Belmont High Comes Back : Four Years Ago, Trash Littered the Hallways, Teacher Morale Was Low and Students Went to Class Only When They Wanted To. How an Inner-City, Multi-Ethnic School Was Turned Around.

I t was 6:45 on a cold January morn ing at Belmont High School, on the fringe of downtown Los An geles. Principal John Howard, ar riving at his customary time, was struck by a sight that infuriated him: graffiti, 10 feet high and 20 feet wide, on an outside wall of the school.

After having spent more than a year hammering away at Belmont’s most visible problems--pervasive graffiti, garbage in the hallways and students who roamed the campus instead of going to class--Howard had thought he had things pretty well nailed down. The school was starting to shape up. But now, one of the neighborhood gangs had scrawled its signature over the front of his school. He was damned if he was going to let them get away with it.

As soon as the tardy bell rang, Howard got on the PA system to address Belmont’s students.

“I’m sure all of us here have noticed there was some defacing of the wall,” the principal said gravely. “I am not going to put up with this kind of psychotic behavior. It shows a negative attitude.

“There is a certain group that did this. I will give you 10 minutes to come down here and take that crap off my walls. If you don’t, harsher measures will follow.”

Recalling the incident, which took place two years ago, Howard says he had no idea what those “harsher measures” might be. But he was confident that his ploy--he called it “the old fake-out game”--would work.

Minutes after his announcement, six “volunteers” walked into his office. Howard handed them paint and paint rollers.

When they finished, Howard went back on the loudspeakers: “I want to thank the members of the group who came down and undid the defacing of the wall. Ladies and gentlemen, we now have our civilization back.”

In some classrooms, students burst into applause.

“Everybody was surprised. We

couldn’t believe those people had turned themselves in,” one student recalls. But Howard was not surprised. “People do what you expect of them,” he says. “It is the law of expectancy--and it works.”

Not long ago, no one expect ed much of Belmont.

“The place smelled like a urinal,” says a teacher who has taught at the school since the late 1970s. “You couldn’t have the classroom door open because we had roving bands of cholos going up and down here.”

Graffiti and trash were everywhere. Teacher morale was low. Many instructors found that they spent little time actually teaching because they were “chasing kids down the hall or were disrupted by tardies,” says a veteran of Belmont’s inglorious past.

Today, however, Belmont is a different place.

Although from the outside it still looks forbidding, isolated from Beverly Boulevard by chain-link fencing and a massive cement wall, its corridors are freshly painted, brightened here and there by murals. Students hustle to class on time. And many teachers keep classroom doors open, no longer disturbed by outside distractions.

Graffiti, although commonplace in the surrounding community, have disappeared from the campus. Misplaced trash is hard to find, even though Belmont is overcrowded and used year-round.

Now, Belmont is considered “the paradigm of what an urban school with difficult problems should be,” says Associate Supt. Paul M. Possemato.

Some district officials say it is the best-managed of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 49 high schools. That would be no mean feat for the staff of any school, but at Belmont the accomplishment is amazing. Belmont has 4,300 students, more than any high school in the state. Most of them are low-income and new to the country. They represent 52 countries and speak 34 languages, including Spanish, Cantonese, Khmer, Tagalog, Korean, Laotian and Mandarin. Seventy-six percent of the students are Latino; 20% are Asian. English is a second language to about 60% of the students.

There is a reason why this inner-city school works when so many do not. The reason, according to students, teachers and administrators at Belmont, is John Howard, a 20-year veteran of Los Angeles schools who became principal at Belmont four years ago. “Howard,” says a teacher who has taught at Belmont through several administrations, “has gotten things done.”

Numerous educational studies have pointed out how important a principal is in making--or breaking--a school. According to the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, the nation’s largest organization of school administrators, the exceptional principal can set the tone for a school and make it a place where students want to learn and where teachers want to go the extra mile to help them. Conversely, the weak or inept principal can make life miserable for everyone.

That does not mean that the process of straightening out Belmont has been smooth or particularly pleasant; nice is not one of the first words that leaps to mind about Howard. Described by his admirers as demanding and fiercely committed to helping students--and by his detractors as blunt to the point of rudeness--Howard admits to “a touch of fanaticism” about his job. “I don’t waste much time with charm, and I’m not too famous for bothering with bureaucratic nonsense,” he said while on hall duty one day recently. He compares his job to that of the mayor of a small town or manager of a large company. “In Search of Excellence,” the 1982 best seller about management in successful American corporations, is one of his favorite books. Still, for all his tough talk, there is no mistaking his concern for Belmont students.

