Return to School Means Big Test at Gompers : Educators Urge Parents to Help Make Total Magnet Program a Success

Last Thursday night, a two-hour meeting of almost 100 black parents at Gompers Secondary School became part lecture, part pep rally and part Sunday sermon as school administrators tried to galvanize them into helping boost student achievement when classes begin today.

On Friday, the 80 teachers and counselors at Mann Middle School in East San Diego took a bus tour of the diverse neighborhoods where their students live--from tony houses in Alvarado Estates to rundown apartments along Euclid Avenue--and later had a picnic lunch in a nearby park where campus tensions between black and Asian students spilled over into occasional fighting last school year.

Those were among the more creative and unusual preparations for the opening of school today in the San Diego Unified district--the nation’s eighth-largest with 118,000 students--and 16 other county districts, from Oceanside and Poway in North County, to South Bay and San Ysidro along the border.

Countywide, beginning today, more than 382,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students are attending one of 495 schools spread throughout 43 districts.

Nowhere will the education spotlight scrutinize a school more closely this year than at Gompers, the acclaimed math-science-computer magnet facility in Southeast San Diego that has garnered a bushel-full of awards and national recognition for the district.

Gompers becomes a total school magnet this year, meaning that its 400 black resident students will study the same high-powered curriculum along with those white students who voluntarily bus to Gompers as part of the district’s integration plan.

Before the change, only a small number of nonwhite students could join the magnet. The total-school concept is intended to eliminate differences--real and perceived--between the previous magnet and non-magnet curriculums. But it has been highly controversial among some parents and teachers who say the change means unqualified students will face too challenging a course of study and that class lessons will be watered down.

“We have changed Gompers and now we face a real challenge,” Shirley Weber, a school board member and professor of Afro-American studies at San Diego State University, exhorted parents in an emotional, heart-to-heart talk that touched on black culture, student achievement, race relations and politics.

“Those outside are watching and waiting for failure at Gompers, so they can point to Shirley Weber, so they can point to George Frey (assistant schools superintendent), so they can point to (principal) Marie Thornton and say, ‘See, black folks weren’t ready for this curriculum, black folks can’t be leaders and technocrats, but are (meant to be) laborers and hewers of wood.

“I say that Gompers is going to be a beginning, but that means that each person in this room will play a crucial role for their children.”

Tells Parents to Take Charge

Regarding television-watching, Weber answered those parents who say they cannot get children to turn the set off. “Why not? It’s your set, you bought it, you pay the electricity . . . don’t allow conditions (of television or society) to determine the life of your child. Unless your kids study, turn in their homework, achieve and overcome (racial attitudes), I’m wasting my time.”

To frequent audible acknowledgements from her audience, Weber challenged parents to think “books and not gold chains, books and not Reeboks, books rather than boom boxes.”

Thornton pulled no punches in presenting to parents the sobering statistics about black achievement districtwide, in which only a small number of black students--especially black males--achieve grades above “C” during the critical college-preparation years of high school.

“Brains have been distributed to every person but it’s a matter of using them,” said Thornton, dismissing the notion that the key to success is simply promoting self-esteem among youngsters by telling them that they are good persons.

“Success means hard work and that requires some sacrifices,” said Thornton, who gave parents considerable detail on what the school expects in grooming and dress, in having notebooks and writing materials, and in discipline. The school had a special summer camp for 100 incoming seventh-graders in July to boost their study and academic skills in math, computers, English and social studies.

Change in Attitudes

Thornton asked parents to push for changes in attitude, saying that Gompers teachers have been instructed this year not to accept homework papers folded into tiny squares and stuffed into back pockets. Many inner-city male students who complete homework often carry it to school in their pickets to avoid the peer pressure of not being seen carrying books.

“I say that no one ever died from carrying books to school,” Thornton said.

Frey told parents to learn more themselves about black history, about the many black empires in Africa, both ancient and modern, to instill pride in their own children. And he pushed the idea of professional careers, saying that even with the present poor achievement among black students, they still have chances 15 times greater to be an engineer or doctor than the oft-stereotyped dream of a becoming a professional athlete.

“We have opportunities now as a people and let’s use them, let’s believe in ourselves . . . otherwise, by the year 2000, we are going to be in real trouble” as a race.

An Inside Look

At Mann Middle School, principal Maruta Gardner took to heart a suggestion from teachers, working this summer on new curriculum and teaching styles, that staff learn more about where their students come from. The school’s 1,400 students, in sixth- through eighth-grade, are almost evenly divided between white, black, Asian and Latino.

“My teachers thought it would be a good idea to see all the different neighborhoods, since we have such terrific (economic) contrasts at our school and a lot of our people don’t live around here,” Gardner said.

Gardner and her staff have attracted special funding to improve the school’s curriculum, involve parents in more activities and try to address the ethnic tensions. The school has a $200,000 special foundation grant for middle schools, extra money as a district academic enrichment academy, and has been in the forefront of essay-writing programs and class seminars to promote student discussion of political and social ideas.

Teacher Nancy Krouse, a member of the Mann interdisciplinary education team, said that much middle-school research emphasizes parent participation as critical for student achievement.

“So the idea was that we can’t just see the school as an isolated place from the neighborhoods,” Krouse said, calling the Friday tour “an eye-opener” as counselors Eddie Duenez and Ed Leon pointed out rock cocaine houses on certain streets and apartments almost bare of furniture.

“And some of us had never been in (Colina del Sol) park, even though we could see the fights from the balcony at school.”

Computer science teacher Jeffrey Alstot said the tour “hopefully will give us more empathy” regarding Mann students, which would lead to more support for their academic achievement. Alstot said that occasionally teachers run out of energy in dealing with a student, “but maybe because of what we saw today” they will consider more the barriers the student is trying to overcome.

Harriet Kaplan, a resource teacher, cautioned that the process will be a slow one. “Basically, the kids need to be able to identify positively with someone at school . . . and if this (field trip) can help, that’s good.”