Living Laboratory : 6th Graders From Crowded Barrio Schools Bused to North Clairemont

A new school conceived last spring in haste and frustration over student overcrowding in the barrio neighborhood schools of southeast San Diego is set to become an innovative attempt to improve minority achievement as the 1990-91 school year begins today.

Twenty-six hand-picked teachers, aides and their principal plan to turn the controversy over the origins of MacDowell Elementary School into an unusual showcase of promise for more than 400 sixth-graders who will be involuntarily bused from Sherman, Brooklyn and Balboa elementaries to relieve the crush at those schools.

If successful, they will also leap into the front ranks of San Diego city schools efforts to transcend rhetoric and give teachers and principals more responsibility to design instructional programs.

The staff, even before today’s official opening, sponsored an open house for students and parents, enticing more than 150 mothers and fathers last Wednesday to take the 45-minute bus ride with their children from south of downtown to the long-shuttered school in north Clairemont.

Teachers spent long hours on the phones asking the parents to look at MacDowell and see that their anger over forced busing, and apprehension over long bus rides out of the neighborhoods, could be offset by the programs set up for their children. Many took teachers up on their offer, in part because they had received training workshops during the past two years sponsored by the barrio schools to make parents more assertive about, and interested in, education.

One parent who missed the school bus provided by the district took a taxi, despite the $20 fare, so she could be at her son’s school.

Both parents and students came away intrigued, if not altogether sold, on the “Mac-Do-It!” motto for the single-grade school.

“I love it, the campus is clean, the teachers are real warm and down to earth,” parent Roxanna Salcido said of the 3-hour open house. “I had second thoughts about sending (my son Adam) here, because I just didn’t know what he would be coming to.”

Added Omar and Anna Flores: “We weren’t going to come out but the teacher (Peter Brown) showed a real concern and kept calling and calling us, giving us directions if we came by car, and made us realize how important this can be.” Their daughter Barbara will attend MacDowell.

Principal Magdalena Matthews and resource teacher Joe Gama, both alternating between English and Spanish for the heavily Latino audience on Wednesday, emphasized the creativity planned at the refurbished school.

The staff will offer students a middle ground between elementary and junior high school, trying to retain the close-knit, nurturing aspect of the elementary level, while enticing students with extra academic, social and sports programs usually unavailable until seventh grade or later.

Teachers will group themselves in teams of three, with students switching among them during the day for math, social studies and English. Several days a week, students will perform science experiments in a special lab, and receive instruction in physical education, computers, fine arts and music from specialized teachers and aides.

Every afternoon, students will choose from myriad activities including jogging, ceramics, aerobics, drill team, softball, journalism, first-aid, video production, instrumental band and Spanish for non-native speakers as part of extra enrichment. Each person on the MacDowell staff has offered his or her speciality.

For example, principal Matthews will head one of the softball teams while teacher Margaret Joseph will show interested students how to play the kazoo.

“The teaching teams are a wonderful idea that we came up with,” said Sherryl Lawson, one of three on the “Tiger Team,” along with Joseph and Jeanne Seiler. Other teams will work with students making the transition from Spanish to English as well as with immigrant students just beginning their English studies.

“Not only can the teams help us better with kids, they help us communicate better with ourselves,” said Lawson. A teacher having problems with a particular student can talk with colleagues about how to solve them, she said.

“Four days a week, all three of us will meet for 45 minutes to talk about how our teaching is going, and two days a week, we’re going to meet with the kids and go over their studies,” Lawson said.

All the teachers will emphasize journal writing as well as the district’s new literature programs to instill language skills and to learn more about their students.

During the first three months, smaller groups of children within a team will be invited to breakfast with the teachers so that additional barriers can be broken down. In particular, the staff is aware that many students will be uneasy at first about MacDowell because they are being mixed from three separate barrio neighborhoods with different identities.

“Hopefully, we’ll get to know about each other, such as who has a new baby at home, whose family is going on a trip, what new clothes someone has bought, things like that,” Lawson said.

“We are going to be a tight family.”

Teacher Janie Moreno, who came to MacDowell from the San Ysidro school district, said teachers “realize that we’re now doing things that teachers have talked about doing for years.”

Matthews said that everyone associated with the school “is a risk-taker, a go-getter.”

“We want these kids to be prepared for any type of junior-high curriculum and we only have 10 months in which to do it. We haven’t had the luxury of having them for the past four years or so.”

Later, Matthews told parents that the school “doesn’t have all the answers yet” as she appealed to them to sign up for an advisory council to meet with the staff regularly. More than 20 parents filled out cards volunteering for the council.

Matthews is still waiting on the district’s counseling and race/human relations division for promised assistance--a minor irritation to some of the staff--but she credits Assistant Supt. Bernadine Hawthorne and the district’s maintenance division for cooperation in making sure most of the school is ready today.

The plans at MacDowell meet with approval from Susan Chavez, who chairs the Mexican-American Advisory Committee, and schools Supt. Tom Payzant, even though Chavez resents the busing.

“Maggie (Matthews) has created a very positive situation out of this, to have cooperative teaching, new curriculums, parent involvement, since a lot of our Chicano kids have not done well under traditional ways of teaching.”

But Chavez does not want success at MacDowell to mask the continued insistence by Latino groups and parents for new schools to be built in the crowded barrio areas.

“It’s still a bad situation, an unnatural situation, to bus these kids away from their natural community,” said Chavez, a bilingual education consultant at San Diego State University.

“This is supposed to be a temporary solution but I am concerned about the commitment of school board to the Chicano community.”

The plan to use MacDowell came out of district-sponsored studies earlier this year about the overcrowding and the need for new schools in several San Diego neighborhoods, including southeast San Diego, the mid-city area, and Mira Mesa. Because overcrowding is so severe at Brooklyn, Balboa and Sherman schools, school trustees selected MacDowell as an overflow sixth-grade school that could be used for five years or longer.

Some time this fall, the school board will receive from Payzant a list of proposed new schools throughout the district, ranked by priority. Even with the list, actual construction would depend on voter approval of projected new bond proposals.

“I think there will be some very serious consideration to ranking at the top, one or more of the proposed schools in the Southeast area,” Payzant said. “I disagree that there is not a commitment by the district to that area.”

In response to the forced-busing issue, Payzant agrees that the “best of all possibilities is having a combination of wonderful education in a setting that is convenient.”

But in citing existing special academic magnet programs that require long bus rides, Payzant said, “If you have a school cross-town that works educationally and the child is successful at, that is what’s important, not the 45 minutes it takes to get to.”