Changing Compton College : President Cites Gains, Hurdles at Campus

Before Edison O. Jackson had been in town six months, one organization named him Man of the Year. As the new president of Compton Community College, he traveled to district city halls, public schools and church congregations with a rousing pledge to recapture the institution’s reputation for excellence and to raise employee morale.

Now, his first-year report card shows that some results have been dramatic and some have been disappointing:

- After three years of discouraging declines, enrollment has risen roughly 10%--more than any other two-year school in Los Angeles County, college officials say. For example, the 4,076 students who registered for the spring term represent a 17.2% increase over the previous year.

- Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts are being paid, some long in advance of their due dates and at a savings of thousands of dollars in interest.

- And the grass is literally greener, thanks to a campus beautification program intended to make the grounds more hallowed in the public eye. “People can now jog around the track without feeling that they’ve got to get a bath” to wash off the dust, Jackson quipped this week.

But at a press conference marking his first anniversary in office, the energetic, 43-year-old educator from New Jersey also acknowledged that everything isn’t “rosy.” In fact, the success of his plan of reform still depends on his ability to convince others that they should go along with it.

The reception given him by faculty and staff has, at best, been “mixed,” Jackson said. “There was some resistance to my leadership,” he contended, because of his demand that college employees step up their performance while tightening academic standards.

And contract negotiations with the 235-member Compton Community College Federation of Employees have been deadlocked for months, with officials on both sides saying there is little chance for a settlement before fall classes open on Sept. 8. Union leaders have filed five unfair labor practice claims and accused the college trustees of “public-financed union busting.”

In May, union members gave their leaders preliminary permission to call a strike. But Jackson said he believes that the employees will report under the old contract rather than stop work as they did three years ago, when a combination of budget cuts threw the school into a financial crisis from which it is only now emerging.

“We’d have to get farther apart than this to have them not come back to work,” the president said.

While union members want more control over things like grievance procedures, the foremost sticking point involves money: Compton teachers continue to be the lowest paid of any in the state’s 70-college system. California community college faculty members receive an average of $43,699 a year, but in Compton the average is $30,632. Union members seek a series of raises that start at 10%. College officials want the rate to start at 5%.

“Basically, employees feel that there really is no recognition of employee rights at all,” said Darwin Thorpe, a biology professor for 23 years and co-president of the union. “And with the low pay, we feel that the objectives and goals of the college, with which we agree, will not be carried through.”

Thorpe said he “personally” likes Jackson, but believes that the administrator could have done more to bring about a contract solution. At the same time, Thorpe said he believes that Jackson’s hands have to some degree been tied by state education officials and the district’s five-member Board of Trustees.

At his press conference, Jackson said he sympathizes with the employees, but added that “I’m not going to bankrupt this institution to give raises, however badly paid they are.” That kind of determination and no-nonsense style continues to win Jackson rave reviews outside of the college, which is tucked in the southeast corner of a district that includes Compton, Lynwood, Paramount and Willowbrook.

‘Taking Care of Business’

“I think that he believes in taking care of business and not fooling around,” said Kelvin D. Filer, president of the Compton Unified School District board. “He is very concerned and very sincere about his commitment to Compton. He lives in Compton” and attends the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church.

Filer said Jackson also “really gets out and gets involved. . . . He goes to everything that he can and he makes himself visible.”

College spokesman Charles Cropsey said that in addition to being named Man of the Year by the Martin Luther King Jr. Democratic Club, Jackson “came home with at least a dozen framed documents to hang on his office wall,” including commendations from the City of Compton and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. “I see him almost more than I see our own council people,” said Lynwood Mayor Robert Henning. In the three years that Henning has been a city official, he said, Jackson is the first Compton Community College leader to “meet with us on a regular basis in order to update us on what’s happening at the college.”

The Rev. David J. Berkedal, a Compton Lutheran pastor who knew former college President Abel B. Sykes and recently served on a college committee with Jackson, described the current administrator as “more of an inspirational leader, a motivator” who is out to raise the expectations of a community college district that is beset with crime, poverty and unemployment.

‘A Way Up the Ladder’

“The idea of an inexpensive quality education is a major hope for the community here,” Berkedal said, “because it tells people that there is a way up the ladder.”

In the coming academic year, Jackson announced, the college will continue to refine its back-to-basics approach by requiring that all students take a course in speech.

A new degree program--associate in applied science--will be established as the state’s first so that students who only “want to enter the world of work” after two years can avoid some of the more difficult course material required of those who plan to eventually transfer to a university in pursuit of a four-year degree.

College officials will also set out to establish its first branch campus somewhere in the Lynwood-Paramount area. And next year’s enrollment goal is an increase of 12%.

“If he can do that,” said Paramount schools Supt. Richard Caldwell, “then he’s done an excellent job.”

But Caldwell said that many Paramount students are reluctant to enroll in the college--when they are free to attend another--because “they remember all this Watts (riots) stuff, they’re afraid they’re gonna get beat up. . . . There is a reluctance on the part of many Paramount citizens to cross over into Compton, particularly after dark.”

Caldwell said he believes those fears are unfounded, “but I don’t think they (city and college officials) have been successful in selling that to Lynwood, Paramount and Downey people.”