Parents at All-Girl Westlake Protest Merger Plan With All-Boy Harvard

A group of parents of girls attending Westlake School are demanding an explanation and a voice in the decision announced last week to merge the prestigious girls’ school with Harvard School for boys.

Parents circulated petitions at an open house Tuesday night seeking a 90-day delay during which parents, students, faculty and alumnae would be consulted about the proposed plan to go coed. Nearly 200 parents, representing the three junior high classes alone, signed the petitions.

Flyers headlined, “Save the Westlake School for Girls,” with for girls underlined, were plastered on parents’ cars, urging parents to attend an all-school meeting tonight.

Parents complained that they were presented last week with a fait accompli. Many were left with questions about the necessity of the merger and fears that their daughters will lose an educational atmosphere that encourages them to reach their potential and enhances self-esteem.

Parents said their first inkling of the merger came when their distressed daughters called them from pay phones at school after an assembly at Westlake last week. Westlake is located in Holmby Hills, where the seventh, eighth and ninth grades will be taught if the schools merge as planned in 1991. The upper grades will be taught at Harvard School in Studio City.

“It makes a drastic change in the lives of 700-odd girls and their families and no one asks them (their opinion),” said Karen Hill-Scott, a UCLA professor with a daughter in the 10th grade. “The absence of communication casts an overall negative pallor for many, many parents,” she said in a telephone interview.

David Higgins, as did many other parents, voiced his concerns to Westlake Headmaster Nathan Reynolds at the open house. “The underlying objection is the haste and the secrecy,” said Higgins, who has two daughters at the school.

Some Support Merger

Some parents expressed their support of the merger to Reynolds and suggested that they may be a silent majority. But disgruntled parents said they found deep dissatisfaction during a telephone tree process to invite parents to tonight’s meeting. They said their position is: Convince us that this is in the best interest of our daughters.

Harvard will dominate the newly formed board of trustees by a 2-1 margin in the merger plan. The Harvard headmaster will be in charge and the new school will be named Harvard-Westlake, leading Westlake parents to worry that Westlake got the short end of the merger. “What did Westlake get out of this?” one parent asked.

The composition of the new board was based on diversity, not which school the board member came from, Reynolds said. However, he acknowledged that while the board members from Harvard had been selected, the Westlake representatives had not.

The merger was placed on the agenda of the Westlake Board of Trustees meeting last week without warning, said several parents who requested anonymity. The parents said that when the 12 or 13 board members present voted on the subject, they had not had adequate time to evaluate the data on which the merger was based. Three trustees voted against the merger. The plan was presented to the board by a subcommittee that had been negotiating with Harvard without telling the rest of 23-member board.

Reynolds defended the secrecy as necessary for the success of the plan, saying, “They would have never gotten as far as they did” if the process was open to public scrutiny.

Earlier attempts to merge, one of them six years ago, were stymied by opposition.

Reynolds said the merger was based on confidential information about the future enrollment base for Westlake. The concern was that if Harvard went coed on its own, as it was prepared to do, it would siphon off some of the top girls from Westlake, turning it into a second-rate school.

The 24-year Westlake veteran said it was more important to maintain the quality of the student body and faculty than to continue as a girls school. “I’m talking about first-rate education for young women and young men,” he said.

Some parents said they find such talk ironic in that Reynolds has always sold Westlake’s all-girl composition as superior to coeducation. At the open house, they distributed a reprint of a Wall Street Journal article on research that concluded boys receive more attention from teachers, which undermines the self-esteem and damages the morale of girls.

They were originally given the article, and others like it, by Reynolds.

‘I Can Empathize’

Reaction at Harvard School has been more positive, according to Headmaster Thomas C. Hudnut, who will run the merged schools. “I can empathize with Westlake parents who feel a great sense of loss, but I hope their sense of loss will give way to the conviction that we’re preparing for a better future.”

A coeducational environment is preferable, he said, “because the world out there is a coed world.”

Hudnut said it was appropriate for the trustees to make the decision to merge. “I think trustees who are charged with management of an institution must be able to carry on their deliberations confidentially.”

Some parents believe that they may be able to block, or at least postpone, the merger, which must be voted upon again by the Westlake board. That opinion is not shared by the administration. Seventh-grade girls who were circulating their own petitions to keep Westlake an all-girls school were advised at an assembly that their effort was futile because the matter had been resolved, one parent said.