At 2:20 one recent afternoon, school was let out an hour early so that teachers could attend a special meeting. As students streamed out the doors, the faculty filed into the cafeteria to prepare for the district’s math and reading achievement test, a demanding, six-hour written exam--used to gauge academic fitness--that has never been easy for Belmont students.

Howard, a short (5-foot-2), 54-year-old man with wavy white hair, is intent on pulling Belmont’s test scores up from the bottom ranks of high schools, where it has languished for years. To help raise the school’s performance on the upcoming test, he wanted to use the meeting to motivate his staff.

“I saw a movie last night called ‘The Killing Fields,’ ” he said a few minutes into his speech, referring to the 1984 film about a New York Times correspondent’s experiences covering the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge and the ensuing blood bath. “That is the population we have at Belmont. (Our students) are from El Salvador, Cambodia and Vietnam. They’ve seen things that make them more mature than any population we have ever had here. Thank God for the students of Belmont!

“Don’t be discouraged by the ESL (English-as-a-second-language) kids. . . .Take hope, and be a spark. Give the new entries a feeling of warmth, of care . . . a feeling that America is the thing they dreamed about when they saw their father and mother being tortured . . . (a feeling) that Belmont will deliver the hope of America to them.

“That is what we are doing here,” he said, and stepped away from the podium.

The teachers gave him a standing ovation.

Some in the audience found the emotional pep talk curious for so mundane a topic as testing. But, says one teacher who has observed Howard for several years, “that wasn’t a show. That’s how he really feels.”

Later, some teachers and staff members poked their heads into his office to congratulate him on the speech. Howard seemed embarrassed. But, as he explained, he considers Belmont an extraordinary school and thought that some teachers needed to be reminded.

“We’re teaching the (type of) kids the rest of Los Angeles will be teaching in a few years. I told (the staff) four years ago that Belmont’s population would change, that we would be getting kids with greater handicaps . . . who need more ESL and a more measured approach. The old-timers have to be ready to adjust. Some have been listening, and some have not.”

According to Possemato, who headed the district’s senior high division when Howard became principal, Howard has been very effective in getting his message across, not only to teachers but to the students.

“I don’t think you can find a more competent leader in a high school setting than John Howard,” Possemato says. “John got students to respond to the school, to the teachers and to the administrators. When students respond, they take ownership. And when they take ownership, it makes a difference in the way a school looks. Belmont is a bright, clean, positive place for learning to take place now. It has become that way because of the leadership that has taken place.”

That is not to say, however, that the Super Principal is the universal cure for troubled schools. “It is hard to find a school that has turned around that does not have a good principal,” says Lew Armistead of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals. “But a principal who has nothing else good in the school can’t do the job alone.” Other ingredients for a good school, Armistead and other experts say, include motivated students and supportive parents and community members.

Belmont’s students, for the most part, have a “refreshing and positive attitude” toward school and want to learn, says Possemato. That attitude seems to hold sway among the teachers as well. Part of this may be because they appreciate being spared the hallway and lunch patrols that teachers at most schools are saddled with. Howard says he sees to it that all they have to do is teach.

That policy seems to be paying off. School board member Jackie Goldberg, who represents Hollywood, northeastern Los Angeles and the gritty Central City area around Belmont, says that when she visits the campus, she is impressed by a “family feeling” that students and teachers seem to share and by the school’s overall orderliness. “That doesn’t happen with a police atmosphere,” she says. “That happens from pride in oneself and in the school. John Howard is excellent at inspiring that.”

Howard (nicknamed “Grandpa Smurf “ by some of his students, after the diminutive, white-haired Saturday-morning cartoon character) takes pride in Belmont’s accomplishments over the last few years. For instance, the school’s football team made it all the way to the city 2-A division finals in 1984. To Howard, that was remarkable. “We have the smallest athletes in the district. Most of them didn’t even know the shape of the ball when they came here,” he says.

Howard also points to Belmont’s performance last year in the districtwide Academic Decathlon, a daylong competition involving oral and written tests on a variety of academic subjects. Out of 52 schools, Belmont finished in 11th place, beating many schools that have a majority of native English speakers.

Belmont has a long history as a school of many colors and nationalities. The school district did not begin to re cord information on ethnicity until the late 1960s, but a look through Belmont yearbooks shows that, in the late 1940s, the school, while predominantly white, had a sizable number of Japanese. And through the 1950s, a sprinkling of Latino and Chinese students started to show up on the roll books. Through the 1960s, the Latino segment steadily grew, eventually becoming a majority. Thereafter, it seemed that each wave of immigration that reached American shores was reflected in Belmont’s student body, attracted to the area, at least in part, by low-rent apartments. Cubans, Filipinos, middle- and upper-class Vietnamese, and later the poorer classes of Vietnamese and Cambodians and refugees from Central America all eventually made their way to Belmont’s door.

