Shock Troops on the Front Line : Teachers at Hamilton Elementary Fight Turnover Epidemic

Of the 30 fourth-graders who showed up for the first month of Jean Sadeno’s class at Alexander Hamilton Elementary School last summer, half are no longer there.

In Ray Hanshew’s third-grade room, 16 of the original 31 have left.

For first-grade teacher Carol Klein, 20 of the original 30 students are gone. In her class alone, 40 others have arrived since opening day, but only 20 have remained.

Most schools offer orientations for new students once or twice during an academic year. At Hamilton, counselor Chuck Mosburg and Vice Principal Elaine Arm hold them once a week, each session averaging 20 to 25 new arrivals.

Each weekday from 7:30 a.m. on, office aides Shirley Love and Merle Lonstein help a cramped room of parents and guardians fill out papers for new students, work the phones to track down records from schools the students attended before and collect data to send off for students who have left. Nurse Claudia Hildreth gives polio and measles shots daily so new students can meet health requirements.

This is the crowded world of Hamilton Elementary in East San Diego, where more than 75% of the students who begin study at the school leave before the end of the school year. In 1987-88, after an initial fall enrollment of 782, 581 students left and 663 new students arrived by the following June. Of the current 1,100 students, 35% are Latino, 24% are black, 22% are Indochinese and 16% are Caucasian.

The mobility is by far the highest among the San Diego Unified School District’s 107 elementary schools and triple the citywide average of a 25% turnover during the school year.

It’s explained largely by the economics of the highly transient neighborhood surrounding the campus, which two decades ago was an area of stable, single-family homes but now has been transformed into one of low-income apartments with rents within the reach of the working poor or those on welfare.

A tremendous number of residents move from month to month--taking their children with them--as they find better jobs or lose existing jobs or receive an eviction notice because of failure to pay rent when they cannot stretch welfare payments to

cover basic needs. Although the district collects no statistical data on movements, Hamilton administrators say many students attend three or more schools each year as they follow their parents.

Almost 30% of Hamilton’s students live in households receiving public assistance, and a large majority of them live either with only one parent or a relative who also has had little education or poor school experiences or both. The school ranks 307th of 316 countywide in its poverty level.

The neighborhood features more than an occasional drug house, and police actions touch the school’s perimeter almost weekly.

The extraordinary student mobility affects every aspect of life at Hamilton, from the way teachers tailor their lesson plans, to the ability of students to make and keep friendships, to the effort to involve parents in their children’s schooling and even to the effort to maintain the minimum number of students for the sidewalk safety patrol.

Melded Staff

Yet, rather than sowing frustration and burnout among teachers and administrators, the revolving-door existence at Hamilton has melded the diverse staff into a committed band of loyalists and would-be reformers.

Not only do they struggle to reach out to students and parents--with any rewards coming only from hard-to-measure, subtle changes in a child’s performance or attitude--but they are also hard at work under the school’s district’s reform program trying to design a better way of teaching children who come from unstable homes.

In the battle to stem dropouts, to improve reading achievement, to boost student self-esteem and to persuade parents to participate in education--all priorities of districts locally and nationwide--Principal Carrie Peery and her staff serve as shock troops on the front lines.

“Hamilton is our name, and education is our game!” said second-grade teacher Beth Tame with no apology for the seeming corniness of the school motto. “This school is a ray of hope among all that goes on in this neighborhood, and the staff is incredibly dedicated to the kids.”

For teachers, the weekly student movement in and out creates special instructional challenges, especially since an increasing body of research nationally shows that the more a student switches schools, particularly after the third grade, the more his or her chance of graduating from high school goes down.

“So many of these kids are not long enough at any one school to get adjusted,” said counselor Mosburg, a 25-year veteran of city schools who asked for assignment at Hamilton. “It takes a while before a new kid can feel good about a school, to get new friends, and start again . . . and that’s why we have such a large number of kids at-risk (defined as reading a year or more below grade level) and such a large number of kids held back at year’s end.”

Repeat the Lessons

First-grade teacher Ginny Turk said that she will begin reading a story to her class on Monday, intending to cover various oral, written and grammar aspects by week’s end. “But you’ll get seven new students during the week, so you have to reread, review and you end up taking two weeks for a one-week unit,” she said.

First-year teacher James Weinshenker, a 20-year veteran of the Navy, said some students in his fourth-fifth combination class may be doing first-grade work and others are capable of perhaps eighth-grade work. He has four reading groups--most classrooms in the district have three--to meet the wide range of abilities.

“But I realize there might be better alternatives,” said Weinshenker, reflecting on ideas now being researched by a group of Hamilton teachers who want something better for their school. “There is research that indicates teacher expectations are the level to which kids will perform, and I have high expectations for my students.

“But, in the cold light of day, if I have a fifth-grade kid reading at third-grade level, I can’t give him a sixth-grade book. Yet I also can’t keep giving that same student a third-grade book and expect him to remain interested in it.”

Teachers Klein and Lucia Stone said that, although their expectations are no less for Hamilton students than they would be for those in La Jolla or Scripps Ranch, the district’s present lock-step, sequential pacing for reading, math and other basic skills is unrealistic at their school because it assumes that students will stay in one place over the long term.

“We need a curriculum that allows us to have short-term objectives for our kids,” Vice Principal Arm said. “Now, it’s so hard to fit a new kid into a certain place in a reading text . . . perhaps we can get more options (of books) so that there might be one which a kid could use no matter when he arrives and which (would get across) skills for writing, oral work, and other topics as well.”

Resource teacher Barbara Boone tests all new students in reading to give teachers a general idea where their new charges stand, but both she and other teachers prefer to rely more on class observations and student potential rather than standardized scores.

