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Supporters of Academic Choice, a controversial program at Berkeley High School, packed the Little Theater Thursday and elected four of their own to the School Site Council that had been critical of the program since it began three years ago. 

Three of the parents (Juliann Sum, Marilyn Boucher, and Regina Simpkins) appeared on a four-person slate distributed by an ad hoc group of Academic Choice advocates, while the fourth (Da’Rand Shariah) indicated that he was in favor of the controversial program. 

Any parent with students attending Berkeley High could vote at the meeting. 

Prior to the PTSA meeting, a group identifying itself only as “Parents and Families in Support of Marilyn Boucher, Regina Simpkins, Juliann Sum, and Janet Wise” circulated a leaflet announcing that “Academic Excellence at BHS Is Threatened!” and calling on parents to attend the meeting and vote in the election. A “pink card” slate with the four candidates’ names was circulated at the meeting under the banner “Vote For Excellence.” 

Thirteen candidates vied for the four seats on the School Site Council. Among the losers was Federal Judge Claudia Wilken, who had served as president of the council for the last five years and shared the concerns of many council members that Academic Choice threatened to segregate the school. Wilken said Thursday that if she lost, she would continue to attend council meetings as an alter 

School Site Councils are state-mandated policy making bodies, comprised of parents, students, teachers, administrators and classified employees. Berkeley High’s council is entrusted to devise an annual site plan. 

The plan approved by last year’s council called for instituting a diversity requirement for Academic Choice, which combined with a scheduling decision by Principal Jim Slemp to cut Academic Choice classes led to Thursday’s backlash against the council. 

Comments by meeting participants reflected the disagreements in the closely contested election. 

“I like the people on the [pro Academic Choice slate] pink card,” said Elizabeth Scherer, a parent of a ninth grader who said she moved her child from private school to Berkeley High specifically because of the Academic Choice program. “[Academic Choice] offered excellent teachers and the ability to be stimulated and challenged. A lot of us wanted to know which of the candidates was in support of giving students the choice to take rigorous classes.” 

But another parent, Amy Beaton, called the meeting “a joke of an election. A group of organized, connected people created a nice little show,” she said.  

“These people showed up because they only have interest in the controversy over Academic Choice. But it’s just one issue in a much larger school.” 

Berkeley High School academics has been moving in two different directions in recent years, with some advocating the move to autonomous small schools and others promoting academic improvement within a large-school framework. As in many such battles in modern American life, race is a tinderbox backdrop. 

By next year, nearly half of Berkeley High’s 2,900 students will be enrolled in four autonomous small schools, each of which is required to mirror the entire school population’s ethnic diversity, which is roughly 37 percent white and 32 percent African American. By contrast, more than 55 percent of last year’s Academic Choice students were white. 

Academic Choice, which is open to all BHS students, focuses on higher level classes and teaches some of the school’s Advanced Placement courses, with a goal of offering students a more challenging curriculum than in the school’s regular program.  

Critics of Academic Choice have said that the program was promoting segregation at Berkeley High, while its supporters counter that the program’s racial ratio is not far from the school’s total student racial breakdown, and that rigorous classes are the best remedy for the school’s achievement gap between white and Asian students and African Americans and Latinos. 

In a less-hotly contested election at the PTSA meeting, Mary Elliott Reiter, Dan Lindheim, Barbara Coleman, Allen King, and Sabe Hundenski all won seats on the BHS Berkeley Schools Excellence Project Site Committee. 

Staff Writer Matthew Artz contributed to this story.›