Public School Choices Guru Offers Advice to Mar Vista Parents

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the impending decision of where to send your entering kindergartener or graduating fifth-grader, or are you just dissatisfied with the school your child currently attends and are looking around to see what other options are out there?

My family is on its third LAUSD elementary school. My oldest son attended three schools in three years starting in kindergarten, but we’ve now happily settled down, a little wiser, I hope about what is important to us in a school.

To get a bird’s-eye view for prospective parents, I sat down with Tanya Anton, Mar Vista resident, mom, activist and educational consultant, to talk about the advice she gives parents trying to understand the complexities of public school choice in West Los Angeles.

Anton, who writes the GoMamaGuides to public schools, says she launched her career by accident.

“It started when my daughter was in preschool [and] I signed up for the parent education committee,” she said.

When the committee hosted a kindergarten fair at the preschool, Anton quickly realized there were a huge number of choices when it came to public schools. However, she said there was also a lot of misinformation out there.

"It was complicated and there was no one source to go to get all of that information," she said. "You couldn’t just go to LAUSD.net and get answers to ‘what is a magnet’, ‘what is a charter,’ ‘what are these points and lotteries and when are they?’”

Anton agreed to write up the notes from that meeting for parents who had missed it and wound up with a 10-page addendum to the preschool kindergarten handbook. She went on to become an expert on the arcane rules of the local school districts on her mommy blog, and on several local parents’ e-mail list-servs.

After meeting Sandra Tsing Loh, a comedian turned public school parent activist, and hosting a standing-room only event called “Martinis and Magnets” with her at the Electric Lodge in Venice in 2007, Anton realized that there was a great need for the kind of information she was gathering. She launched a business, writing guides and providing in-person advice to parents on local public schools.

Anton said she counsels parents to think about their individual child’s needs and interests.

“Not all schools provide the right thing for each child," she said. "For every high performing school that has a really high API (Annual Performance Index score), I personally know parents who have pulled their kids out of those schools and had a not so good experience there because it wasn’t the right fit for their child.”

Anton advises parents to think about whether advanced academics, arts programs, school size, proximity to home or a particular educational approach is the most important factor and to come up with a list of priorities.

This advice would have helped my family figure out what we wanted more quickly. My oldest son attended my local school, then a magnet, and now all three of my children attend  through the “open enrollment” program that allows parents to send their children to another district school as long as there are spaces available. We just weren’t happy with the culture at the first school, and the second school - a magnet - didn't seem worth the commute, the giant student body or the far-flung play dates.

Neighborhood schools, Anton argued, are the first place every parent should start their school search.

“One of the first things I like to encourage parents to do is go look at their neighborhood school before they make any decision, because one of two things will happen: They may be pleasantly surprised that so many great things are happening on this neighborhood campus that they may have heard mixed things about, or they’ll say, ‘This may not be the best fit for my child,’ but at least there’s a direct experience from which to compare other schools, which is far more valuable than gossip and online reviews." 

Anton said she is pleased with the changes she’s seen in the Mar Vista area schools. “I’m extremely proud of our little bubble of schools, which to me is Mar Vista and Venice, over the last five years.

“I like to compare it to popcorn", she said. “It’s like these little kernels that have been bouncing around with a lot of potential, but perhaps ignored by their neighborhoods. I’ve watched a lot of these schools start to thrive as the community has come back and reinvested in [its] neighborhood school.”

Parents sometimes get caught up looking for an ideal school, which isn’t realistic whether it's public or private education. Rather than looking for the best school, I’ve found that getting involved in a school close to our home, with a parent community that we’re glad to be a part of has been very rewarding for all of us.

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