THEY'LL VOUCH FOR THAT

Monday, Oct. 27, 1997 By RICHARD LACAYO

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Jim Lester is crazy about his granddaughter La-Kia, 10. "She's such a little lady," he crows. That's why he was so upset last year when she started attending Vare Middle School in South Philadelphia. It was bad enough that Vare is known for dismal test-score performance. What was worse was how the culture of the streets had seeped inside. La-Kia had been there only a few days when four girls tried to pick a fight with her. When he heard that, says Lester, "I nearly had 10 bypasses."

At his insistence, La-Kia was rushed to the more peaceable hallways of St. Thomas Aquinas, a parochial school costing $1,400 a year. Because La-Kia's mother Yolanda is unemployed, Lester paid the tuition himself. But he's a retired children's clinic administrator, so money is scarce. Help came at a community meeting a few months later. Lester heard Robert Sorrell, head of the local chapter of the Urban League, talk about the new school-voucher program that Sorrell had started with money from the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. The businesses were providing up to $1,000 in private-school-tuition assistance for about 90 students. With persistence, Lester got $700 of it to keep La-Kia at St. Thomas Aquinas. "You should see her in her crisp uniform," he says with the satisfaction you might expect from a man who may have saved his own flesh and blood. "Just a little lady."

It may not be news that a doting grandfather would struggle for his family. What's surprising is that he discovered school vouchers--cash stipends that can be used to help pay private-school tuition--from a black community activist like Sorrell. For a long time, politically active African Americans and the Democratic Party that most of them belong to have looked upon vouchers as poison apples intended to kill off public education. Even programs financed by private donors are suspect, since those might persuade legislators that taxpayer-financed vouchers would be a good next step. But with inner-city schools in a state of permanent crisis, lower-income blacks are being drawn increasingly to vouchers as a last best hope for getting at least some of their kids into better schools. "We don't want to tear down the public school system," Sorrell insists. "But we need to give parents choices."

It's because of their potential appeal to black voters that vouchers, which are largely a Republican cause, may grow from a small-scale educational experiment to a sizable political issue. Of the 52 million schoolchildren in America, fewer than 8 million attend private or parochial schools. Of those, fewer than 20,000 are using vouchers to help cover their tuition. And only two cities, Milwaukee, Wis., and Cleveland, Ohio, use tax dollars to supply the vouchers. In 30 or so others, funding is provided by private donations. In Washington, for instance, Ted Forstmann, the head of investment firm Forstmann Little & Co., has joined with another investor, John Walton, to pledge $6 million in tuition assistance for 1,000 D.C. children. "I hope this will be the wave of the future," says Forstmann, "citizens taking responsibility for problems."