Magnet Schools Are Beating Bushes for Ethnic Balance

Sally Bennett has an unusual, and tough, selling job. Her pitch is not for stereos or cars or Tupperware, but for getting white children to attend magnet education programs in minority areas of the San Diego school district.

During the past month, Bennett has set up information tables at the Community Concourse, Horton Plaza, San Diego Gas & Electric Co. headquarters, the County Administration Center and the Police Department, touting the new business magnet curriculum at Sherman Elementary School that begins this summer.

The business/government studies magnet, together with free after-school day care, is designed to tempt suburban parents who commute to downtown offices and government agencies to send their children to nearby Sherman and help integrate the school, which is 95% minority, under the district’s voluntary integration program.

Bennett, the magnet’s special-resource teacher, spent long hours at the tables with no takers, but did generate some interest among the few people who stopped long enough to pick up brochures. She acknowledged that hopes for an initial goal of 20 white students for the new school year--the long-term goal is 100--may be hard to fulfill.

More than 40 resource teachers in positions similar to Bennett’s have beaten the bushes this spring for their own magnet programs in predominantly white areas, at coffee klatches in Bird Rock and libraries in Tierrasanta and University City. The programs range from music to art to Spanish language immersion, to science to math to regular curricula that feature unusual teaching philosophies.

The efforts are a major annual drive to sustain the heart of the 10-year-old integration program, which has set up special curricula in predominantly minority schools to draw white children onto school buses for cross-town rides of up to an hour.

Some schools with offerings not available elsewhere in the district have waiting lists, such as the theatrical arts magnet at Valencia Park Elementary, the music magnet at Baker Elementary, or the science magnet at Encanto Elementary. They appear to have an easier time attracting white students than magnets with enriched curriculums that nevertheless may be seen as no more rigorous than those at mostly white schools in La Jolla or Point Loma.

In addition, the teacher-marketers from the inner-city schools must persuade parents that their campuses are secure and offer safe learning environments, and that drug sales and other violence in Southeast San Diego--to the extent they do occur--do not affect the school.

In almost all cases, the parents who end up sending their children are convinced of the potential academic gains first and foremost, with support for integration and socialization secondary.

Only Test Is Ethnicity

There are no intellectual tests for magnet eligibility; the only requirement is that students meet ethnic quotas.

“The whole recruitment thing is tough,” said Patricia Harris, a former magnet coordinator for the district and now a vice principal at Lincoln High School, which features specialized courses in humanities, foreign languages and the health professions.

“There has to be a clear, clear hook for the parents . . . that they can perceive that their kids will be getting an education different enough from the neighborhood school.”

Effective marketing is often as important as the program itself, according to Michael Lazard, another former coordinator who, as new vice principal at Kennedy Elementary, is struggling to enhance the popularity of the San Diego State University lab magnet at his school.

“It really helps to have something specific you can demonstrate in a videotape so that parents will understand exactly what goes on in a program,” Lazard said. “You need a little bit of ‘flash.’ ”

George Frey, the assistant superintendent who oversees integration programs, said success of a particular magnet depends in large part on how well it reflects parents’ thinking about education.

Liked the Discipline

“When we had a fundamental magnet at Webster (with a strict code of discipline and heavy emphasis on basic skills), we found most of the (white) kids were coming from the Murphy Canyon area with all of its military housing,” Frey said. “And we attributed that to the fact that military people reacted favorably to the word fundamental itself.

“And word of mouth from parent to parent is a major way of building a program.”

By the same token, if something negative occurs at a school or in its neighborhood--such as the present conflict among teachers and administrators at the science-math-computer magnet at Gompers Secondary School--the program can quickly deteriorate, Frey said.

About 4,300 white students are participating in magnet programs at both elementary and secondary levels this year, down about 300 from last year. There are 2,500 in elementary magnets and 1,800 in junior- and senior-high programs, with an overall integration percentage of 28% white and 72% non-white at the magnet schools. Total enrollment districtwide is 43% white and 57% minority.

Almost all of the elementary programs today are total-school magnets; that is, all resident students at the schools receive the special curriculum regardless of the number of students who are bused in.

With few exceptions, the secondary programs are more specialized schools-within-a-school, with limits on participation by resident students depending on the number needed to roughly balance the number of white students coming from outside the neighborhood.

Resulted From Court Order

The magnet program was set up after a 1977 court order requiring integration in the San Diego Unified School District. Administrators have emphasized attracting white students to minority areas through magnet offerings.

