Ivy Bound Academy in Sherman Oaks Ranks No. 1 Among L.A. Middle Schools

For the second consecutive year, Ivy Bound Academy, a Sherman Oaks charter school, was the only middle school to rank in the top 10 percent, according to public school rankings released yesterday by the state’s Department of Education.

“When you put together a program that focuses on what the student needs – the results are great,” said Kiumars Arzani, founder, principal and executive director of Ivy Bound Academy.

The charter school, which opened in 2007, has ranked in the state’s top 10 percent of schools every year since it opened – and it achieved this top ranking again this year, according to the state’s report.

Arzani called the achievement a testament to the hard work of everyone at the school including the students.

“This is not just a one-person job,” Arzani said. “I had a vision, but this ranking is a reflection of the hard work of the teachers, the office staff, the students, and everyone who works at this school.”

The state rankings are based on the school’s base Academic Performance Index, which is calculated for elementary, middle and high schools based on the results of the Standardized Testing and Reporting program and California High School Exit Exam.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 24 elementary schools received the highest rank of 10, placing them in the highest 10 percent of elementary schools statewide, according to a City News Service report.

Six high schools placed in the top 10 percent -- College Ready Academy High #4, Environmental Science and Technology High School, Granada Hills Charter High, Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy, Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies and Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies.

Ivy Bound Academy was the only middle school to achieve the top ranking among middle schools.

“When you look at the rankings, we have to ask why only one middle school was able to achieve this ranking,” Arzani said.

It raises some questions, Arzani said, when you have 26 elementary schools ranking in the top 10 percent, but it drops down to one middle school, and then goes up to six by high school.

Part of the answer to that question is why Arzani tells parents who ask if he will ever open a charter high school that, “No, I will not.” He wants to focus on the age where students are most likely to fall behind.

“Middle school students are going through puberty, this is the age when you are more likely to have classroom management problems,” Arzani said. “That is why our school is small. As a principal, I am able to meet with every family and get to know every student.”

At larger schools that serve 2,000 students, he said, the children can get lost in the system.

The Vision

The journey that would lead Arzani to form a committee of parents and community leaders in 2005 to work toward opening a charter middle school actually began nearly 20 years ago.

As a young man, Arzani had originally intended to become a doctor. His first stint as an educator came when he worked as a science teacher at Portola Middle School in Tarzana while awaiting acceptance into Columbia University’s medical program. He loved teaching, but headed to New York City to study medicine.

In his third year at Columbia University, fate would intervene.

When his father passed away, he returned to Los Angeles to provide support to his family and again got a job at Portola teaching science. Deciding that he loved teaching more than medicine, he would not return to Columbia University.

While working at another middle school, Milken in Sherman Oaks, he began tutoring students after school. The demand he saw in the community for a tutoring center combined with what he described as his dismay at the school’s focus on school politics over student learning compelled him to open the Ivy Bound Educational Center, a tutoring center, in 1994.

He reached another turning point in 2005 as he listened to parents complain about the schools in Los Angeles.

“Every year, I was talking to families, who were saying that their kids were not being educated,” Arzani said. “We came down the path of founding a charter school, because we felt we could do better.”

His experience at running the tutoring center taught him that he could create programs that could turn the weakest students into straight A students. The parent complaints convinced him there was a need. He decided to found a charter school and gathered like-minded parents and business people to form a board.

He looked at where the schools were failing and began to draft a “petition,” what the state calls a charter school’s business plan outlining the school’s curriculum and procedures. The petition included a strong emphasis on technology, because he wanted the students to have mastered programs like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel by the time they graduated.

“I realized when I went to my son’s school that it looked the same as when I went to middle school nearly 40 years ago,” Arzani said. “It had the same chalk boards and no computers. My son was only receiving a half hour of computer instruction a week.”

The 250 students in grades five to eight at Ivy Bound attend school until 3:30 p.m. unlike their peers at traditional public schools, who get out at 2:30 p.m. The school day is eight periods long, rather than six periods. And there is a waiting list to get in each fall. New students at the independently-run LAUSD public school are selected based on a lottery system.

The school embraces technology and physical education is mandatory, but the primary emphasis is on making sure students leave each grade with the knowledge the state mandates for each grade level. When a student leaves fifth grade, he or she is prepared for sixth grade – unlike many schools where students end up with holes in their knowledge and fall further and further behind, Arzani said.

Area high school principals have told Arzani how impressed they are with how prepared his students are for high school, he said.

“It is clear that Ivy Bound students have had a rigorous curriculum throughout middle school with high expectations,” said Marsha Witten Rybin, the principal of High Tech Los Angeles Charter High School.  “They are used to working hard and thinking critically, which isn’t the case for the students at many of the feeder schools that come to us.”

Arzani and his board of directors would like to replicate this success by creating more Ivy Bound middle schools in Los Angeles County. Last year, the district’s school board agreed to allow approved charter schools to use six schools owned by the district that have been vacant since the 1980s.

Ivy Bound hopes to use the eight acres of the former Highlander Elementary in West Hills, but improvements would cost $8 million. With $2 million they received from a grant, the Ivy Bound administrators would have to raise another $6 million to build the four schools serving 250 students they are envisioning for the property.

“The problem is that the banks do not want to loan money on a property when they can’t hold title to the land until the loan is repaid,” Arzani said. “LAUSD would retain title to the land.”

For now, Arzani plans to continue to look for a way to raise the money, because he believes more quality middle schools are needed in Los Angeles.