Can neighborhood school attract new G-Ho residents?

AT A MEETING at the upscale Naval Square condo-and-townhouse complex at the end of last year, the principal of Chester A. Arthur School stood before a roomful of parents who could probably afford to send their kids to private school and encouraged them to consider her neighborhood school.

"Sure, I want them to come here," Renee Musgrove, principal of the K-8 school at 20th and Catharine streets, said in an interview last week. "Because I believe in public education and I believe my school is just as good as the Greenfield School or the Meredith School or the McCall school. We're proud of our school."

Some parents in Naval Square weren't swayed.

Clara Jerez, who has two sons - Alejandro, 12, who goes to Masterman, and Diego, 5 - said that she had researched the school and found that test scores were "not too high" and that there were "some safety issues there," including assaults.

Tami Dimmerman, who has two girls, Chloe, 5, and Sienna, 2, said that she wasn't comfortable sending her kids there. "We don't want to be guinea pigs in this school," said Dimmerman, who attended part of the meeting, initiated by Toll Brothers, developer of the half-million-dollar condos and town houses.

Both mothers, who at first believed that Center City's Greenfield, with its higher test scores, was their neighborhood school, plan to send their 5-year-olds to private schools in the fall.

Their decision to spend about $18,000 on something they could get for free down the street exhibits the difficulty of some parents in up-and-coming areas to find a school they consider good enough for their kids.

As Graduate Hospital has gentrified over the past decade, some newer residents have been reaching out to Chester Arthur to get to know the school and help with activities there. Ivy Olesh, 28, co-founder of the group Friends of Chester Arthur, which formed last summer, has a 6-month-old son and says that she "definitely" plans to send him to Chester Arthur.

"I see nothing better than that. It's the idyllic city life [for parents] to walk their child three blocks to their elementary school," she said."I just assumed every public school in Philadelphia was subpar . . . but I was really pleasantly surprised when I visited the school, how orderly it was, how safe it was."

A good public school can only help the neighborhood continue to improve, said Andrew Dalzell, 26, program coordinator for the South of South Neighborhood Association. "The last thing we want is for people to move in, then move out," he said.

Jeanne Vissa, 62, is one Naval Square resident who also wants to help beef up Chester Arthur's extracurricular activities and to volunteer there to build a relationship among educators, students and residents. A former principal in White Plains, N.Y., Vissa heads Naval Square's education steering committee and hopes that she can replicate the successful Penn Alexander School that she helped get under way in West Philly.

"The point," she said, "is to make Chester Arthur [desirable] for people who have a tradition of going to public schools themselves and who want to have that for their children."