Q & A : She Starts Pupils Early in Learning to Reach for the Stars

Genevieve Andrews Shepherd, 57, principal of Dublin Avenue Fundamental Career Awareness School in Leimert Park.

Claim to fame: Principal since 1985 at Dublin, a magnet school in a middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood; honored in 1990 as a Woman Pioneer by the Los Angeles City Council.

Background: A veteran teacher and administrator in the Los Angeles Unified School District; a graduate of Los Angeles City College and Cal State Los Angeles, she also studied at Pepperdine University and Golden State University, where she earned her doctorate. Dublin has an enrollment of about 650 in kindergarten through sixth grade; about 90% of the students are African-American.

Interviewer: Times staff writer John L. Mitchell

Q. What is a fundamental magnet?

A. It’s a school where children are groomed in the fundamental skills of how to survive. We try to make sure that before they leave they have a strong foundation in academic skills. All schools do that, but ours is a little more intensive in reading, writing and mathematics.

From kindergarten, we are preparing children to go to college. I ask the parents of my kindergarten children here to buy two frames--one small and the other large. I ask them to tell their children that one day they will fill both of these frames. The small one is for their high school diploma and the larger one is for their college degree. Children need long- and short-range goals. So, whenever their child wants to know why he has homework or why he has to go to the library, I say point to the frames.

Q. There is a dress code at your school. How is that helpful?

A. We ask children to come to school in a pre-professional manner--no shorts, no play clothes, no thongs. We ask them to come to school as if they were going to work in the way they dress and behave. If they practice that enough as a child, it will set a pattern for the future. It is a way of practicing career behavior while they are still in elementary school.

Q. What are some of the things you do to prepare young students for later life?

A. We do take more time helping children to understand their culture, heritage and history for survival sake. If you don’t know where you have been, you are not going to know where you are going. We deal a lot with our own history, tracing our roots to find out who we are and where we come from.

We ask the students to pick out one person in their past, a hero, and write about that person. Probably the most striking example of this was a kid who recently wrote about his grandmother. He wrote the most beautiful paper about her, how she would read to him, help him with his homework. She was always there for him. She was his hero.

We invite all the heroes, one from each class, to a special black history program. His grandmother was very sick and had to be wheeled in in a wheelchair. She cried when he read the essay--everybody in the auditorium cried, even the kids. Six months later his grandmother died, and the boy read his essay at the funeral as a eulogy. It was perfect.

Q. Who were your heroes?

A. I had two. I had a Sunday school teacher who taught me how to be firm with love. You can be firm, but you don’t bond, you don’t cement without love. I can bawl kids out, tell them off. Then I call them over and ask them, “Why do you think I’m upset?” And they say, “Because you care about us.” It’s a half-minute of scolding and a minute of nurturing.

My mother was also my hero. My father died on my 6th birthday, leaving my mother with seven children. All we had was a house that my father built from the ground up. She would tell each of us that we were winners.

Q. When did you decide you wanted to become a teacher?

A. I think I always wanted to teach. I was fanatic about it. I was always playing school, and when the other kids wouldn’t let me be the teacher, I would take my books and go home. And when I couldn’t teach other kids, I would teach flies and the sidewalk, anything. It seems like I have been teaching all my life. I taught Sunday school when I was 13.

Q. Did anything or anyone try to stop you?

A. I remember a college counselor calling me into her office and telling me that she didn’t think I would ever be a teacher. She told me to do something else with my life. I’ll never forget the way she said that. I don’t know whether my anger over what she said was what gave me more determination than ever to teach. I was shattered for a minute. My parents taught me to reach for the stars, the sky is the limit. Well, I walked out of her office and stood on the college steps and said to myself. You just watch and see.

Just recently I told that story to a group of college counselors. I told them, ‘Don’t you ever dare tell a kid that he or she can’t be something. They can be anything they want to be, but it has to come from them.’ It’s not a tragedy when you don’t reach your goals, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (a noted black educator) once said. The tragedy is not having a goal to reach for.

Q. Would Dublin be considered a successful school academically?

A. Dublin has a very good reputation. We have an excellent teaching staff, and we believe that most of the students who graduate from Dublin eventually go on to college. Our scores are just about at the norm. The recent fifth- and sixth-grade scores have improved, especially in math.

