Summer Class Primed Students for Success

The verbal trappings of success don’t come easy at Memorial Junior High School, a budding oasis of learning in the rough heart of Barrio Logan.

Talk briefly with the dozen or so eighth-graders who took a special summer enrichment course 14 months ago--designed as a motivational “jump-start” into junior high--and they’ll hem and haw over whether it has helped them in any way.

But spend an hour or so exploring their feelings about the value of school, about challenging the stereotypes of Latinos as non-achievers--and the students will gradually validate what their academic records show during the past two years:

They are succeeding in school, and they remember the six weeks of summer school as helping them believe that school can mean something for their future, despite the graffiti, drugs and frequent violence that plague Memorial’s neighborhood.

In particular, the students credit resource teacher Donna Somerville, who shepherded them through a summer of playwriting, video, field trips and conversation, with showing them that people will care about their success.

The summer course at Memorial was part of several enrichment classes held at 10 schools around the city in July, 1989, the first time in more than a decade that San Diego city schools had offered such a program. Memorial tailored its course to expose the students to cultural and intellectual experiences, and to show that academic work such as poetry and computers can often be fun as well as challenging.

“The summer (in 1990) was a chance for them to bond, to have better self-esteem and positive peer pressure for achievement, to make the summer count later in their lives,” Somerville said.

For the school district, however, it was a one-time effort, since a lack of money meant there was no similar program this past summer for a new crop of incoming seventh-graders.

Daniel King nodded toward Somerville when he talked about struggling with his final math test last spring.

“She would have gotten on my case” if I had flunked, King conceded. “I’ve got to show other people that we can do it, (that) it’s not true” what people say about inner-city residents.

Even though Somerville is in charge of special programs concerning Memorial’s magnet courses in Spanish, philosophy and world history and geography, she informally tries to keep tabs on the summer-school students.

“I think the summer school helped everyone get more involved with school,” said Rebecca Smith, who voluntarily takes the bus to Memorial from Clairemont to take advantage of the magnet programs. In an informal luncheon get-together with Somerville last week, Smith broke the ice for the other students in talking about why school is important to them.

“The summer class showed us about things that have to do with the world, furthering our knowledge in a lot of ways,” Smith said.

Many of the students mentioned the beach trips that Somerville took them on near her Coronado home, since few of the students have easy access to the water. Others talked about the visit with San Diego Zoo keepers, with a space station designer, and with a playwright.

Sally Gutierrez remembers writing journals and poems, “and that really helped me in writing during the past year. I’m a better student, I get good grades.”

Carlos Mendoza said the summer session helped change his attitude.

“I hated school before,” said Mendoza, now a B-average student. “I was doing bad.” Mendoza remembers the beach trips but also the head start that Somerville offered in teaching them how to use computers.

Mendoza now has a career goal: to be a civil engineer. School has focused his longstanding interest in building roads, he said. In fact, he designed an elaborate sand castle during one of Somerville’s beach trips.

“But I need more math, I have to take more math, and I need to learn how to draw on the computer,” he said, displaying an intellectual impatience that shows Somerville how his thinking has matured.

She also sees a sign of success in the willingness of the male students to take part in school activities and in the thick notebooks they carry with them everywhere. King signed up for art, and Carlos Valdivia is part of the intramural soccer program.

Valdivia aspires to a career in design, taking advanced math as well as a course designed to strengthen study skills for promising minority students in college-prep classes. He drew logos during the summer class for student T-shirts and visors, and continues to draw, “especially when I’m bored.”

But, both he and Mendoza spoke for the neighborhood students in conceding that things are not often easy, given that there is still strong peer pressure not to do well in school. Many of their friends pay little or no attention to the pleadings of Principal Tony Alfaro and others to use school as their ticket out of the worst aspects of barrio life.

“The ones who don’t care, they’ll be the ones who won’t work a lot later in life, and they won’t make any money,” Mendoza said.

“Some of them don’t listen to the principal,” Valdivia said. “A lot depends on your parents. Parents need to put in the time with their own kids.

“My mom is on me every day to work hard. All the moms should be like my mom.”