Students Are Getting Help From Unusual Teachers : Business Leaders, Zoo Keepers, Even Navy Corpsmen Turning Up in Classrooms

Doug Uselman saw a small child alone at recess last week during his second day as a volunteer for the Santa Margarita Elementary School in Oceanside. The 23-year-old Uselman, a Navy corpsman stationed at Camp Pendleton, took the student over to a playground slide and helped him get involved with classmates.

“It makes you feel good to help out,” said Uselman, a member of the 1st Marine Division’s 1st Medical Battalion, which has “adopted” Santa Margarita, part of the Oceanside Unifed School District.

“With budget cuts in education, 30 kindergartners in one class--for example--is a load for one teacher, and with us to help . . . it takes a big load off the teacher, and the child gets more interaction,” he said.

Uselman is among thousands of San Diego area residents who now tutor children, raise money for scholarships, judge science fairs, hold field trips, honor top achievers or provide assistance in a myriad of other ways to public schools. They participate through their businesses, agencies or organizations that have agreed to “adopt” a facility both as a way to improve educational experiences for children and to boost the standing of schools in the community at large.

Sponsoring agencies vary widely. They include, for instance, partnerships between the Taco Bell restaurant in south Oceanside and Lincoln Junior High; NCR Corp. in Rancho Bernardo and Poway’s Meadowbrook Middle School; the zoo’s Wild Animal Park and Miller Elementary School in Escondido; the San Diego-Imperial counties AFL-CIO labor council and Pershing Junior High in San Diego; and the Naval Supply Center at the Broadway Pier and Roosevelt Junior High.

“One of the beauties of the program is that every partnership can be designed to meet the needs of the student population,” said Dan Armstrong, who coordinates the match-ups for the Oceanside district. “All schools can benefit, from the most affluent to the least, assuming that good planning has gone on and that there’s sufficient commitment and understanding to follow through on initial enthusiasm.”

All school districts encourage partnerships as an outgrowth of nationwide concern expressed over the lack of basic skills shown by many school graduates who apply for jobs, and a corresponding lack of public appreciation over the difficult role of teachers.

“Obviously, American business has not been fully satisfied with the level of training, with the capability shown by entry-level employees, and we all have a critical stake in that,” Armstrong said. “Long-range, we would like to have students see the connection between doing well in school and doing well afterward.”

Some area officials would like to see a far larger program beyond individual school-company links, and are now talking of drawing up a formal compact between educators and the community to promise jobs and college scholarships for graduates who demonstrate improved test scores and mature behavior. In essence, the seed of the adopt-a-school program would become the tree of a formal, areawide community-schools arrangement.

“We are looking at more of a results-oriented program with a proposed San Diego compact than the present assistance-oriented (individual) links,” said John Hanson, president of Solar Turbines Inc. The compact would be modeled after the ongoing Boston Compact, where business, social agencies and public organizations in that city have made job and grade agreements with the school district.

“It would be an overarching community focus for partnership efforts,” said Jeanne Jehl, who oversees partnerships for the San Diego Unified School District, the county’s largest. “If we improve our educational act and product, business would then buy more of it, promising to set aside jobs for students from the city schools.”

But a San Diego compact is still in the planning stages. And in the meantime Jehl and others hope to refine the present adopt-a-school philosophy to focus more on specific goals of preventing dropouts and boosting basic skills, especially at the middle school and high school levels, and less on simple field trips or parties.

“Already, the (partnerships) have brought people who don’t have kids in schools and haven’t been on a campus for years to understand that schools are good places to be, or at least not bad places to be, especially since some people are scared to death to walk onto a school ground,” Jehl said. “Also, it lets them see that teachers are good people who work hard and are dedicated to knocking down the ‘we versus they’ sense in the community.”

From the school’s perspective, Jehl points to internships that companies have provided for teachers, to career and vocational programs they have given students, and to an increase in motivation and attendance among children exposed to adults with positive outlooks on life.

The 1st Medical Battalion sends two volunteers from its ranks to Santa Margarita School each day to help teachers in any way they need assistance, from playing the violin or reading for children, to building booths for carnivals to watching playground activities during recess.