In 1961, the members of the homecoming court were named Brown, Miyake, Garcia, Iwasaki and Konigsberg. In 1986, the princesses were named Suarez, Garcia, Huynh and Salvador.

At Belmont, many of the immigrant students have been in the country for several years and are, at least on the outside, quite Americanized. Others are recent arrivals with special needs that Belmont has had to address.

For instance, the district requires that all students new to the country be enrolled in a semester-long orientation class that gives them a rudimentary introduction to an American high school. The class is needed because many such pupils arrive lacking formal school experience and are unaware of things as basic as how to put notebook paper in a three-ring binder, what a drinking fountain is for, or how to use a cafeteria.

Because of Belmont’s polyglot population, the potential for misunderstanding is great. Sometimes the language barrier causes social problems. Sixteen-year-old Alejandro Jarmin says that it is easy to leap to the conclusion that someone speaking a foreign language is “talking about you, and that offends you.” However, most teachers and students say that conflict--including fights--is rare. And although five youth gangs are active in the area, students say the campus is safe, a condition they attribute to Howard’s hard-line stance on gangs. “Everybody knows (the rule is) one fight and you’re out,” says a student who used to belong to a gang.

But Belmont’s cultural smorgasbord also has its advantages. “We (celebrate) Cinco de Mayo . . . and Chinese New Year. I’ve learned some Spanish, and I’ve learned some Chinese,” says Varavut Limpasuvan, a 16-year-old from Thailand.

Teachers say what they like best about Belmont are its students. “There is a sweetness to them that you don’t find in kids in the Palisades or the Valley,” says Jay Schaeffer, an English instructor. Ken Suto, a bilingual administrative assistant, says, “The kids really respect teachers. It’s a pleasure to work with them.”

Because of the struggles many Belmont students have experienced, they tend to show a deep appreciation of education. Roger Navas, for example, fled with his family from Nicaragua eight years ago, after his father was murdered because of his ties to the Somoza government. The first several years in the new land were difficult, but Navas’ mother has since remarried, and the family is prospering. Navas, an 18-year-old who is interested in politics, understands that education is the key to making it here. “Education is very important,” he says. “It is the only thing you can take with you and no one can take from you. If you are educated, you know your rights . . . and people can’t trick you or make you do things you don’t want to do.”

Student Celia Toche, 17, came from El Salvador with her family five years ago, knowing no English. Now she is an honor student and hopes to go to college. She is usually so absorbed with physics tests, economic theory, trigonometry exercises and English literature that she rarely thinks anymore of such painful losses and frightening times as when armed guerrillas perched on the roof of her school.

Sometimes, however, she is reminded. “My parents didn’t get a chance to get an education,” she says. “It’s a family treasure, to get an education here. I really value it a lot. So when I see people wasting the opportunities they’ve got here, the choices they have here, that’s when I think about El Salvador. Here at Belmont, we know what we have--and we appreciate it.”

To Howard, students such as Navas and Toche give Bel mont its heart. Knowing that Belmont can make a difference in their lives is, to a large degree, what drives him. A product of Eastern Catholic schools who has master’s degrees in philosophy and school administration, he routinely puts in 12-hour days and barely pauses for lunch--which for him consists of a plate of raw potatoes and carrots from the school cafeteria, washed down with a can of soda. Unlike most principals, Howard works year-round because Belmont is a year-round school.

He came to Belmont in 1982 after 17 years as a teacher and administrator in predominantly Latino East Side schools. Belmont, he recalls, was “a pigsty.” “There was graffiti everywhere, garbage everywhere. The attitude of the kids was, ‘I think I’ll go to class, or maybe I’ll climb the fence and go home.’ And the security guy would be standing right there looking up at the sky as the kid went over the fence.”

Howard quickly requested and received a new security team, and he had the school painted. To solve the tardiness problem, he and other administrators stood in the hallways at class breaks three times a week and rounded up any late students for detention.

He was so adamant about ending the tardiness and cleaning up the school that it offended some of his staff. “I wanted to leave the first year he was here. I thought he was a tyrant,” says Michael Thorpe, who was teaching English at the time and now is a college adviser. “I thought he was hassling kids all the time . . . and I didn’t see any reason for it.”

But by Howard’s second year, Thorpe began to see results. Students were disposing of their own trash and getting to class on time. “Howard said if you set your expectations high, you’d get better results. He sure made a believer out of me,” Thorpe says.

Creating an atmosphere conducive to learning--one that is clean, orderly and caring--is half the battle, educators say. Those familiar with Belmont say it clearly can claim that victory. But the other half of the battle is ensuring that students learn. That is where Belmont’s struggle continues.

