Answer to Gompers School Problems Evades Board

San Diego city schools trustees remain at a loss over how to move the troubled Gompers Secondary School toward stability.

There was no clear consensus among the five board members Tuesday about how to respond to the final report from a district-appointed community-school committee that listed severe discipline problems, high teacher turnover, a collapsing integration program and haphazard curriculum improvements, despite a much-publicized renewal plan put into effect two years ago.

Trustees Kay Davis and Jim Roache called for some action by schools Supt. Tom Payzant to institute consistent student discipline, which the report described as nearly out of control at times in the junior-high portion of the seventh-through-12th grade math-science-computer magnet school in Southeast San Diego.

“If true, there is no way to educate any child without having stability and law-abiding (procedures) on any school campus,” Roache said.

Trustee Shirley Weber debated colleague Ann Armstrong over whether the 53% drop in the number of white students choosing to be bused voluntarily to Gompers for the magnet program represents a severe blow to the district’s integration program.

Although Armstrong called the statistics disappointing, Weber asserted that the school was never really integrated because the white students were largely segregated in magnet classes that most of the largely nonwhite neighborhood students did not share. The renewal plan was set up to address demands of neighborhood parents that their children be given equal access to the high-powered curriculum.

Weber also called for “less microscopic examination” of every problem at Gompers, saying that no school would shine if put under similar scrutiny. But Davis responded that, “whether under a microscope or not, we’ve lost the interest of a lot of (whites) and we’ve got to work now on anchoring down the decorum” of the junior high students.

Franklin Orfield, retired Superior Court judge who chaired the committee, asked trustees to take the criticisms seriously, but he also praised principal Marie Thornton, who has been severely attacked by some Gompers teachers and parents for a lack of leadership and vision. “It’s time to affirm complete confidence in Mrs. Thornton,” Orfield said, adding his belief that the media have exaggerated Thornton’s role in Gompers’ problems.

But parent Tom Kaye, who chaired one of the subcommittees, said he probably would transfer his daughter from Gompers. “There is extreme frustration that things haven’t stabilized . . . and it’s hard for me to say that things have even bottomed out and are going to get better.”

Payzant promised a reply to the committee report in September.