New Principal Is Ready for ‘Sacred Mission’

As a youngster living in tiny Mt. Dora, Fla., Ruby Cremaschi-Schwimmer attended a three-room schoolhouse where every black child--from kindergarteners to high school seniors--was forced to go.

One day she happened upon the whites’ school. It was landscaped, well-painted and spacious.

“I never got over that,” she recalled last week. “I said to myself, ‘Something’s wrong here. Why don’t I get to go to a school like that?’ ”

Decades later, Cremaschi-Schwimmer finds herself in much the same situation as she begins her first year at much-maligned Lincoln High School.

But this time, she can do something about it.

“I really feel like this is almost a sacred mission, it really is,” said the 46-year-old career educator. “They needed someone and now they’ve got me.”

To all involved with the reform project at Lincoln High School, the woman hand-picked by Supt. Tom Payzant is the perfect choice. She is charismatic, outspoken, intelligent, organized and motivated--a woman with a vision of where she wants to take the city’s worst high school.

“I’m extremely optimistic,” said Vic Player, a 17-year veteran teacher at Lincoln. “The No. 1 reason is the leadership provided by Dr. Cremaschi.

“She’s a person with great vision, with courage, and with such a positive belief in herself and in the staff.”

“I think just her personality alone can make some pretty big changes,” said a former Lincoln teacher, who asked not to be named. “She’s an extremely exciting woman, and that’s what they need.”

Cremaschi-Schwimmer’s vision for Lincoln begins with the neighborhood residents--the black and Latino children who frequently record low test scores and high dropout rates.

Though Lincoln must attract white students to integrate the school, Cremaschi-Schwimmer says that “what we need to be judged on is whether the enrollment increases and the test scores increase. . . . I am no longer basing my success on the number of white kids who attend.”

After a childhood of poverty in Florida and New York, Cremaschi-Schwimmer has little sympathy for those who will not help themselves.

“I think the kids who use these things as excuses--the poverty, the abuse, the lack of educated parents--I just don’t think they’re valid,” she said. “I think each of us has the ability to make of our life what we can.”

Cremaschi-Schwimmer was born to a mother who was just 15 years old. Her father left his wife four months before the birth.

By age 10, she had lived in Harlem and various spots in Florida, residing with her grandmother when her mother could not support the family on her housekeeper’s wages.

“I think I was the proud poor. (My mother) would never apply for welfare, so I didn’t have Christmas presents or toys or anything,” she said. “But we had what we needed.”

At age 10, she moved with her mother and stepfather to an integrated neighborhood in the New York borough of Queens, where she had her first television, telephone and carpeted floors.

But she said her stepfather soon began sexually abusing her, and at age 11 she moved in with an uncle. She lied about her age to get a job as a mother’s helper for a wealthy Jewish family in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

When the Cohens learned that Cremaschi-Schwimmer often lived alone, they took her in. Her adolescence was spent among people named Cohen, Mendelsohn and DuBow.

She attended Hunter College in New York and earned her B.A. from Wayne State University in Detroit, going on for a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. She married along the way and had three children, one of whom is a world-champion disabled skier and Rhodes scholar from Harvard University.

After teaching in the Detroit schools, Cremaschi-Schwimmer came to San Diego with her second husband. She worked her way up from teacher to vice principal at Wilson Junior High School and Lincoln. She became principal at Muir Alternative School and Montgomery Junior High School.

In May, Payzant chose her for the $67,000-a-year post as principal of Lincoln, a salary that is higher than those of her peers.

“I had to take charge of my life because of circumstances,” she said. “I always preferred to be positive, no matter what was happening.

“I had to make choices not to get pregnant. Girls were doing that then. I had to make choices not to go on drugs. There were drugs around then.”

Now comes the challenge of persuading Lincoln’s students that they can do with their lives what Cremaschi-Schwimmer has done with hers. She believes, as she always has, that she can do it.

“I feel like the kids will buy into the new concept that this is serious,” she said. “They’ll say: ‘Oh, we go to a good school now. Something’s happening at Lincoln.’ ”