“It’s purely voluntary for them to come out and we’ve benefited tremendously,” Principal Dorothy Faulkner said, noting that many of the school’s children are dependents of active-duty Marine personnel who often are away from home for six months at a time. Volunteers Uselman and fellow battalion member Barton Hoffman spent part of a day last week talking with a small boy whose parents are both Marines and both on away on overseas assignments.

“I think our stopping to talk with him was a help,” Uselman said.

The Wild Animal Park has provided the impetus for teachers at Escondido’s Miller Elementary School to prepare class curriculums on animal ecology and conservation of species, using the park as a “live” lab for the students.

“The Wild Animal Park has been more than just a field trip for the kids,” Principal Judy Adams said. “It’s made the children aware of the environment and of endangered animals in a learning sense.

“For me, I believe much more in the service rather than the (material) aspect of a partnership.”

A retired teacher is helping the AFL-CIO set up its new program with Pershing Junior High. Dick Martin, who taught English for almost two decades at various city schools, has designed the program to bring carpenters, machinists and other labor council members together with students the school identifies as “at risk,” meaning they do not seem keen on higher education.

“Everyone is not going to go to college, that’s being realistic,” said Principal William J. Hassett. “And Jeanne (Jehl) and I decided that these kids (at the junior-high level) deserve some direction, to get counseling about jobs, about technical services that exist, and to understand that you need education even to be an electrician.”

Said Martin: “How effective are we going to be? That remains to be seen. The more the kids learn about the outside world, the better off they are going to be, because some of them otherwise will be pretty hopeless.”

At Poway’s Meadowbrook, NCR Corp. provides surplus computer and science materials for classes, gives awards for improved student attendance and study, and judges the science fair.

“This is our fourth year,” Principal Richard Hebling said. “Initially, when you get into it, there is a lot of publicity and maybe a tendency to oversell the program. But if you set up common goals and meet on a monthly basis, it can get to the stage of being ongoing.”

Employees at the Naval Supply Center have raised funds among themselves to give scholarships and awards at Roosevelt Junior High School. They also have set up special speech classes and tutor in the homework lab after school in an overall effort that Jehl said has integrated the Navy into San Diego life better than anything ever attempted.

“We have had a motivational factor,” the supply center’s Tina Porter said. “We chose Roosevelt in one sense because it is an ethnically-balanced school (in the way) our 1,600 employees are.

“And we’ve let kids from various ethnic groups see that their adult counterparts do hold good jobs, by having them tour our facility, by talking with our people on career day about education and their future.

“After work, we’ve talked sometimes about how we find ourselves part of the big picture (in improving U.S. education) by getting positive, enthusiastic people interested in helping out . . . . Just seeing how the children interact with us, our employees comment, ‘Boy, they (kids) sure are more sophisticated, seem to be more alert, than when I went to school.’ ”

Not all programs work as well as hoped for. Wilson Middle School ended its partnership with MA-COM Linkabit Inc. in part because the school’s East San Diego location was too far from the Sorrento Valley electronics firm for students to get to.

“It wasn’t the fault of either of us but the basis for a partnership just wasn’t there,” Principal Joseph Tafoya said. “Also, our kids were overwhelmed with all the technology and there just wasn’t the (learning) growth that I hoped for. I think MA-COM is better suited for a high school, with all its technology.”

Jehl said that partnerships work better if they involve schools and business in close proximity to one another. “And without a good understanding on the part of both, they can go down fast.”

Both she and Armstrong say that a partnership works less well on high school campuses because of the difficulty for a single business or agency to affect large numbers of students. Armstrong said high school programs fare better when two or more partnerships exist for a single school, such as where one or more businesses adopt particular classes or groups within the school. Local printers in San Diego, for example, have adopted graphic arts classes in several city high schools.

Partnerships, and perhaps the hoped-for compact, are a key to America’s educational future, Jehl emphasizes.

“There’s been a redefinition of community involvement in education,” she said. “Parents are not as involved in schools as they used to be. Adopt-a-school is not a substitute per se for parental involvement, but it does help whole communities focus on their future--economic and social--and show how doing more with schools will help the future to be more productive and positive.”