School Becomes a Magnet for Controversy : Principal at Gompers Once Again Comes Under Fire From Teachers and Parents

A crisis with serious educational and racial overtones has erupted at Gompers Secondary School in Southeast San Diego.

The problems threaten to derail both the school’s special math-science-computer magnet program, the city’s best, and efforts to improve regular programs at the inner-city junior high, which is on the same campus.

More than 40% of the faculty--38 of 82 teachers--have begun steps to transfer from the school over issues involving both curriculum and conflict with Marie Thornton, the school’s principal. Most of the teachers involved come from the math, science and computer-science departments responsible for running the award-winning magnet, which draws high-powered students from seventh to 12th grades from throughout the city.

A special meeting of schools Supt. Tom Payzant, school board President Dorothy Smith and Gompers parents will be held tonight after the school’s open house.

Many parents of students--mostly white--who bus into the predominantly minority neighborhood are signing a petition asking the Board of Education to remove Thornton, a black woman, as principal. They back teachers who say Thornton’s management style over the last two years has exacerbated longstanding problems at the school, and say they will send their children elsewhere if demands are not met.

Strong Support

Thornton, with strong support from district administrators, has required all magnet high-school teachers to teach at least one class at the non-magnet junior high level. The controversial premise is that the largely minority neighborhood students deserve exposure to teachers with reputations for motivating their students, and that the result will be stronger academic performances for non-magnet children as well.

Black parents from the Southeast have banded together to protest the petition and to support Thornton, believing the issue is one of racial prejudice. The perception of prejudice has plagued Gompers ever since the district established the magnet there in 1978 as its first attempt to lure white students to minority areas under a voluntary integration program featuring special curriculum.

Neighborhood parents say the high-school teachers do not want to share their expertise with the minority community, a charge that

the teachers strongly deny. The teachers point out that the magnet program is divided almost evenly between white and non-white students.

Payzant will tell tonight’s meeting that neither he nor the board will allow the magnet program to be held hostage to demands for Thornton’s removal. Acknowledging that problems do exist at Gompers, Payzant told The Times that Thornton is capable of running a strong program for all students and will not be removed.

“It’s too easy to target the principal as a scapegoat,” Payzant said. “I’m not going to buy that.”

Payzant said the district is willing to compromise on all issues raised by teachers and parents if personalities are put aside. But he and Smith vowed to find new teachers for the magnet to replace those who choose to leave, though conceding that continued turmoil could sour many parents on sending their children voluntarily to Gompers and could set back the program.

The crisis comes despite intense efforts by Thornton and district administrators this year to put past problems behind. Instead, the decade-old issue of how to blend benefits of the magnet program with the overall school population, instead of being solved, has been joined with conflict over the management style of Thornton, a strong but controversial district veteran.

The five-grade magnet program has 866 students, divided almost evenly between white and minority students, two-thirds bused in, one-third from the neighborhood. The regular seventh grade-eighth grade neighborhood junior high has 506 students, all but 12 from ethnic minorities.

The issue of cross-teaching--of requiring high-school teachers to teach in the junior high as well--is at the heart of the conflict. The push for cross-teaching comes from Payzant and top administrators, who believe teachers at the Gompers magnet should have a commitment to the entire school.

More Preparation

Teachers in non-science subjects at Gompers have been cross-teaching for several years now, although some only grudgingly. But the magnet teachers only began this year, and those teachers say that the additional preparation required is burdensome when they already teach two magnet courses, write their own specialized curriculum and spend considerable time on after-school activities and contests unique to the magnet.

Jay Rubin is a high-school chemistry and advanced chemistry teacher who now also teaches an eighth-grade, non-magnet general science course heavy on biology.

“I don’t think I was the best choice for this,” Rubin said. “No doubt I can spend a considerable amount of time to educate myself and teach that course, but I already spend a tremendous amount of time professionally in order to teach chemistry.”

Rubin criticized an assumption behind the plan: that the existing junior-high teachers are not as capable as those at the senior-high level.

“There is also a strong (national) education view today that says middle-school kids need very special attention at their age, and to bring in a high-school teacher to do one class a day is not going to do that kid much good,” Rubin said.

