SANTA CRUZ
— You could have heard a pocket protector drop.
Thursday
night's lottery for 50 new Pacific
Collegiate School
students — selected from a pool of 407 applicants — had parents and a handful
of kids holding their collective breaths.
One
child smiled gleefully when she saw her identification number come up on
the screen in the school's multipurpose room; she pumped her fist, but for
the most part, decorum and silent tension ruled.
"My
wife stayed home. She couldn't stand the suspense," said Fred Hernandez,
who showed up on behalf of a daughter who attends a Montessori school that
costs more than $10,000 per year.
His
daughter's number was not on the list of 45 seventh-graders selected from
182 applicants by Random.org, a Web site designed, some believe, to torture
people in situations such as these.
The
seventh-through-12th-grade public charter school has attracted, in each
year since its opening in 1999, increasing numbers of applicants who are
drawn by smaller-than-average class sizes, a high proportion of Ph.D. teachers
with professional experience in the fields they teach, and the students'
stratospheric standardized test scores.
But
attrition at the school, which has a student population of slightly more
than 400, is practically nonexistent.
This
year's lottery had 70 applicants for only five eighth-grade spots. There
were 106 applicants for ninth-grade spots, of which there were none.
Pacific
Collegiate Principal Andrew Goldenkranz said he
anticipates that as many as a few dozen of those enrolled will change their
minds or drop out between now and the first week of the school year. But
this does little to comfort the more than 300 currently on the waiting list.
"I'm
hoping there will be a chance for another school," said Frauke Zajac, who attended the lottery
drawing on behalf of a son who will enter the ninth-grade this fall.
Zajac's hopes are a product
of Goldenkranz's announcement at the start of
the evening's business that he intends to study the possibilities for a
second PCS-type school.
"I
want us in the position where if I've got 400 families applying, I've got
400 seats to put your kids in," he said. Goldenkranz
said he plans to determine "if, how, and how soon we can dramatically
expand the opportunities here."
But
while some think more PCS would be a good thing, the school has detractors.
They point to the high education and socio-economic levels of those whose
children dominate the school's population, and the fact that it has a higher
proportion of white faces than surrounding public schools. They say the
school's success is due mostly to the population that applies to PCS.
"It's
a self-selected population," said Sheila Coonerty,
a clinical psychologist who tests special-needs students at Santa Cruz City
Schools.
"If
you don't have a range of students," she said of PCS, "you don't
have to address all these problems."
The
PCS school board will host a town hall meeting Wednesday to discuss diversity
issues.
The
school has only a handful of English-language learners and other special-needs
students. More than 7 percent of nearby Santa Cruz High's population is
learning English as a second language. More than 12 percent are doing so
at Mission Hill Middle School.
But
those issues are far from the minds of parents who want their children to
be among the 400 who attend PCS.
"This
town could really use another school like this," said Hernandez, who
stood to gain spots at the school not only for his daughter, currently in
the sixth grade, but for one three years younger. The charter school automatically
holds open a spot for each sibling of a new enrollee.
In
Hernandez's case, that would mean saving more than $25,000 in private school
tuition.
Same
goes for Michelle LaFever, whose two sons currently
attend Gateway
School.
She
shrugged over the news that her older son's number wasn't selected.
"I've
got good kids," she said. "They'll do well anywhere."
LaFever said there might
be a silver lining to not being a PCS mom.
"Some
of these parents are really wound up," she said, "and I'm not
sure that's a good thing."