They descend on campuses in droves. They listen to sales pitches, peer at science projects, scrutinize writing samples. They take notes and they bring questions. Lots of them.
What's the homework load? How many students to a classroom? How many kids play sports? Then the clincher: How many new students can you take?
It is school-shopping season, a time of heightened anxiety for thousands of parents and students searching for schools, private and public, charters and magnets. Some students take private school entrance exams while their parents pay up to $100 a pop to fill out applications. The much anticipated magnet brochure arrives from the Los Angeles Unified School District, and open houses and tours are in full swing from Sierra Madre to San Pedro.
"I think, truthfully, it was one of the most stressful experiences of my life," television producer Bonnie Raskin said of applying to private schools last school year for her daughter, now a seventh-grader at Marlborough School in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles.
"You would see all the same parents at all the same open houses, and you would want to be cordial, but there was a real competitive tension.... We all knew there are so few openings and so many qualified applicants," said Raskin, who volunteers escorting this year's crop of hopeful parents around Marlborough. "I know what they're going through."
Although many families still send their children to neighborhood schools, educators say increasing numbers of parents are weighing alternatives.
Parents now have more choices than ever before, educators and others say, citing such public school factors as the increasing popularity of specialized, or magnet, programs; California's rapidly growing charter school movement; and a provision of the federal No Child Left Behind law allowing students in poorly performing public schools to transfer to better ones. Some districts, such as Pasadena Unified, are aggressively marketing their campuses as alternatives to private schools.
"Parents are more and more realizing that they not only have more choices, but they ... better choose, because the consequences are so great," said Guilbert C. Hentschke, a professor of education at USC.
Safety, cost, class and school sizes, and proximity to home are among the factors parents look for, in addition to -- and sometimes more than -- curriculum and educational philosophy, Hentschke said.
The process can be grueling.
