> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # CITYWIDE At the end of a frustrating week in February, Amy Brotherton’s jaw dropped. - URL: https://www.smdp.com/hard-times-getting-into-school-applying-for-entry-into-westside-preschools-can-at-times-seem-more-like-college-search-2/ - Published: 2007-03-20T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T00:16:18.000Z - Author: Melody Hanatani - Tags: Education, Santa Monica, #archive-import CITYWIDE At the end of a frustrating week in February, Amy Brotherton’s jaw dropped. More than a year invested in finding the right preschool for her son, Jack, visiting different places and spending hundreds of dollars in application fees, had ended in this — a pile of rejection letters from six Westside facilities. Now, just a few months shy of her son’s third birthday, Brotherton is worried that she will never find the right preschool. “I’m looking at schools farther away,”said the Mar Vista resident, who has been hunting for the right place to educate her son in and around Santa Monica. “I’m at a point where I don’t have a choice. She’s not alone. Numerous parents of young children are staring down similar predicaments this time of year, with the admissions process for pre-kindergarten schools on the Westside beginning to resemble something that these kids might experience as teenagers, when attending college become a top priority. In Santa Monica and other cities on the Westside of Los Angeles County, parents are finding themselves thinking about the right preschool before they even give birth to the would-be preschooler. It’s a region where kids are placed on waiting lists years before they’re even of age to attend preschool; where application fees can cost as high as $200 per school; where schools adopt child-guided and experimental curriculum; and where a year’s tuition for preschool could cost as much as a new car. “Many of the best schools in the country are in Santa Monica, but also many families who want the very best and can have it,” said Christy Bergin, founder of Best Fit School Service. “There are enough schools, just not the ones that families want.” When parents have exhausted all avenues or are entering the preschool scene for the first time, they turn to Bergin, who helps their children find the perfect school. With a database of more than 100 schools in Los Angeles County, Bergin helps parents navigate through the different institutions, informing them of the different philosophies that each school takes and how that would fit in with their family. She stays on with the family until their child is enrolled in the preschool of their choice. “There is a demand for excellent high quality progressive developmental education,” Bergin said. The city of Santa Monica is also unique in that the preschools here all offer different and innovative approaches to education, including the Waldorf, Developmental and the popular Reggio approach — an educational method used in Reggio, Italy. This instructional method prescribes that educators listen to children’s ideas and the student guiding the curriculum, Bergin said. “The curriculum comes from the children and is deeply provoked by the teacher,” she said. Each Reggio-inspired school has developed its own approach and no two programs are similar. At the Garden of Angels School on 18th Street, Executive Director Cyndy Lunn has seen an influx of applications over the past three years, though she can’t pinpoint the reason for the increase in demand. “I’m not sure whether it’s the lack of preschools or if individuals in the city are looking for something different,” she said. “I read about the preschool panic here in LA and in New York and it’s just incredible.” Lunn receives about 200 applications for a school that can accommodate just 59 children at any one time. The waiting list, which costs $200 to get placed on, gets longer as expectant and new mothers of 4-month-old children come in to start the application process. Tuition here ranges from approximately $8,400 to $13,200, depending on the amount of time the child spends in school. > “I’m out of options. I just don’t want him to not go to school.” — It’s a region where frustrated parents are pulling their hair out NETWORKING WITH NUK NUKS The preschool environment in Santa Monica is a hot topic at the playground where many seasoned preschool hunters dish out advice to newcomers. The playground at Douglas Park was one of the resources that Gintaras Oslapas used to find a preschool for his 4-year-old daughter, Leina, when he moved his family from Japan last fall. He took the opportunity to network while his little girl had a good time playing in the park. He explored all options, talking to different church affiliated preschools and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. It didn’t take Oslapas long to find the right preschool as he eventually settled on the program at McKinley Elementary School, where the elder Oslapas found the location, facility, cost and teacher-to-student ratio to be desirable for his daughter. In Tokyo, Oslapas paid about $5,000 a year for a preschool where there were 20 students to every teacher. But in McKinley, the Santa Monica resident pays close to nothing and there are about seven children to one teacher, he said. But what has pleased him most about the preschool at McKinley Elementary School is the rapid pace at which his daughter, whose native tongue is Japanese, is learning to speak English. “Her English is growing leaps and bounds every week,” Oslapas said on Monday afternoon as his daughter played in the sandbox at Douglas Park. Across the park, Sharon Sonnett of West Los Angeles recalled the lengthy process she went through in finding the right school for her 3-year-old daughter, Rachel. Young Rachel was only a year old when her parents started looking into preschools after they heard horror stories about the amount of time it takes to find the perfect match. Her mother found schools through word of mouth and researching on the Internet and was disappointed to find that some schools were selective regarding what prospective parents did for a living. One school administrator even told Sonnett, who went to law school, that the school already had too many doctors and lawyers. She spent about $20 to $25 on applications and applied to several schools including First Presbyterian Preschool and Sunshine Preschool before finally settling on Santa Monica Montessori School. But Sonnett said that her daughter was admitted after calling the school about five or six times. Luckily for Sonnett, the mother of 6-week-old Samantha probably won’t have to go through the ordeal again as the Santa Monica Montessori School might have preferential enrollment for students whose siblings already attend the school. The way Ellen Khokha, executive director of The Growing Place, sees it, there are not enough preschools for families who want them. The shortage in early childhood programs is not anything unique to Santa Monica — it’s a nationwide occurrence, she said. “We do not give early childhood the fiscal support or the community support that it deserves,” Khokha said. “Early childhood unfortunately is still seen as the parent’s problem even though we know definitely from research that when children are in early childhood education, they not only do better in public schools, but they do better in life.” The students who go through early childhood education are more likely to be employed some day, are more likely to pay their taxes, and are less likely to be incarcerated, she said. “The major thing is that parents are now becoming aware of the frustration that early childhood doesn’t have the public support that elementary school has,” Khokha said. “They have to advocate that education starts at birth.” *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 20, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/032007.pdf?ref=smdp.com)