But tests are not always an accurate portrayal of what children can do. You can ask a child what is a sculpture? If he has never seen or read about what it is, he won’t know. That doesn’t mean we don’t take tests seriously. We do. Kids have to learn how to take tests, because they will be taking them for the rest of their lives.

Our test scores are influenced because we are dealing with a more diverse population than we used to (when Dublin’s students were almost exclusively from middle-class black homes). But, once students adjust to the rigorous fundamental approach to education, their scores usually improve.

Q. To what do you attribute the success?

A. Parent support means everything. We get a lot of support from our parents. Parents at Dublin sign an agreement to come to meetings, to visit the school once a month. I ask the parents of kids with problems to come sit in the class with the kids. We need them to stay a little closer with their children.

Like most schools, we have problems. We do get some children who come to us not knowing basic skills for survival. Children come here in the third and fourth grade who can’t read or write. And even though this is an area that is a little more affluent, we are dealing with single parents who have to work and cannot afford the time.

If I didn’t have a playground here, most parents would be in real trouble. But I tell them they have to make the commitment. I tell them, “I’ll call your boss if you want me to.”

Q. How do you maintain and enhance educational programs when money is so tight?

A. Beg. How else? I spend my life begging. I just get sad and say “I need you.” And when they get here, you have to say how much you appreciate the help.

We get a lot of support from the community. There is a gentleman across the street who watches the school, waters the lawn from time to time, keeps the graffiti off the building. There is a mathematician in the neighborhood who wrote a multiplication rap song for the kids. We have a chess club, reading programs, a drill team, a gospel choir and a rites of passage program for boys. The kids take part in a science program put on by a group of black professional engineers. There are fathers who come around to just supervise boys at risk.

Each year the parents raise money to send a group of students to Washington to visit with legislators. Last year we received a special invitation from President Bush. The kids saw him, but he was leaving to catch a plane and waved to the class. The sixth-grade class also sang for Barbara Bush at a literacy conference here in Los Angeles.

Q. Does it anger you that school administrators these days have to scrounge for additional services for the children?

A. Yes, but I take the philosophy of George Washington Carver, who said: You start where you are with what you have. I don’t have time to bemoan the fact that we don’t have the money. Sure I need more money. Sure this school needs to be refurbished. The school is 62 years old and has never been refurbished. We have concrete floors out there. We don’t have nice bright tiles. But that doesn’t stop us. We shine those floors, scrub and clean them up. You can dwell in your sorrow or you can take your lemons and make lemonade. We prefer to make lemonade.

We don’t have the resources, so what do you do? We don’t have a counselor every day. We don’t have a school psychologist every day, we don’t have a nurse every day. We bum, beg and borrow people. We ask parents to come in the nurse’s office.

I have a lady whose husband just died. She was about ready to give up on life. She has been coming in here every Monday, like a job, and she sits in the nurse’s office. She puts Band-Aids on sores that you can’t see, pats a kid on the back who said his stomach hurts, gives a cup of water to another kid who is crying. Wipes a tear. She called me up one day and said, “Dr. Shepherd, I came to help the children, but I didn’t realize how much I was helping myself. Just nurturing them gave me something.”

Q. How do you see your role as administrator of Dublin?

A. An administrator has to set the tone in the school. The administrator has to be a motivator. It wears you out. You have to smile sometimes when you don’t want to smile. We have to be strong and excited. We have to set the tone for the kind of learning climate.

Q. What is the philosophy behind the way you go about confronting life’s problems in the classroom?

A. Our philosophy is that classroom time is prime time for teaching. It is not time for teachers to be sitting grading papers. That is when you have the full attention of those kids, and we want teachers to teach their hearts out.

We say it’s important to teach from bell to bell. I have a second-grade teacher who, when she asks a question in her classroom, every kid has to raise his hand whether they know the answer or not. If you don’t know the answer, you raise your hand like this (with fingers pointing out) and if you know the answer you raise it straight up. Sometimes when a kid raises their hand part of the way up, a light goes on and they know the answer. It is a way of teaching children to reach for the stars.

I tell children that they are preparing today for what they want to become tomorrow. I tell them, ‘You don’t pay rent, a car note, or car insurance. You don’t pay for the clothes you wear. Every morning the only thing you have to pay is attention. And, if you pay attention today, tomorrow you will be able to pay your own way.’