Merit Scholars Polish 2 Schools’ Tarnished Images

Mention Sweetwater High School in National City and the image of a football and basketball powerhouse immediately comes to mind. Bring up the name of San Diego High School and the picture becomes its storied past as the city’s first high school and its challenge today educating a potpourri of ethnic groups from all over the world.

For both schools, the recent images are not those of high academic achievement.

But this fall, both schools have a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, a student in the top 5% of the nation’s secondary school scholars. For Sweetwater, this is its first semifinalist in more than five years. For San Diego, the winner is only its third in the last six years.

For the students--Stacy Weston at Sweetwater and Brad Decker at San Diego--the semifinalist designation is a happy honor that will help them gain college admission and secure scholarship money.

For the schools’ principals, the semifinalists represent the chance to show a different side of their campuses: the academic part they have worked hard to strengthen but which remains little known to the public. Schools such as La Jolla, Poway, Patrick Henry and Torrey Pines--all located in wealthier areas of San Diego County--have, and are expected to have, several winners each year. There are 114 semifinalists in San Diego County this year.

‘Reputation Way Off’

“Our school’s reputation is way off,” said Sweetwater’s Weston, referring to its success in high school athletics. “We have teams in the academic decathlon, the academic league . . . but people don’t know about what goes on here . . . maybe if our academic (success) was more publicized.”

Weston, who is active in Sweetwater’s musical theater productions, told of her participation in a community theater group with students mostly from La Jolla.

“They asked me where I go to high school and I said ‘Sweetwater,’ ” Weston said. “They asked, ‘Where’s that?’ and I said ‘National City.’ They say, ‘Oh, isn’t that in Tijuana?’ because (they think) of (our) minorities.”

That view of Sweetwater raises the hackles of Principal Alan Goycochea.

“Sure, we’re 86% minority (Latino, Filipino, Southeast Asian, black),” Goycochea said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t do well academically, and we decided about (seven years) ago to embark on an academic program . . . we’re not a football program with a school appended to it but a good school that happens to also have a good football program.”

That program meant directing more students into college-preparatory courses, applying for more scholarships and grants for post-secondary education, eliminating the remedial element of bilingual education, establishing a series of advanced placement courses, and requiring a C average for athletic eligibility before that minimum grade became a districtwide rule.

Goycochea, who gives credit to a largely handpicked staff of teachers and counselors, ticked off the results in the face of demographics where one-third of the parents of students receive some type of government assistance, where a majority of parents do not speak English as their primary language, and where the transiency rate is among the highest of any county school.

Ten years ago, 31 members of the 500-member senior class went on to San Diego State University; last year 66 graduates out of 441 entered SDSU. Five years ago the school had no advanced placement courses; today it has 89 students in advanced placement courses in Spanish, European history, American history, biology, chemistry and bilingual chemistry. A decade ago, hardly any students took the college-required Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT); last year, 262 took it, the highest number among students at the Sweetwater district’s eight high schools.

“All kids this year who maintain a (B+) average or higher are going to get academic letters similar to those you get for athletics,” Goycochea said. In addition, every student with a B average or above has his name posted prominently in the main hallway outside the principal’s office. The school holds scholarship assemblies and posts the names of all graduates who go on to college.

“And we are going to make a big deal out of our National Merit honor as well,” Goycochea said.

The soft-spoken Weston credited “doing well on multiple-choice tests” for her success with the National Merit program.

“I’m proud of it and I think that my (peers) are proud of me,” Weston said. Her achievement has been publicized schoolwide, but she admitted that it’s easier to boast of athletic achievement than similar success academically. “I guess some students don’t want to be known (publicly) as smarter than others,” she said.

Success Publicized

The name of San Diego High’s winner, Brad Decker, was put in the daily school bulletin and read to all 1,360 students.

“I had people coming up in the hall, right and left, and congratulating me,” said Decker, who hopes to study psychology at UC Berkeley next year. “This is a pretty mellow school where if you want to do well, people say, ‘OK, that’s good’ and if you don’t, then people say, ‘OK, then, that’s your life.’

“I’ve been at other schools where you’d get a lot of razzing over (academic achievement), but here, not at all. We’ve got every kind of student here, from the ‘try hard’ ones to those who say, ‘Yeah, I’ll skip biology and go to City College later.’ ”

Decker said that his best classes have been those where teachers went out of their way to motivate students by doing something extra or different.

“I think the teachers play a major role . . . but too many teach by telling the class to be quiet, then reading out of the textbook and then assigning a homework lesson. They don’t explain anything, and by teaching too much by rote, the students lose interest and get bored.

“But (I admit) that it’s harder to teach students if we come in with the attitude of ‘Oh gee, another boring year’ ahead. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s just part of being a student.”

Decker’s principal, Robert Amparan, said the National Merit award to Decker, as well as the recognition of six other students who scored just under the semifinalist cutoff point, reflect the academic improvements that have come only gradually to the multi-ethnic school.

“I’ve been here six years and there were no immediate successes,” said Amparan. He said that results of new programs, such as those in writing and international business and culture, took awhile to become clear.

“The academic recognition is the fruition of (six years) of getting us to a safe environment, of having capable teachers, of not having to worry about behavior in classes, of knowing that supplies will be where they should be, that parents care, and the like.

“I like to point to our National Merit results and say, ‘Here’s what this school can do.’ ”