(The magnet program differs from the voluntary busing program VEEP, under which any student can attend a cross-town school that is paired with his neighborhood facility if the move improves integration. Under VEEP, many minority students attend predominantly white schools, but only about half a dozen white students are participating in the other direction this year. No special curriculum offerings are associated with VEEP.)

Many of the first magnets after the 1977 court order were school-within-a-school magnets, at both the elementary and secondary levels. Because originally not all resident students in a school could participate, such programs were controversial among neighborhood parents--predominantly minority--who felt that bused students were receiving more benefits than their own children, who had been ethnically isolated for years.

The district at first attempted to compensate by setting up a few “mirror” magnets at mostly white schools to which only minority students could be bused from other areas. For example, both Chollas Elementary in Southeast San Diego and Grant Elementary in upscale Mission Hills feature special science offerings.

Today, the district has total-school magnets at every elementary school originally identified as minority-isolated, and administrators say that every minority child has a chance to attend some type of specialized program, no matter the number of white participants.

But not every magnet is seen as equally attractive by white parents.

Different Emphases

The resource teachers at Horton, King and Kennedy elementaries combine to make joint presentations each spring in the University City and Tierrasanta areas. All three schools have different programs, and all struggle to find more white children.

The three teachers labored mightily to stir interest among six parents who showed up at an evening meeting last month at the University City library, even though two parents were Asian-Americans whose children would have almost no chance of being permitted to attend. A minority student is not eligible to attend a magnet unless he or she would improve the white/non-white percentage at the receiving school and not hurt the percentage at the neighborhood school.

“We all have different emphases,” Andree Carroll of Kennedy said, explaining her school’s link with SDSU, King’s emphasis on an international studies program and Horton’s accelerated-learning program using music and fine arts in all classrooms.

Curie, the elementary school in University City, ranks No. 1 in achievement among all 107 elementary schools citywide, adding to the difficulty of selling area residents on busing their children.

Most of the questions from parents went to Mary Waldron of Horton about the accelerated-learning program. Later, Frey explained in an interview that often the name alone of a magnet can be a strong selling point.

“Sometimes it is an illusion in that, if you really analyze the magnet, there is nothing going on that is really any different from any school,” he said. “And, in some cases, parents may have caught on to that, and we find ourselves losing enrollment.”

Frey has changed magnet emphases in several schools as popularity waned, in particular reducing the number of fundamental magnets from five to one.

King, Horton and Kennedy are all in areas considered dangerous by many San Diegans.

“I want a real frank answer,” asked one parent at the library. “Does integration work?”

All three teachers said that racial incidents between students are few and far between and--perhaps more to the question’s intent--that buses pull up to front entrances and all students are met and counted at the door by the resource specialists. And they stressed that the campuses have on-site security personnel.

“I tell parents straight out that we are in a rough neighborhood but that the things do not carry over into the schools,” Kathy Phillips of King said. “Safety is the one issue you have to address and satisfy.”

In general, more-established magnets are easier to market, assuming no racial friction or other incidents create negative publicity, Frey said.

“They usually have dedicated, hard-working teachers for a number of years, and those magnets become almost self-perpetuating and they don’t have to do a lot of salesmanship,” he said. “The population stays pretty much constant year after year.”

Two magnets at schools in the Paradise Hills area--a fine-arts emphasis at Zamorano and a program at Bethune utilizing a special theory of learning--have waiting lists despite being only 2 years old.

“In these cases, while they are in the Southeast area, they are in new neighborhoods and are brand-new schools,” said Jean Brown, a magnet specialist in Frey’s office.

Bethune’s resource teacher, Robert Morgenstein, is not shy about touting his well-equipped campus.

“I feel like I died and went to heaven when I first saw it,” he said at a presentation at Mira Mesa High while flashing slides of new classrooms and computer equipment on a screen.

At two specialized and very popular schools, almost the entire student body--white and non-white--is recruited from outside the area as a way to keep the school open because resident students are few. The individual-instruction magnets at Benchley-Weinberger in San Carlos and Fremont in Old Town are so popular that parents put their children on waiting lists as early as 1 year of age.

“Because we wouldn’t be open otherwise, we are able to bring in students of all ethnicities to be as close to 50-50 as we can,” teacher Philip Yoon said.

“We don’t do any recruiting, because we have a perpetual waiting list of kids of all ethnic groups,” he said.

For the other magnets, however, the battle for white students remains difficult.

“We are, in some sense, in competition with each other because we are all trying to affect the ethnic balance in our schools,” said Kennedy Elementary’s Lazard.

“But we know that there are thousands of students still out there who are eligible to participate. We just have to continue to try and get the word out.”