Belmont has a high transiency rate because the neighborhood around the school tends to be only a first stop for immigrants coming to Los Angeles. Thirty percent of its students went in and out of the school during the 1984-85 school year. It also has a 62% attrition rate, which many people equate with a dropout rate, although that is not entirely accurate. District officials say that figure includes dropouts as well as students who attend school elsewhere but have not requested their records, which is the only way the district has of keeping track of a student. About a third of Belmont’s seniors enrolled in a two- or four-year college last year, fewer than in previous years.

Belmont’s performance on standardized tests of basic knowledge does not paint a bright picture, either. Last year, Belmont students had an average combined score of 710 on the SAT, in contrast to the national average of 906. And on the California Test of Basic Skills, the major standardized test used by the district to assess individual and school- wide performance, Belmont scores well below average--in the 30th percentile in math (meaning that only 30% of California schools score lower) and the 16th percentile in reading. In recent years the scores have been rising, but only slightly.

Proud as he is of the school, Howard says he makes no excuses for its low academic ranking. “I could give you a list of reasons why Belmont can’t do as well as Beverly Hills (High),” he says. “But the bottom line still is, how did we do on the standardized test? The day I would smile as the principal of an inner-city school is the day when the school goes past the 50th percentile.”

But that day is a long way off for Belmont. According to experts on the relationship between language and testing, a student who is not proficient in English is sure to flounder on any exam that assumes native English ability. Thus, as long as Belmont remains a port-of-entry school for non-English-speaking students, language probably will remain a barrier to achievement.

Because 60% of the students are not native English speakers, the school’s average reading level is low--about fifth-grade. For teachers, that means having to work especially hard. History and science teachers say that they find themselves having to teach reading and writing as well. And all teachers have to go to greater lengths to explain concepts.

One day in July, algebra teacher Stan Mu was reviewing a lesson on positive and negative addition. On the blackboard he had drawn a simple line graph with a zero in the middle. With a piece of chalk in hand, he marched to the right to explain what a positive integer is, and to the left to show a negative integer. Some students seemed to get it, and some didn’t.

“Simple word problems are hard because (the students) dread reading,” says Mu. “You have to re-explain everything, which takes time. I try to make it so that the lowest student can understand. That’s why I was walking this way and that way, to get the concept across.”

Howard has a plan for raising the school’s scores, but it is sure to be controversial. He would like to require a fifth year of high school for all students who are not proficient in English.

Last year, Howard began an experimental program that will lengthen the high school education of 50 immigrant students. Those students, primarily from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, not only speak little English but also lack much in the way of formal education. They are spending their first three years in special classes that offer intensive English training. By the fourth year, they can join regular high school classes. By the fifth year, Howard hopes that these students will have a firm enough foundation in English to stay in school and earn a diploma.

Howard recently submitted his plan to the district superintendent to extend high school an extra year for all English-deficient students, including native English speakers who need remedial help. “I would do it tomorrow if I could get permission,” he says. “But there’s a problem. People will say that I’m isolating them. So it’s a sensitive issue. It’s a political thing. But I believe that (without this) they will be isolated anyway. The isolation will just go on.”

The proposal may encounter stiff opposition, but Howard remains optimistic. He remembers that he also met resistance when he first came to Belmont. Teachers and administrators told him that he could never clean up the school or get kids to go to class on time. “They said it would cause a revolution,” he says, grinning.

The same skepticism prevailed when Howard wanted to organize a pep rally two years ago to honor student achievers--anyone who had accomplished something positive during the school year. For some, the achievement was high grades; for others, it was more modest, such as steady attendance.

“Everybody thought it was going to bomb,” he says. And, at first, it seemed that the skeptics were right. To many of the immigrant students, a pep rally was an alien concept, and so they didn’t understand the purpose of the event or their role in it. But, as Howard recalls, the cheerleaders soon had the other students doing “the wave” and shouting “B-E-L-M-O-N-T.” Local celebrities such as newscaster Tritia Toyota and television weatherman Maclovio Perez were there, and a police helicopter made a special pass over the stadium, dropping leaflets with congratulatory messages.

At the end, Howard got everyone to join hands and sing “We Are the World.” Tears streamed down a lot of faces. Howard admits to having felt a little misty himself. Corny as the rally sounds, he’s ready to do it again. But instead of the 700 students honored last year, this time he wants 3,000.

“This place should make you cry. It means deep things to a lot of people,” he says. “The story of Belmont is that people can be better. Just imagine, if you came home and your wife enthusiastically greeted you every night and did a cheer, what would happen? You’d feel better. It’s the same here. All I am is a catalytic cheerleader. I believe people can do a lot with what they have.”