21 Winners in the County : State Gives A’s to Seven Anaheim Schools

When California honors its Distinguished Elementary Schools today, the Anaheim City School District will be a big statewide winner. Seven of its 20 elementary schools will receive the special award.

The awards are particularly gratifying, Anaheim school officials said Thursday, because ethnic minority enrollment in the district is 52%, and these students often have a limited command of English.

While Los Angeles Unified, with eight winning schools, tops the state in numbers for a single school district, Anaheim City School District has by far the largest ratio of winners to its total schools.

“On a percentage basis, we win,” noted Anaheim elementary schools Supt. Meliton Lopez, noting that Anaheim’s seven out of a total of 20 outstrips eight out of 416 in Los Angeles.

Plaques and Flags

The state Department of Education will give plaques and special Distinguished Elementary School flags to 248 schools in the state. There are 21 Orange County winners, including the seven elementary schools from Anaheim.

State Schools Supt. Bill Honig, who established the awards program last year to recognize and encourage excellence, said “Achievement can mean two things”: One, the schools are in “the top quarter” statewide and, two, they are “coming from point A to point B . . . improving rapidly.”

Other multiple winners in Orange County are Placentia Unified, with three elementary schools getting awards, and Newport-Mesa Unified and Santa Ana Unified, with two each. Districts having one award-winning school are Buena Park Elementary, Centralia Elementary, Huntington Beach City, Laguna Beach Unified, Los Alamitos Unified, Orange Unified and Saddleback Valley Unified.

Awards to Be Presented

The awards will be presented at ceremonies in the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles today. Lopez said the principals of Anaheim’s seven award-winning schools will accept the honors.

“In our school district, we say that instruction is Job No. 1,” Lopez said. “We have high expectations, and we make regular inspections to see that our expectations are being carried out in the school.

“Our district now has 52% minority, and 48% white-Anglo. It varies from school to school, not because of segregation, but because of neighborhood. But the winners (of the state award) include a school that is about 90% minority, and another school that is about 80% white-Anglo. So we think all our schools are doing very good work.”

The selection process began in October, when results of the California Assessment Program test of basic academic skills were released. The state Department of Education screened the scores of the state’s 4,500 elementary schools and found 559 that either scored consistently high marks or had shown rapid progress.

Detailed Questionnaire

Those schools were required to answer a detailed questionnaire about academic goals, instructional practices and the roles of parents, teachers and administrators, according to Mary Ann Overton, a state education official who coordinated the program.

The 283 schools that survived that stage of the review were then subjected to first-hand scrutiny. A team of evaluators that included teachers and administrators from the nominated schools spent a day at each site. As a result of the visits, 248 schools were judged to be distinguished.

“When you walked onto any of these campuses, you got the feeling this is really a live-wire school,” said Marvin R. Matthews, a consultant to the Los Angeles County Office of Education who helped evaluate the finalists. “When you visited the classrooms, kids were working--and not grudgingly. There was a magic present.”

Strong Principals

In all the schools, evaluators found strong principals, a high degree of parent involvement and teachers who showed initiative and an ability to blend disciplines. The schools had science classes that involved a good deal of writing, literature classes that incorporated history and math classes that found ways to include art.

At one of the winning schools, Eagle Rock School in northeast Los Angeles, the judges found all these elements. They also noted a collaborative spirit that drew together the diverse elements of the school, which includes several classes of gifted and educationally handicapped youngsters.

According to Principal Bernice Hallam, the school is gearing up for Dinosaur Day next week, which will feature a simulated archeological dig, “dinosaur cookies” and other activities. Several classrooms have designed special projects, such as the combination third- and fourth-grade class of Barbara Ishida, whose students worked daily for three months building a 20-foot papier-mache brontosaurus.

For two fifth- and sixth-grade gifted classes, teacher Beverly Glassford developed an archeology project in which each class created an ancient society--a language, life style, economic system, family structure, religion and form of government--and designed artifacts that represented various aspects of the culture.

The students have been excavating each others’ artifacts, which were buried in a dirt pit on the campus. Next Thursday, there will be a showdown to see which class could decipher the most about the other’s imaginary society.

Times staff writer Elaine Woo contributed to this article.