“We put a lot more credence in the opinions of each other than in simply test scores,” Mosburg said.

Potential Cited

Teacher Sharon Dowdy said many children have strong potential, which Hall said stems from their “survivability” despite the troubled family situations.

“I brought goldfish into the classroom and the kids found them really special,” Dowdy said of her third-graders. “They crowded around and wanted to know whose they were. When I told them they were ours, their eyes really lit up. It was the same when we had a speaker on (postage) stamps who brought each of them a little packet to keep.”

Dowdy and other teachers are forced to be creative because of the area’s economics. One of the district’s elementary science experiments calls for students to use a stick of celery in a home experiment with parents. But, because so few can afford even a simple item like celery--or have a parent able to help them with the assignment--Dowdy buys the items and has the students do the lesson at school.

Similarly, teacher Sadeno has been sewing pillows in her spare time, on which the students will draw designs for the school’s first-ever art fair next month. Colleague Joyce Kerchival, although on a three-week break this month between sessions at the year-round school, is spending some of her spare time tracking down people at UC San Diego, San Diego State University and in private industry who will speak to students without charge as part of an enrichment unit.

“I am able to measure results sometimes,” said Kenneth Fox, another 25-year veteran who left Spreckels Elementary in well-to-do University City this year for Hamilton. “Even though so many move on so quickly, you can at times see a subtle shift in their attitude, in their ability to respond and to learn to trust, since we teachers talk so much about these kids being unable to pay attention and being less guarded because they move so much.”

Dowdy also takes pleasure at small gains. “It’s discouraging because they aren’t reflected” on standardized district tests, “but so often the kids we make progress with are not around when the tests are given,” Dowdy said. “In a way, I say damn the scores and, rather, I wish people in the district would come into the class and see that things are going on.”

‘The One Stable Person’

Fox said he carries extra responsibility for his students because of the environment.

“Here, the parents are not visible at all, there is so very little involvement, that I feel these kids need me to be as much a decent human being who is there for them as much as simply being a teacher,” Fox said. “I feel the pressure in not wanting to let them down. . . . They really get resentful if I am out sick, because I am the one stable person in their lives.”

Although teachers understand the realities of the neighborhood environment--only one of four parents of the new children last week in Sadeno’s class had a job--they nevertheless express frustration with the difficulty in succeeding with more than a few of the residents.

“I finally was able to meet with the father of a child after repeated efforts . . . and the father told me he dropped out in the eighth grade,” Turk said, shaking her head at the difficulty of simply persuading parents that daily attendance is critical to a child’s success in school.

Home Visits

Weinshenker makes several personal home visits at night weekly because so many Hamilton households have no working phone. In one positive result last week, a parent asked him--on his seventh visit to the same apartment to ask the mother to help her child succeed--if she could sit in on his class.

“Ma’am, I’ll have the school chorus sing your favorite song, I’ll strew petals in your path,” he said, marveling that she would be the first parent this year to visit his class.

But there’s a darker side to home visits as well. One mother beat her daughter when Weinshenker took the child home to talk with the parent, and another father told his son he would put him in a foster home if the teacher visited about learning problems again.

“Just because the buildings around here aren’t crumbling tenements doesn’t mean there aren’t some places just as mean as South Chicago,” he said.

No Blame Assigned

Hall said, “We know so many moves are symptomatic of a loss of jobs, of economics, of divorce, and we try to let them know clearly we don’t blame them, but simply want them to reach out to us and to other social-service resources.”

The school encourages parents to volunteer to help out at the school, to attend amnesty or English-as-a-second language courses offered twice weekly at night, or just to ask questions about their child’s education. Rosemary Aguirre, a 28-year resident of the area whose children attended Hamilton when it had only 250 students, serves as the full-time parent coordinator, with her own office just off the front entrance to the school.

“I beat the bushes constantly,” Aguirre said. “I have gotten a few to volunteer in the library and computer center, and eight have gone from being volunteers to actual paid aides for the district, which helps them with their income, since so many are single parents as well.”

Aguirre has sponsored workshops on parenting skills and on the effects that constant moves have on a child’s education, attracting as many as 50 parents. “That seems like a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start,” she said.

Pot-Luck Gathering

Aguirre also planned the school’s Thanksgiving pot-luck gathering last November that lured 300 parents and gave her the opportunity to promote other activities. Since she lives in the area, Aguirre uses every opportunity to corner parents when she spots them in neighborhood markets, especially since the children will run up and greet her, giving Aguirre an excuse to meet the often-suspicious parent.

She nevertheless faces disappointments, both in the inability to reach more parents and in losing those parents who do take the plunge and join the school community. “I lose probably 45 to 50 aides a year because they turn over just like the students,” Aguirre said. “But, in these cases, at least I know these parents will be able to handle the transition of their child to the next school . . . and, in two cases that I know of, the parents have been able to get off welfare.”

The involvement of Hamilton teachers never ends. Kerchival gives her home address and a gift to each student who leaves her classroom during the year in the hope that she will hear that the children made it to their next school. But one night recently, she and her husband heard arguing outside their front door, which turned out to be a taxi driver demanding payment from a mother and her three children. They had taken the taxi to the Kerchival house--using the address given one of the children--because they had no other place to stay.

Paid Driver

“We paid the taxi driver and took the family down to St. Vincent de Paul (a homeless shelter),” Kerchival said. “I guess the kids had been out of school for weeks.”

But Kerchival said even that experience could not break her spirit.

“I have a breakfast club for students who have perfect attendance” while they attend Hamilton, she said.

“And I’m looking forward to rewarding them for coming every day by taking everyone to Bob’s Big Boy at the end of the year,” Kerchival said.