PHILADELPHIA While its future home may be only an outline in red and white steel girders, the new University of Pennsylvania-assisted public school at 42nd and Locust streets will open Sept. 6 for some 120 students in kindergarten and grade one.

While the new building is under construction, classes will be held in a wing of a now-closed divinity school that occupies the site.

Students at the still-to-be-named facility will benefit from a school designed from the ground up to incorporate the "best educational practices" that have borne the tests of research and time.

"Our goal was to create a demonstration school of what a public school should be like," said Nancy Streim, associate dean of the Graduate School of Education at Penn. "This school will demonstrate what educators already know about best practices. It will be a team effort, with Penn providing additional resources financial and intellectual that will make it happen."

Those financial resources include the $1,000 per student the university is contributing. "Intellectual" refers to the support university personnel lent in the planning and curriculum development as well as a professional-development center that all Philadelphia School District teachers are invited to use.

While the search for a principal went nationwide and yielded 60 applicants, the committee really had to look no further than the schools backyard for the right person. Sheila Sydnor, a native of West Philadelphia, had been principal at the M. Hall Stanton School at 16th and Cumberland streets for eight years before taking on the challenge of this new school. A product of the city schools and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Sydnor sees this job as "an opportunity to give back to the community that helped raise me."

A 25-year veteran of the city school district, Sydnor leads a group of 12 teachers and staff, who are a mix of veteran and young teachers, a nurse and secretary. In addition to the six classroom teachers, a full-time computer teacher will instruct the children daily in a state of the art technology lab.

"This will be a technology-rich school; there Internet wiring every- where," Streim said. "It designed for today and to be ready for tomorrow."

The classes will be smaller than at most schools -- a 17-student maximum in kindergarten and 23 in first grade -- since research has positively linked class size to studentsacademic success. Three classes are planned for each grade.

Next year, the brand new building will welcome children in grades K-2 and 5.

"This will provide the community with a new middle school option," Sydnor said.

The new school was developed with continuous input from the community it will serve. Designed to serve students from a catchment area drawn by the city school district, the school will be the educational home of elementary-age children who live in the area bound roughly on the east by 40th Street, on the north by Sansom Street, on the west by 46th and 47th streets and on the south by a zigzag made up of Woodland and Chester avenues.

The community is also reflected in the racial/ethnic make up of the student body. By mid-August, families with roots in 19 countries had enrolled their children, and the racial breakdown is 41 percent African-American, 32 percent white, 23 percent Asian and 4 percent Hispanic.