O.C. Magnet School Exerts Powerful Pull

Using tactics honed as teenagers at rock concerts, hundreds of Orange parents have been camped out since Wednesday seeking an adult’s brand of hot ticket: a spot for their kids at a science and technology magnet school opening in September.

Enrollment begins this morning on a first-come, first-serve basis for the combined elementary and middle school. But armed with cell phones and pagers, Starbucks coffee mugs and top-of-the-line camping equipment, many parents decided to get a jump on the competition for the school’s 420 spots open to students throughout the district.

“When I was a teenager I stood in line for the Rolling Stones or whatever, but your priorities are different when you’re 40,” said Tami Gobely, 39, one of more than 200 parents crowding around the district offices Friday. “This is something that’s going to bring more than one night of enjoyment. This is for the future of our kids.”

The lawn chair and RV-filled queue snaking around the perimeter of the Orange Unified School District Education Center is something of a guerrilla effort. School officials say they don’t condone the line and won’t honor the orderly numbering system parents have devised to keep peace among themselves. When the center’s gates open at 5 this morning, district employees will distribute official numbers to whomever they see lined up first.

After two days of letting the line grow until it filled the parking lot of the district offices, school officials on Friday asked parents to leave district grounds. That the parents promptly did Friday morning--shifting their lawn chairs and parasols a few feet over, onto the sidewalk.

*

While the line expanded into a sort of grown-up slumber party, complete with doughnuts, mocha runs to nearby coffeehouses and giggling huddles of newly-made friends in sleeping bags, parents not on the queue called district offices furiously, officials said, concerned that they won’t get a fair chance to get their kids into the school.

“We’ve told the parents out here from Day One that we did not approve of this and did not condone it,” said Neil McKinnon, assistant superintendent for educational services. “But it’s out of our control. We did not anticipate the magnitude of the problem. But I have to say, it’s a wonderful problem to have.”

Parents said Friday that leaving the line was not an option.

“No one wants to be here. We want to follow the rules like everyone else,” said Judean Sakimoto, 36, reading People magazine in a chaise lounge set up on the sidewalk. “But once the first chair went down you had no choice, you had to bring yours too.”

Since February, when the Orange Unified School Board voted to convert a former middle school into the district’s first-ever school with a specific academic focus, excitement about the effort has been building among parents.

Many said they want to save their children from overcrowding in the district’s traditional schools, which are grappling with exploding enrollment.

*

The magnet school will be staffed with teachers with proven specialties in math, science and technology. There will be laboratories and special science equipment and advanced texts, district officials said. Classes will each be limited to no more than 20 students.

The school, which will open to kindergartners through sixth-graders next fall, is slated to grow to 900 students in kindergarten through eighth grade by 2001, district officials said. The district is bracing for an influx of 1,000 new students next year alone.

“I asked my mom and dad if back when I was in school they ever thought about doing something like this, and they didn’t--they didn’t have to,” Sakimoto said. “It’s kind of sad. Not only do you have to worry about being good parents these days, you have to worry about your kid’s education, which should be a given.”

That concern mirrors that of parents elsewhere in Orange County and around the state who have made long lines to get into magnet schools commonplace, education experts say.

In recent years, parents have routinely stood in line overnight in Santa Ana to gain admission for their children to so-called fundamental schools, which stress basics in education and stern discipline.

*

In Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest district in the country, officials say there is typically a waiting list of 20,000 students for 45,000 slots in various magnet programs from business to medicine. “These schools have been very popular, in part because of the theme approach but in part because parents believe that those kinds of schools attract particularly strong students,” said Michael Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford University.

“There’s some hope among parents that you’ll be getting your kids into a special group of highly motivated people interested in one subject, being taught by a group of teachers with a specialty.”

The magnet school concept dates to the 1960s and earlier, when school districts around the country began following the lead of cities like New York, which had long included specialty schools among its public education mix.

Some magnet schools are open only to students who qualify under certain academic guidelines set up by school districts. Others, such as the Orange district’s McPherson Magnet School for Math, Science and Technology, are open to all comers while there is space.

*

The vast majority of magnet schools have no specific academic focus. Instead, they came to be during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s, when school boards created open-enrollment schools as an alternative to busing, Kirst and others said.

In Orange, parents said enduring camp beds and late-night soakings from the district’s automated sprinkler system is nothing compared with the trade-off--getting their kids in a good school.

“What’s two days of your life when you think that your kid’s education is going to be bettered?” said Connie Townsend, 41.

The newly chosen principal of the school spent much of the morning patiently answering parents’ questions while they wait on line.

“I’m a bit awed by it, it’s fantastic that we have this kind of interest,” said the principal, Rod Hust. “For a parent to sacrifice three days out of a busy schedule, to sacrifice vacation time, to take a day off work, it’s a tremendous thing. It’s a tremendous sacrifice.”

Times staff writer Nick Anderson also contributed to this report.