Parent-Principal Antipathy Boils at Marvin Elementary

To hear the principal describe it, she was chatting with her husband and several teachers--all black--outside the school auditorium after an evening awards ceremony when an angry white parent approached, pushing her in the arm and side while screaming vulgarities.

To hear the parent describe it, she--a recipient of an outstanding school volunteer award that night--was rudely rebuffed and told to leave the campus or risk arrest when she approached the principal and lightly touched her on the arm to ask her to mingle with white parents.

Was principal Sarah Coleman of Marvin Elementary casually socializing with friends late last month? Or was she deliberately avoiding white Allied Gardens parents because she knew of their increasing distrust and dislike of her leadership since she took over the traditionally middle-class, stable school last fall?

Whatever the truth, the incident was the last straw for more than 100 Marvin parents, especially after Coleman pressed charges against parent Jill Spindle, accusing her of assault in papers filed with school police. While disposition of the potential misdemeanor charge rests with the city attorney, the parents have now demanded in two letters that Supt. Tom Payzant remove Coleman from Marvin, citing a laundry list of disagreements they have faced since September.

School district administrators are scrambling to deal with the severe antagonism now spewing forth after months of quiet discontent, attempting to persuade both sides to accept mediation as a way to calm the situation.

In many ways, the problems at Marvin mirror those at many other schools, where aggressive, active principals face discontent or revolt from teachers and parents who want to see new district promises of shared decision-making at individual schools actually carried out.

But Marvin’s situation is complicated by the element of race.

“The racial aspect could overshadow everything,” said Sue Braun, San Diego city schools trustee who represents the Allied Gardens area. Braun has spent hours talking with all parties for the past two weeks, attempting to find some common ground for constructing a resolution.

“But it’s amazing--each side takes the same set of facts and draws completely different conclusions. . . . Everyone is talking past each other; nobody is talking with each other.”

A ssistant schools Supt. Al Cook, whose operational responsibilities include Marvin, said Wednesday that “there may have been mistakes made on both sides. . . . But, if everyone has the best interests of students at heart, then I believe we can get everyone together and talk about ways to work the problems out.”

Cook declined comment on the assault charge, other than to indicate that it could be a complicating factor in district efforts to solve the school’s problems.

Trustee Braun said the assault incident is “probably the straw that broke the camel’s back” in terms of parent demands for Coleman’s removal.

“But look, there’s right on both sides,” Braun said. “The staff is used to a certain way at the school, the parents are used to a certain way, and now you have a new principal who has her own way, her own vision different from the others.”

Coleman was a district teacher from 1967 until 1976, when she was appointed to the first of her four principal posts.

Neighborhood parents insist the issues are not racial, but rather those of style, of easy communication with teachers and community, and willingness to work with parents who have played a strong volunteer role over the years with everything from chaperoning field trips to staffing the school library. They point out that the previous principal was also a black woman, whose promotion to a larger school this year almost galvanized a petition campaign among parents to keep her at Marvin.

In their first letter to top-level administrators, they cited the evening incident, saying: “This extremely inappropriate behavior on the part of Mrs. Coleman is totally unacceptable. If any teacher would have behaved in such a manner to a parent, no doubt the district would see fit to employ their very strongest disciplinary measures . . . morale is low among our teachers and this community is outraged . . . (we) certainly should not be subjected to the erratic behavior exhibited by Mrs. Coleman.”

Said parent Spindle, who is accused of the assault: “I feel that she is trying to turn Marvin into a South San Diego school where it is just a little hometown school now, that has always been run by parents in the past.”

But Betty Brown, who chairs the districtwide Committee For the Education of African-American Children, said that Coleman’s problems at Marvin show that “racism is alive and well at Marvin.”

“This district always worries about every white teacher who goes down to teach in our (nonwhite) community while forgetting about the African-American teacher who goes to white areas and has to deal every day with racist attitudes and other hateful innuendoes,” Brown said.

Marvin has a kindergarten-through-sixth grade population of 514 students, with a 90% stability rate, a measure of the percentage of students who remain at a school for the entire year. Marvin Elementary’s stability rate is among the district’s highest. The ethnic makeup is 63% white, 17.3% Latino and 13.2% black, with almost all the nonwhite students bused voluntarily to the school from Southeast San Diego under district integration programs. Its overall standardized test scores generally rank above district averages, although those for the nonwhite students are about half of those for whites.

Ann Robertson, a spokeswoman for the parent group, listed several instances in which she said Coleman had failed to consult honestly with parents or teachers, including:

* When a popular instructor was replaced as lead teacher--a person who substitutes in Coleman’s absence--by a newcomer.

* When an intern teacher was brought in to replace a long-term substitute, who herself had replaced a popular teacher who suddenly left Marvin without explanation.

* When an after-school day-care center was quickly set up, despite parent concerns that it might conflict with private day-care providers in the area.

“The whole issue is that we were used to shared decision-making at this school long before” it became a district goal, Robertson said. “It was a tradition, but she did away with that, has made all the decisions without consulting, and that started all the problems.”

But, for Coleman and her supporters, many of those criticisms appear racially tinged. Both the lead teacher and the intern teacher are black, and the day-care program is popular with nonwhite parents of bused children, leading to perceptions that the neighborhood parents and some longtime teachers have a racial agenda.

Parent Pamela Moorehead, who is black, said she likes the school because of its strong academic reputation, but said that there is an undercurrent of talk that makes blacks uncomfortable at times.

“At the (evening) assembly, every African-American teacher or administrator who stood up to answer questions had to give a long speech about where they got their degrees, about their qualifications, as though they have to justify themselves more than others,” Moorehead said.

According to police records, Coleman told them that “Jill (Spindle) asked me why I was standing talking to a group of blacks when there was a group of whites just over there. At this time she began to get very loud and belligerent and started saying, ‘See! You’re the one causing the problem.’ Then she started getting right up into my face and started pushing me in the arm and side. At this time, my husband stepped between her and kept her from badgering me.”

But Spindle tells a different story, describing Coleman’s version as untrue, “if only because this woman is more than 6 feet tall and (heavyset) where I am 5 feet, 7 inches and weigh 112 pounds. And I swung and pushed her? It’s absurd.”

In her version to police, Spindle said: “I touched her on the left arm. She jerked away from me like I had a disease. . . . I said, ‘If you want the parents to buy your program, why don’t you come over with the other parents instead of segregating yourself in an Afro-American group?’

“She said that I obviously don’t know anything about black people. . . . I asked her, ‘Why are you talking to me this way? Is it because I am white?’ I never made an attempt to strike her.”