Board Opens School to Citywide Enrollment : Education: District officials relax rules about race or residence at Lincoln High School to boost student body.

To increase enrollment, the San Diego Unified School District board voted unanimously Tuesday to allow a magnet high school in Southeast San Diego to open enrollment to all students in the district, regardless of ethnicity or where they live.

Lincoln Preparatory High School, 150 S. 49th St., with 980 students, is one of 15 magnet high schools in the district and is the only comprehensive high school in the district with fewer than 1,000 students.

The one-year pilot project would make Lincoln the only school in the county with such an enrollment program. Traditionally, magnet schools are designed to attract either minority or white students to achieve racial balance.

Lincoln’s inability to attract students is, in part, the result of the success of a neighboring magnet program, Gompers Secondary School, a seventh- to 12th-grade institution with an emphasis on math, sciences and computers that has the same attendance boundaries as Lincoln.

“We are encouraging students who are at Gompers Secondary School to remain at Gompers and participate in the magnet program there,” said Albert Cook, assistant superintendent in the area.

However, Gompers feeds into Lincoln, and more students have opted to remain at Gompers after the eighth grade, keeping Lincoln’s enrollment from growing. Lincoln has no other feeder junior high schools or middle schools, and now it is scrambling to get not just white students, but any students.

Lincoln’s relaxed enrollment requirements are designed to attract 50 to 100 more students from the outlying areas to maintain current course offerings, Cook said.

Lincoln offers a strong curriculum in the humanities and a pre-medical and bio-medical research curriculum, the only one of its kind in the county. Resources at Lincoln include rooms set up as hospital facilities, training in emergency room skills and laboratory testing.

Magnet programs began 13 years ago after a court ordered the school district to integrate schools such as Lincoln where ethnic minority students made up almost 100% of the student body.

In 1977, Lincoln was one of 20 schools in the district where more than 90% of the students were from minorities. Now, Lincoln is one of eight schools with more than 90% minority students. Neighboring Gompers, however, has a minority population of less than 80%.

Cook said opening up the enrollment is preferred to the option of closing the school and leaving the community without a comprehensive high school.

“We have to decide whether or not we want to provide a comprehensive school in that community or whether we want to stick to our past rules about not allowing minority students from the outside coming in and really not providing a school that is serving anyone,” Cook said.

He added that Lincoln is needed because Gompers has a specialized magnet program in math, sciences and computers and is not equipped to offer all the classes of a comprehensive high school.

“We certainly don’t want to force all those kids who live in that neighborhood into a math or science program. We need to have a comprehensive high school,” Cook said.

District magnet program officials said community perception of Lincoln Preparatory High School and the Southeast neighborhood discourage white parents from enrolling their children there.

“Parents get real excited when I tell them about the program, but when I mention where the school is and encourage them to go visit the campus, I get statements like, ‘I don’t want my children to go to school in that part of town,’ ” said Pat Trandal, a magnet resource teacher for the district.

But Cook said the community is not solely responsible for Lincoln’s inability to attract white students.

“We do a good job of attracting students to other Southeast schools, so you can’t say it’s just Southeast,” Cook said, adding, however, that he doesn’t know what is discouraging white students from Lincoln, even though it is the only school in the district with a pre-medical studies curriculum.

“People choose schools for the same reason that they choose a lot of things. I would be kidding you if I were to say that race does not have a part in it. It certainly does. You’d think the program would be attractive, but it has not drawn the numbers that we had hoped.”

Janet Garbosky, magnet coordinator for the district, agrees that community perception of the Southeast area has hurt Lincoln’s program, but believes that recruiting efforts and just getting parents to visit the campus would help increase enrollment greatly.

“If parents stepped into one of our campuses, they would see a safe and serene haven for education,” Garbosky said. “There would be no way to say no.”

Trandal said that, although the magnet program failed to attract white students to Lincoln, it has raised test scores and the educational level of the school. All students are required to take three years of foreign language, math and social sciences, and at least two years of natural science.