Private Schools

The Marlborough School, where two of Jody Fay's daughters are enrolled, is the kind of educational establishment she always dreamed of for her children: The private, all-girls school in Hancock Park offers small classes, specialized courses, individualized attention from top instructors. Sending her girls there is a gift, Fay believes, that will last a lifetime. And it is a gift that does not come cheap.

Mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán hosts "Open Call," KCET's new Thursday evening show featuring performances at Southern California's top arts schools and institutions. The L.A. native maintains an active performing schedule - her next gig is singing the role of Bertha in San Diego Opera's production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," opening April 21 - and helps groom young artists as the director of L.A. County High School for the Arts' Office of Community Engagement. Tell me about "Open Call.

Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being "a good start"? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys. Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates.

When the state basketball championships are held this weekend in Sacramento, it once again will look like a party for private schools, with eight of the 10 boys' teams being from private schools. But the real intrigue comes with a closer look at what binds the five Southern California Regional champions together: Each team's roster has at least one top transfer student. Transfers have become the most important ingredient to propel a school to Sacramento. In Division I, Santa Ana Mater Dei has senior Xavier Johnson, who came from Temecula Chaparral after his sophomore year, along with junior Elijah Brown, who arrived this season when his father, Mike Brown, became Lakers coach.

When David and Jacki Horwitz read an article in The Times about Lorelei Oliver's struggle to find a good school for her son Kamal Key, their response was immediate: Perhaps, they inquired, there was a fund to which they could contribute to help the 12-year-old, who had been admitted to a prestigious but costly private campus?

The decisions by San Diego school board members Shirley Weber and Kay Davis to send their children to non-public schools ("2 Board Members Put Children in Private Schools," Sept. 27) should educate, not shock the public. Leading scholars on the subject of what it takes to make public schools effective increasingly find that this is not possible without the competition that non-public schools afford. One part of the solution to today's educational problem therefore is to offer more choice to parents about the schools their children will attend.

Reporting from Sacramento A state basketball advisory committee is expected to make a proposal that could deal with the issue of the growing number of private school teams reaching the state finals in almost every division, according to Marie Ishida, executive director of the California Interscholastic Federation. Seventeen of the 20 teams that traveled to Sacramento this weekend were private schools, and for the first time, all 10 state champions were private schools. "I think the committee is going to be coming up with criteria and ideas" in the next few months," Ishida said.

Endangered species are supposed to be protected to make sure they don't disappear entirely. But it's too late to save the endangered species in Southern Section Division 4AA basketball - public schools. Once Big Bear was eliminated Saturday, public schools had officially vanished from the 32-team playoff bracket. The eight-team quarterfinals set for Tuesday will be all private schools, just as many had predicted when the Southern Section unveiled its new divisions in November. The matchups look like championship games: Gardena Serra at Studio City Harvard-Westlake, Los Angeles Windward at Los Angeles Price, Torrance Bishop Montgomery at Encino Crespi, La Verne Lutheran at Westlake Village Oaks Christian.

More competitive divisions and all-out battles brewing between private schools are the highlights from the Southern Section-Ford boys' basketball playoff brackets released Sunday. Usually, the strongest divisions rank from 1 to 6, but that can be ignored because 4AA has been labeled the "Super Division," with its cast of ambitious private schools, all of whom have enrollments of no more than 1,250 students. It's going to be a demolition derby before a champion is crowned. 1AA Top-seeded teams: 1. Santa Ana Mater Dei (24-2)

It's 20 minutes before tipoff, and Locke High boys' basketball Coach Lloyd Webster has sent his stat keeper to Nickerson Gardens in Watts to retrieve one of his top players, who had to go home because of a family problem. Meanwhile, tacos are going for $1 at the concession stand in an effort to raise funds to pay for a DJ. And a makeup game against Crenshaw is about to begin after it was postponed because of a bomb threat. Welcome to life in the Coliseum League, where, as Webster likes to say, "We earn everything we get. " There's so much basketball talent in this part of Los Angeles that players keep switching schools and changing allegiances seemingly every other semester while looking for the best playing opportunity.

Armed with a press pass, a full tank of gas and a determination to see the very best in high school basketball, I spent night after night last week trying to get a big-picture view of the Southern California scene just three weeks before the playoffs begin. It was an exhilarating but exhausting endeavor. There's more to life than who wins or loses a game, but people love their sports experience, whether they're a fan, coach or player. And I get paid to write about it, so who's the luckiest person in Los Angeles?

The Southern Section has released its boys' and girls' basketball playoff divisions, and there are lots of winners and losers. A new format that places schools in divisions based on a combination of their enrollment and a formula evaluating their last four seasons of performance has created controversy. Because there's a 1,250-enrollment cutoff to compete in state championships in Division IV, lots of top private schools in the Southern Section have been put in Division 4AA for boys, creating what has been labeled a super-division.

It was a rare day of carnage for the private (school) sector. The lofty coaching salaries, nonexistent attendance boundaries and financial-aid packages for some players couldn't boost Mission Hills Alemany, Gardena Serra, Encino Crespi and Los Angeles Loyola in high-profile matchups with public counterparts. Southern Section private schools were a combined 19-10 in head-to-head meetings with public school opponents Friday, a significant drop-off from the 34-7 record they posted three weekends ago. What in the name of air-conditioned charter buses and perfectly manicured fields was going on?

The state charter school association has received a $15-million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to add 20,000 more charter school students in Los Angeles and 100,000 statewide. The grant, scheduled to be announced Tuesday, is the largest by far to the California Charter Schools Assn., and also the largest of its kind from the nonprofit established by the founders of the Wal-Mart Corp. The Los Angeles Unified School District has more charter schools — 183 last year — and more charter-school students than any school system in the country, and that growth spurt is poised to continue despite countervailing pressure from reduced education funding and political resistance from teacher unions and other critics.

There was a time during the Cold War when getting China and the United States to allow athletes to play one another in a game of pingpong was considered a major act of diplomacy. The not-so-friendly relationship between public and private schools needs a similar small step to at least start a conversation toward reconciliation. One example took place Saturday, when football players from Carson got into their cars and drove to Orange Lutheran, where the two teams held a combined workout under Coach Jim Kunau of Orange Lutheran and Coach Elijah Asante of Carson.