Pali High Board Revises Admissions from Revere

Hoping to avoid a repeat of last year’s admissions headache, the board at Palisades Charter High School fine-tuned its enrollment policy on Tuesday night. The change gives added priority to non-resident students at Paul Revere Charter Middle School who have attended local elementary schools. ‘I think it’s going to help ensure that kids who have been together since kindergarten are going to be able to stay together,’ said Executive Director Amy Held, who suggested the change. The meeting was the board’s first since its October election, which sent four new members to the board. Members elected Rene Rodman, a community representative, as chair. She replaces longtime board member Bud Kling, who lost reelection to the board to fellow teacher Dave Suarez. Teacher and boys basketball coach James Paleno was elected vice chair. Last year, applications to the high-achieving, 2,700-student public high school far exceeded 700 available ninth-grade seats. By virtue of a previously little-noticed admissions policy, the enrollment of hundreds of non-local students who had attended Palisades public schools since elementary school was in jeopardy. After a school lottery and a lot of anxiety, all students from Revere were accepted last year. But with expectations of continued high enrollment rates, school officials can’t guarantee admission to all applicants. Further, school officials don’t expect that the new policy will solve the basic problem with admissions’namely, that there are more applications than seats available. One source of the problem is that Paul Revere Middle School enrollment has grown faster than PaliHi has. Revere’s eighth-grade class is larger than Pali’s ninth-grade class. Pali administrators expect that admissions will continue to be tight until the schools’ numbers are aligned. The new motion, which was approved unanimously, establishes the following: ‘ Residents of the Palisades, Topanga and areas of Brentwood will receive first priority to the school. This priority has always been part of the school’s charter. ‘ Non-resident and non-traveling students at Revere who attended any of the five charter complex elementary schools will now receive second priority. (Previous admission procedure recognized students from 13 high school sending areas as ‘traveling’ students and gave them second priority.) ‘ All other students attending Revere will be given third priority. ‘ All other students’those who did not attend Revere and are not local residents’will be given fourth priority. ‘ The school will now set aside 1,427 spaces schoolwide for LAUSD traveling programs. Those programs include the Magnet, Permits with Transportation (PWT) integration, the overcrowding relief Capacity Adjustment Program (CAP), the Other Transportation Services (OTS) for students in hazardous transportation areas and NCLB Public School Choice (PSC).