San Diego School to Test ‘Preventive Government’ : Education: Gov. Pete Wilson believes that poor children and their families will benefit if social services are offered along with reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.

A severely overcrowded elementary school in the low-income City Heights neighborhood here soon will become a testing ground for Gov. Pete Wilson’s belief that both poor children and their families will benefit if a variety of social services are made available to them at school.

In March, after two years of planning, city, county and school officials expect to transform the Alexander Hamilton Elementary School into a new kind of combined school and social service agency. Along with traditional schooling for children, their families will be able to get most of what they need at the school: health care, job training, welfare payments, English-as-a-second-language classes, public housing referrals and much more.

If the San Diego experiment is successful, the Wilson Administration would like to see similar programs started statewide. It has set aside $20 million in its proposed 1991-92 budget for this purpose.

At Hamilton, 88% of the pupils are from racial minorities, about half of the 1,350 pupils have limited proficiency in English and almost one-third attend the kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school for fewer than 60 days before moving to a new neighborhood and a new school.

Scores are low. Last year, California Assessment Program scores for Hamilton third-graders were well below the San Diego County average in reading, writing and math.

Advocates of the combined schools-social services concept say this approach will create a better learning climate for poor children and eventually scores will climb.

The San Diego approach, called “New Beginnings,” is in line with the “preventive government” message Wilson has been preaching.

The new governor first talked about the school concept during his campaign against Democrat Dianne Feinstein. The proposal not only enabled him to blunt Feinstein’s image as an education advocate, but helped Wilson strengthen ties to the state’s education Establishment, often at odds with his predecessor, Republican George Deukmejian.

Although the governor’s proposed 1991-92 budget trims overall education spending by $2 billion, Wilson has set aside $100 million for new child development and education programs, including the $20 million to encourage other cities and school districts to follow San Diego’s lead.

“The condition of kids has declined so severely that schools can’t do it alone,” said Maureen DiMarco, secretary for child development and education in the Wilson Cabinet. “You can’t cure drug addiction with a better history textbook.”

California’s new interest, and San Diego’s “New Beginnings” effort, are part of a “strong national movement to bring about more collaboration between schools and other public agencies,” said Michael Kirst, professor of education at Stanford University.

Kirst described the existing system as “like shopping in ‘mom and pop’ stores instead of a supermarket. You go here for one service, someplace else for another. The children bounce from one program to another like a pinball machine. There isn’t much cooperation among the agencies. It’s expensive and inefficient.”

The Hamilton concept emerged as city and county leaders--faced with a social services budget that had soared 50% in three years--began to search for ways to improve services and cut costs.

“The numbers kept going up, but we realized we were just not meeting the needs of the people in this population,” said Richard W. (Jake) Jacobsen, director of the county Department of Social Services.

San Diego’s national reputation as a sun-drenched resort and military city has another side.

“People struggle to survive without proper shelter, shoes and clothing,” a recent study of poverty and homelessness in the state’s second-largest city found. “Malnourished children look for food in restaurant and park trash cans. At the base of a palm tree, surrounded by torn cardboard and a rusting shopping cart, a homeless person sets up residence.”

After a series of meetings between top education and city officials, a decision was made to launch an interagency attack on poverty and low educational achievement. The New Beginnings project was born in the summer of 1988.

Hamilton was chosen after an additional yearlong study because it is a “port of entry” school, with a heavy concentration of Latino and Indochinese students, many of whom speak little or no English.

Hamilton has the highest mobility rate of any school in San Diego. In 1987-88, about 28% of its pupils were at the school for less than 60 days; only about 40% were enrolled for the full year.

When Principal Carrie Peery arrived five years ago, Hamilton had 750 students, on a traditional school calendar. Now it has about 1,350 attending year-round classes.

“Many of the families live in poverty and many are dysfunctional,” Peery said. “Some of the children suffer from abuse and neglect. Many of the families don’t know how to access services. They just struggle along, trying to make it on their own in this high-tech city.”

If New Beginnings works, at least some of these problems should be alleviated, officials believe. “These families trust the schools when they don’t trust other agencies,” Peery said. “They’ll come to us. They’ll talk to us.”

At the school, renamed the Hamilton Academic Achievement Academy, a staff of 60 classroom teachers, specialists and administrators will teach basic educational skills, with emphasis on mastery of the English language.

The school has been divided into four smaller units specializing in such broad topics as “creative expression” or “science in a socially responsible world.”

Peery said schoolwide decisions are made through a “shared decision-making process” that includes herself, two teachers from each of the four units, a parent and a member of the school’s non-teaching staff.

The most unusual part of Hamilton will be the new family resource center to be located in three portable classrooms in the play area.

There, the families of Hamilton children can talk to family-service advocates who will be prepared to help with such problems as health needs, job training and gang prevention.

On a recent afternoon, Raul Garcia, who holds a similar job at O’Farrell Middle School, described his work as he tried to learn more details from a young male student about a recent drive-by shooting in the neighborhood.

Garcia and three other family advocates--who replaced school counselors--usually have 30 to 35 ongoing cases. “Some of them are pretty easy,” he said. Others, such as the drive-by shooting, or trying to find a 13-year-old girl who was molested and then kidnaped by her stepfather, “are so difficult they take quite a bit of time,” Garcia added.

Because the children at Hamilton Elementary are younger, the problems may be less dire. Many families need dental and health care, information about affordable housing, access to bilingual education or amnesty classes (these will be offered by the community college district) and many other services.

Some of these--health care, for instance--will be offered at the family resource center. Others will be provided by an “extended team” of social-service specialists in such fields as housing, job training and child abuse. The five family-service advocates working in the resource center are responsible for diagnosing the problem and seeking help from the proper agencies. For now, these services are being paid for by the responsible agencies, but eventually the center will have to pay the costs on its own.

At first, the resource center will be available only to families of Hamilton children. Eventually, it will serve all in the school attendance area.

The hope is that children who do not have to grow up in an atmosphere of crisis will have more successful school careers and avoid drug addiction and crime.

The experiment faces many unresolved questions.

Will the separate bureaucracies that run the education, social service and community college aspects of the program cling to their turf and refuse to cooperate? Can people trained in very different fields, such as education or social work or health care, learn to work together for the common good?

Will the confidentiality requirements of many public agencies make interagency cooperation difficult, if not impossible? Can federal and state regulations be changed so that the problems of poor people are managed as a package and not as separate, frequently clashing, parts?

Money will be a constant problem. So far, foundations have supported much of the effort in San Diego. But if the integrated services approach is to move from the pilot-project stage to bring about change in an entire system, permanent financing must be found.

Jackie Goldberg, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said, “The concept of combining schools and social services is right on the money, but I have a serious worry that we might end up spending less on the combined services than we would have spent on them separately.”

San Diego School Supt. Thomas W. Payzant warned that the integrated approach will cost more at first because, if services are improved, more people will use them.

“You have to spend some money now in order to save money later on,” Payzant said. “But is it worth it to save these children and keep them out of jail or drug programs or worse? You bet it is.”