Greg Volger, chairman of the computer science department, said that some teachers “have worked themselves to the high-school level of kids and don’t want the squirrelly little kids with a junior high mentality, whether black or white, or whether from Southeast or north city.

Motivation Needed

“No teachers in San Diego Unified are required to cross-teach the way we are,” Volger said.

Gompers is the district’s only seventh- through 12th-grade school.

Volger said also that cross-teaching will not solve the problems of many resident junior-high students who read below grade level and have other academic shortcomings because of poor elementary-school preparation or unstable home environments.

Science teacher Toni Wisehart said extra reading teachers and other special resources, including better counseling, could do more to motivate and raise performance levels of resident, non-magnet students.

“A seventh-grader comes in with a third-grade reading level and we’re supposed to give them two years of history in one year and start them off with algebra,” Wisehart said. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”

Although cross-teaching at Gompers preceded Principal Thornton’s arrival two years ago, teachers claim that she has made the situation worse by refusing to modify or slow the process. Many science teachers learned of their junior-high assignments this school year only days before the fall semester began, forcing them to make last-minute curriculum preparations in order to teach a coherent course. That has left some teachers bitter.

“We would like some exceptions, for the administration to recognize that some people just won’t be teaching at their best,” Wisehart said. “Just as some teachers do like teaching at both levels and have done so voluntarily.

“But we have ended up beating our heads against the wall. . . . She will not communicate with us, we can never find her or get an appointment, and frankly, most of us believe she knows what she wants and is not going to think any differently.

“None of us would really like to see the magnet destroyed, and we’ve tried to keep (the conflict) quiet, but we’ve had it. We’ve tried hard to make Gompers science No. 1 in the U.S. . . . and things keep being taken away, diluted, fragmented.”

Racism Denied

Rubin warned against alarmist rhetoric, but said teacher morale is low “because other recommendations we’ve made for improving the junior high haven’t been tried with much fervor, and cross-teaching is being done in such a rigid way as to rob individual teachers of dignity and leave them no recourse.

“People don’t respond kindly to such absolutes.”

Added Rubin: “Those of us committed to continued excellence at the high-school level are feeling very stressed in being made responsible for the junior high as well.”

The teachers denied racism plays any role in their thinking. “Almost 60% of the magnet population is minority,” Wisehart said. “If we did not like teaching (non-white) kids, we wouldn’t be at Gompers. . . . But the community is so conditioned to see things as racial that it does not listen.”

Thornton was not available for comment Tuesday. But in January she said that Gompers has been known for an “image of a school that is all brains. We want an image that all kids here get a good education.”

Two-dozen prominent black parents told Payzant at a meeting last Saturday that they see the pressure on Thornton as substantially racially based. They compared it to complaints several years ago by white parents at Serra High School that led to Thornton’s transfer as Serra principal to Gompers. At a meeting of magnet parents last week, information about Thornton’s Serra troubles was passed around to those in attendance.

One black parent said, “These teachers at Gompers have an attitude problem toward our kids, they’re not putting forth their best effort, and therefore the junior-high kids are not doing as well as the magnet kids.”

School activist Walter Kudumu traced a large part of the problem to the fact that magnet teachers who first came to Gompers “had an understanding that they didn’t need to teach minority or resident kids.”

“Black parents have gone out of their way to work with these teachers,” he said, yet there are still teachers who do not agree on district goals for the entire school.

An ‘Easy Target’

Board President Smith, who represents the Gompers area, said Thornton is an “easy target” for teachers and parents, in the wake of the Serra experience.

“But, at bottom, what we have here are teachers who are saying that, because they had had control of the magnet, either we give them what they want or they’ll pull out and tell parents the magnet is going down.

“The issues don’t have anything to do with the principal but, in order to force the issue, they are using her and her past conflicts to get their way.

“The district can’t live under a threat.”

Payzant believes compromise is possible, but only if all sides accept the continued presence of Thornton.

“I think we can, however, do a better job in designing and implementing for next year,” Payzant said of cross-teaching.