Two Schools to Begin Innovative Programs

Ambitious new academic programs incorporating educational innovations discussed at national and local levels were presented to San Diego city schools trustees Tuesday for implementation this fall at two schools.

A major new language-arts magnet program featuring daily computer instruction for all students, whether fluent or not in English, will be established at Baker Elementary School in Southeast San Diego. The existing music magnet curriculum will be moved from Baker to Oak Park Elementary because district administrators believe that low-performing Baker students can profit much more from focused academics stressing integrated reading and writing programs.

Baker principal Maria Garcia said that much of the new magnet program will be based on instructional models carried out in the South Bay Union Elementary School District in Imperial Beach and Nestor, where rigorous attention to individual student performance has resulted in high standardized achievement test scores. Garcia said close pupil monitoring will be a key feature of the Baker magnet, in which she and other administrators will spend each morning in classrooms rather than in meetings or on non-student activities.

The Baker school staff also plans to build a partnership with parents, along the lines of a social-service program begun in New Haven, Conn., to arrange help for family- or health-related problems, pervasive in many low-income areas, that can affect academic performance.

Trustees also heard about the “dream team” plans of the teachers reopening O’Farrell Junior High in Southeast San Diego--after a nine-year hiatus--to expose all students to a single advanced integrated academic curriculum. The core of teachers, after more than a year of planning, assumes that all students can benefit from high expectations and the most rigorous material in history, math and English, no matter their background and the different speeds at which they learn.

The O’Farrell model also will include a social-service component, in which teachers work with parents and community agencies, similar to the one planned for Baker. And both schools will attempt to plow new ground with the district’s restructuring program by making most, if not all, of their decisions about curriculum, budgets and administration through collaboration of teachers and parents rather than through the principal alone.

“This is all very ambitious,” trustee Susan Davis told Garcia and O’Farrell Principal Robert Stein.

Supt. Tom Payzant added, “It’s a big leap from the rhetoric stage to the action stage,” noting that many details in both plans have yet to be worked out.

The new programs, in addition to other magnet- and integration-related changes, will cost $1.33 million for 1990-91. Because of an expected tight state financial picture, Payzant also proposed $1.3 million in cuts in existing magnet and integration programs for next year to balance the picture.

A magnet school is one with special academic programs designed to help not only its predominantly nonwhite resident students but to attract white students from other areas.