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There’s Room for Everyone

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Compton school officials and California State University are at odds over the location of a math and science high school that would especially serve minority students. As too often happens when adults cannot agree, it is the youngsters who may be hurt.

At issue is the university’s plan to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District to operate the school on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus. Cal State Chancellor Ann Reynolds hoped the school, similar to the university-backed high school for the arts at Cal State Los Angeles, would draw promising students from Watts. The Los Angeles Board of Education has supported the plan, which has been in the works since 1986.

Now Compton school officials have complained that the school, which would be within their boundaries, would drain off their brightest students. Compton has just opened its own special science and math program at Dominguez High School near the Cal State campus. Because of this complaint, the Los Angeles school board has temporarily suspended its support. The challenge comes just before the April 13 deadline to apply for state planning money for the Cal State school, which the university hoped to open next fall.

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Reynolds and other Cal State officials contend that their program would draw only two or three students from each school that chooses to participate. Reynolds adds that Cal State wants its school to reach beyond the first tier of bright students who have the best chance of succeeding in college and instead find those who need more help and motivation. That would increase the pool of future minority scientists.

Reynolds, a biologist herself, has taken a special interest in bringing more women, minorities and people with handicaps into science and technology and co-chaired a federal task force with that goal. It reported last fall that America’s leadership in those fields cannot be sustained unless schools do more to interest and prepare minority students in science and math. “Our most experienced scientists and engineers, recruited after Sputnik, will be retiring in the 1990s,” the report said. Meanwhile, “the educational pipeline--from prekindergarten through the Ph.D.--is failing to produce the scientifically literate and mathematically capable workers needed to meet future demand,” especially workers who are black or Latino.

Of course, Compton has a responsibility to protect its own programs. Cal State clearly should have better anticipated Compton’s fears and worked to head them off. The university may have to consider moving its program to the campus of an existing Los Angeles high school to avoid this turf war. But that would defeat the purpose of bringing students to a special place with better laboratory equipment and more interaction with university faculty. Better to resolve the dispute with the understanding that there are more than enough students that could benefit from better science and math education and get on with the task at hand.

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