Map of L.A. Private Schools

Here’s your L.A. private school GPS! Since L.A. is such a big city, this map we created offers a birds-eye view of some of the schools you may want to tour. * Update: The Daily Truffle posted our map, with a short discussion of where their friends are going & which schools are most popular.

 

Click on map to enlarge

Map of LA Private Schools created by Beyond The Brochure (created on communitywalk.com)

 
 

L.A. Private Elementary School Buzz

  • Some people are wondering if the Center For Early Education (CEE) will continue to be a “feeder” school to Harvard-Westlake now that Tom Hudnut has announced he will retire after the 2012-13 school year. He’s married to Deedie Hudnut, CEE’s longtime admissions director. Here’s a 2009 article in W Magazine about the “power couple”. The article states that CEE receives 1000 applications for 60 spots annually. And, up to 40 percent of its graduating class is admitted to Harvard-Westlake’s middle school. Now that’s what I call a “feeder” school. Let’s see if the trend continues.
  •  Los Angeles private school applications were up 30 percent for 2011-2012, according to a well-informed source. Families relocating to L.A. and budget cuts in public schools are two of the reasons.
  • According to RadarOnline, Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Chris Martin are looking at private elementary schools. They plan to live in their $10 million Brentwood house full-time.
  • At one Westside K-6, some families feel the playground has a “Lord of the Flies” quality because of the administration’s belief that kids can solve their own problems.
  • The head of the lower school at this Eastside K-6 was forced to re-apply for her own job at the end of this school year if she wanted to stay. Needless to say, she left the school, along with several other staff members.
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Wordless Weekend: L.A. Summer Daze

Album Cover. One of my daughter's projects in photo class at Marlborough Summer School
My son at a soccer tournament in the OC. Team is FCLA/Galaxy Club
Our family at Disneyland for my kids' birthdays
Tennis Tournament at UCLA
Our family loves hiking at Tree People in Coldwater Canyon-my daughter and our dog (Taken with Instagram)
Take the Expo Line to the super-cool "Cleopatra" exhibit at California Science Center
Blogging! Writing for Beyond The Brochure, Momangeles and SuperMommyNot. (Taken with Instagram)
A decadent afternoon. The 100th anniversary of the BH Hotel. (Photo: Instagram)

 

Tour It, Don’t Ignore It!

One of the best things I did when we was applying for kindergarten was to tour 10 schools. That may seem like a lot of schools, but I started two years before my daughter entered kindergarten (families apply one year before the child will enter school).

Here are 5 really good reasons to tour as many schools as possible:

  • Cast a wide net! If you don’t see the school, you’ll never know if it’s a place you might like.
  • You’d be surprised at how wrong your pre-conceived notions about a school can be, good or bad.
  • Anything can happen on a tour. At one school, a kid leading the tour told us that half the 5th grade class had flunked math and the teacher had been fired. OMG!
  • There’s lots of comic relief. My co-author, Porcha Dodson, was leading a tour where a dad went rifling through the teacher’s drawers in the classroom, to the horror of everyone else. He called the next day to say he hadn’t seen enough of the school.
  • While you ask questions that are polite and relevant, you can let other parents ask the questions you may want to ask, but you know aren’t appropriate. Trust me, they will!