Beginning Teachers Do Some Learning

She strolled up to her desk wearing a short dress, carrying a partial six-pack of Diet Pepsi in one hand, an overstuffed bag in the other. She plopped everything down and opened her grade book.

“Sorry I’m late, class, but traffic was terrible on the freeway,” she told the assembled students, who were pulling each other’s hair and throwing things around the classroom.

Smacking her gum, she told the class to settle down and started calling the roll.

“Jesus Martinez,” she said, pronouncing the name as if she were saying Jesus Christ. She fumbled a Vietnamese name, and then said, “Oh, these names are too hard. I promise I’ll learn them the first six months of school. For now, just sign in.”

Comic Charade

The first day of school in the Santa Ana Unified School District? Not quite. This was only an enactment, a comic charade of a worst-case scenario, with teachers in the role of unruly students, and home economics teacher Judy Conners playing the part of the clownish instructor.

The demonstration was part of new-teacher training for the district, which expects to have about 300 new teachers when school opens for the fall semester today. New hires will make up about 15% of the district’s teaching staff of 1,900, which represents a greater number of new teachers than any other Orange County district has had to hire at one time.

The two-day workshop, which mixed some serious lectures with the skits, helped teachers prepare for the first day of school. In the Santa Ana district, with its high dropout rates, a high turnover of teachers every year and a reputation for tough, inner-citylike schools, orientation for the new teachers goes beyond passing out grade books and making room assignments.

It also gives district administrators and trustees a forum for setting a new course for the county’s biggest school district.

The orientation was part pep rally, part love feast, part evangelical meeting to help the new teachers understand that there is a new wind blowing in Santa Ana.

“This is a truly dynamic school district,” Assistant Supt. Don Champlin told the assembled new teachers. “You’re in for an E ticket ride. So take a deep breath and buckle your seat belts because this is going to be quite a year.”

Supt. Rudy Castruita, who was appointed to head the 40,000-student district last November, told the teachers that this year they will be a part of a grand turnaround in the district’s performance and in its image.

“Now that you work here, you are going to be second-guessed by teachers in other districts, friends and neighbors,” he told them. “They will say to you, ‘Gee, why do you want to teach in a district with gangs, with crime, full of kids who don’t speak English?’ ”

Many of the new teachers nodded.

No Gangs in Schools

“Our community here may have gangs, no question about it, but you will never see that in your schools because it will endanger your schools and we will not tolerate that,” he said.

“We have 37 different languages here, and you may not understand them all,” he said. “But you’re going to get a lot of love.”

Castruita, who grew up in the barrios of East Los Angeles, is the first Latino superintendent in the Santa Ana Unified District, now the state’s ninth-largest school district. And he uses his background as the grandson of part-time farm laborers as a case study to show how schools can fail ethnic minority students--or help them to succeed.

Castruita told the teachers that when he was about to graduate from high school, having earned a 3.4 grade-point average (in addition to playing football), the school counselor told him that he was not ready for college. She suggested that he get a job in construction with his grandfather.

“And I believed her,” Castruita said.

That night he went home and told his grandfather about her advice. He said his grandfather said to him: “Son, all your life people will be telling you that you can’t make it. I think you can. You can go to college and prove me right, or not go and prove her right.”

So he went to college, and four years later returned to teach at the same high school. During orientation on his first day of school, when he was introduced as one of the new teachers, he saw the same counselor, who was still working at the school.

“And you know what she told me? ‘I always knew you could make it,’ ” he told the teachers.

The moral of that story was the same as the moral of all his personal stories--that students, especially those from ethnic backgrounds, need to be constantly taught more self-esteem if they are going to succeed.

“I want you to be sensitive to what (the students) are,” he said. “You’re going to make an imprint on their lives.

“I want you to be creative and I want you to turn kids on, and I mean that. I want education to be the most important thing to these kids. I want you to encourage them to become more than just laborers.”

At the orientation, the new teachers heard about teacher burn-out, about how to prepare lesson plans and about the pros and cons of belonging to the teachers’ union. But a lot of time was devoted to explaining what types of students they would be teaching.

“Many times it’s a shock for a new teacher from Irvine to come here, where most of our student population is minority,” said Susan Despenas, deputy administrator in the elementary division.

Districtwide, Santa Ana Unified’s students are 78% Latino, 10% Anglo and 10% Asian, with tiny percentages of many other groups. Also, 54% of all students are categorized as limited in English proficiency. Their 37 languages range from Spanish to Vietnamese to Hmong to Korean.

The new teachers heard that bilingual education programs are a fact of life in almost every Santa Ana school, at every grade level. Because a majority of the new teachers have had no training in bilingual education--although several do hold bilingual education certificates--one workshop explained the district’s bilingual education program. And the team leaders emphasized that even for those teachers not directly involved in bilingual teaching, a sensitivity for different cultures is important.

