New construction, expansion of charter and magnet schools, and the USC outreach efforts with its "Family of Five Schools" offer excellent choices from Kindergarten through high school in West Adams.

Highly rated schools in the past were rare in the inner city but not unknown. The 32nd Street Magnet at 822 W. 32nd Street, under other names, dates from  1904. The Mid-City Magnet at Adams Blvd. and Arlington was built in 1973. But the shift to a broader rise in educational standards in the area dates from USC's 1994 adoption of five local schools. This trend has accelerated in the last few years with significant contruction of new high end schools and growth of the charter school movement.

The USC Family of Five Schools

The University of Southern California in a turn toward deeper involvement in its surrounding inner-city community in 1994 formed a partnership with five public schools near its University Park campus. The aim was to provide "educational, cultural and developmental opportunities" for approximately 8,000 kindergarten to 12th grade neighborhood children and youth. The schools are Foshay Learning Center, Norwood Street Elementary, Vermont Avenue Elementary, Lenicia B. Weemes Elementary, and the 32nd Street/USC Magnet Center (Visual and Performing Arts Magnet and a Math, Science and Technology Magnet). This effort has been a model in the use of the resources of a major national university to dramatically improve public education in nearby schools.

The Family of Five Schools project has the active support of the Exposition Park museums, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, and the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest Division. The USC website describes the idea behind project as "to develop ways in which the children can access the community's rich resources, including its institutions of higher learning, its museums, libraries and recreation facilities."

The five schools are located in Los Angeles' Central City South. The approximate target area is roughly bounded by the Santa Monica Freeway (north), the Harbor Freeway (east), Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (south), and Western Avenue (west).  Programs funded by contributions made by hundreds of USC faculty and staff to USC Neighborhood Outreach include: After School Enrichment Program; Intersession Enrichment Program; Kid Watch; Mission Science; New Stories/New Cultures; Partners In Friendship (Troy Camp); Saturday Explorers Series (24th Street Theatre); Readers; Sea Grant Island Explorers; USC/YEP CARE; and Web Masters/Info Masters.

The most unusual of the five is the 32nd Street/USC Magnet. It has a particularly high standard of instruction. It comprises not one but two distinct schools, a performing arts magnet from K-8 and a math-science magnet for high school. It is one of only five campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District to have all grade school ages. The Small Schools Workshop Info Center says this about the 32nd Street Magnet:

"Parents line up to apply for 32nd Street, which offers a range of outreach programs and tutors with the help of USC. As conceived 20 years ago, magnet schools like 32nd Street were intended to improve integration by offering specialized programs in areas such as math and science, art, language and the humanities to attract a diverse student body."

The school's website adds: "“We are a school of choice for students from kindergarten through 12 grade. Located in central Los Angeles, we have a multicultural, multilingual and multiethnic school community and partnerships for extending the school boundaries with cultural and community agencies from throughout the city."

Another fine school in the Family of Five is the Foshay Learning Center (K-12). Newsweek (March 13, 2000) ranked the Foshay Learning Center among the 100 top high schools in the country (#95 out of 500 included in the survey). Foshay is a real success story among the many difficulties often reported about the Los Angeles Unified School District. Take a look at their website.

Two New Elementary and Two New High Schools

Educational choices in West Adams have benefited considerably from the wave of new construction in the last few years by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Four new high-end schools have been built and are now in session. These are the John Mack Elementary School at Jefferson Blvd. and Catalina; the Alexander Science Center School (K-5) at 37th Street and Vermont Avenue, which is within the Exposition Park/California Science Center complex; the West Adams Preparatory High School at Washington Blvd. and Vermont Avenue; and the Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School on the campus of the Orthopaedic Hospital at 300 W. 23rd Street.

Science Center School

The parent California Science Center website writes:

"Imagine an elementary school with all of the resources a teacher or parent could ever want. It's located near world-class museums, a major university and a state-of-the-art teacher professional development center. The school features an integrated curriculum emphasizing science, mathematics and the use of technology. Its teachers are fully credentialed with a demonstrated ability to make science and math engaging and accessible to their students. And it's not a magnet school but, rather, a neighborhood school for underserved groups of children and their parents. While such a school seems like a dream, it is a dream that has become reality in South Los Angeles, the result of more than a decade of collaborative work between the California Science Center and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)."

Orthopaedic High School

The Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School opened in 2004. Doctors from both the Orthopaedic Hospital at Adams Blvd. and Flower and UCLA physicians and scientists participate in the design of the curriculum and assist with the faculty education which includes clinical and research activities. The Orthopaedic Hospital serves pediatric patients with hip dysplasia, spinal deformities, fractures, hand and foot deformities, hemophilia, limb loss, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida and musculoskeletal tumors, among other disorders.

The school has its own labs, but in addition students are allowed to use facilities at Orthopaedic Hospital for certain projects and to work with the medical and research staff.

Other Schools in West Adams

By our count there are currently 13 elementary schools, 4 middle schools, and 8 high schools (two of which are Charter schools) in West Adams (taking Pico as the northern boundary and Crenshaw as the western one). There are no less than five charter schools: the Animo Film and Theater Arts Charter, Gertz-Ressler Academy, Richard Merkin Middle Academy, the Celerity Nascent Charter School, and the Community Harvest Charter.

In addition to the two magnets at the 32nd Street School - the K-8 performing arts and the high school math/science magnet - there is the Mid-City Magnet at Arlington and Adams. There is also a math-science magnet at Los Angeles High School just north of West Adams at Olympic and Rimpau and the Adams Middle School Gifted/High Achiever Magnet just east of West Adams at 151 W. 30th Street. A number of our local schools have affiliated Early Education Centers. One elementary and one high school are devoted to severely handicaped and special needs children.

For more information or to contact any of these schools go to the Find a School section of the LAUSD website . You can search there by school name or by zip code. Zips 90007 and 90018 are almost entirely within West Adams, while 90006 and 90019 have a few West Adams schools in their southern sections.