“We want them to become proficient in English because we want them to function in society,” Anita Ford, a bilingual resource teacher at Martin Elementary School, told them. “But more than anything, we want them to build their self-esteem.”

Santa Ana had to hire so many new teachers this year in part because about 100 teachers took advantage of an early retirement package that offered them the incentive to retire early and save the district money. Like many other Orange County school districts, Santa Ana Unified has a large percentage of older teachers.

Also, said Rick Bryan, president of the teachers’ union, the Santa Ana Educators Assn., the district has historically had a larger teacher turnover than other districts.

“It is a lot more work to teach such a diverse population,” Riley said. “I’ve worked in other districts where you don’t have that kind of diversity, and you don’t see that commitment (from teachers) to the degree you see here. There is a total commitment, too, coming from our very progressive and committed board, and that direction is passed down to our administrators, and to us. The sense of cooperation is incredible here.

“That’s really changing the direction here. In the past, we’ve had a real negative image, with the perceived gang problems and dropout problem. But those are all overrated. We’re really changing for the better.”

Said Jim Grissom, an award-winning chemistry teacher at Saddleback High School: “When I came here . . . it just wasn’t the same thing. There was a different philosophy, a different board (of trustees).

‘Far-Reaching Philosophy’

“Now it’s become such a positive place to work. Everybody is working together, from the school board with its visions for the future, to the teachers.

“It’s a much more far-reaching philosophy, one that gives us an ability to change with our changing times, like with the changing demographics, something that is happening all over California.”

This year, district administrators launched a more extensive teacher recruitment effort than ever before, even traveling to other states. One selling point the recruiters mentioned was that the district had settled this summer on a three-year wage and salary contract providing teachers a 7% wage increase for this school year and promising them raises for the next two years of 1 percentage point above the county average.

Administrators also have offered a much more extensive orientation program, which includes bus tours of the city, periodic dinner meetings to discuss various educational topics, and other workshops besides the ones held last week.

Several teachers at the orientation conceded that they had applied at various other school districts, and Santa Ana was not necessarily their first choice. But they said the workshops had helped them to understand what is happening at Santa Ana.

“I think it was much nicer than I expected,” said Kim Burke of Huntington Beach, a new elementary school art teacher who began teaching a month ago at one of Santa Ana’s year-round schools. “The student population is a great group to work with. They are a very nice group of kids, very respectful. . . . Some of my friends don’t understand why I’m coming here. They think we’re going to be bombarded with the problems of drugs and gangs.”

Said Barbara Tanner of Irvine, who will begin teaching at Greenville Fundamental: “I didn’t really understand the bilingual program before this. . . . A lot of my friends thought that I should be able to speak Spanish fluently and that I was taking my life into my own hands.”

On the Cutting Edge

Margo Kester and Veronica Ponce, who will both be bilingual teachers at Fremont Elementary, say the Santa Ana district is on the cutting edge of methodology in teaching limited-English students.

“Some of these kids need so much, not just in academics, but in acculturation in this country,” Kester said. “I have kids who don’t know how to read anything, not in their own language and not in English.”

And, said Ponce, “Our school has report cards in six different languages.”

Alice Cuellar Sierra, who graduated from Santa Ana High School, remembers that she couldn’t wait to leave behind a city and a school district that had a poor image.

“All through college, when I’d say I was from Santa Ana, they’d just look at you and raise their eyebrows,” Sierra said.

One of the worst “snobs” among her college friends, she said, was a woman from Fountain Valley.

“Now she’s working in this district and she loves it,” Sierra said. “It’s just culture shock for a lot of people at first. Now I’m so proud to be back here in Santa Ana.”

BACK TO SCHOOL

School begins on the following days for Orange County public schools:

Today in: Orange Unified; Santa Ana Unified; Fullerton Joint Union High School District; Huntington Beach Union High School District; Buena Park City School District; Fountain Valley School District; Fullerton School District; Huntington Beach City School District; La Habra City School District; Ocean View School District, and Lowell Joint School District.

Wednesday in: Brea-Olinda Unified, and high schools in Tustin Unified.

Thursday in: Capistrano Unified, Garden Grove Unified, Irvine Unified, Laguna Beach Unified, Los Alamitos Unified, Saddleback Valley Unified, and elementary and middle schools in Tustin Unified.

Monday, Sept. 11, in: Placentia Unified; Newport-Mesa Unified; Anaheim Union High School District; Anaheim City School District; Centralia School District; Cypress School District; Magnolia School District; Savanna School District, and Westminster School District.

Source: Individual school districts