PROFILE / LUPE SIMPSON : ‘I’ll Show You’ : Call Her Domineering or Driven, This Southeast L.A. Principal Never Says Never

Lupe Simpson is caught in the vortex of a middle-school frenzy: Hyper teen-agers encircle her as she escorts a visitor across campus.

“Miss Simpson! Miss Simpson!” they shout. One of them reaches for an embrace. Others grab her arm, wanting equal time.

The visitor will just have to wait.

At Nimitz Middle School, kids always come first.

That’s the Law According to Simpson, says the small, energetic woman wearing a blue satin school jacket emblazoned with the motto: “Honor, Purpose, Knowledge, Service, Pride.” If she had her way, Simpson, 48, would add passion and strategy . The two have always shaped her fervor for education, ever since she was a little girl growing up in a Southeast Los Angeles barrio.

Now, as a school principal in a similar community nearby, Simpson has come full circle.

Only she makes sure her kids hear a different message. Words like college , success and future are punctuated with praise, not put-downs.

“I grew up hearing, ‘You’re nothing. You are never going to make it,’ ” Simpson says.

“ Mentiras! “--Lies!

Which brings us to another law: Never say never to Lupe Simpson. And whatever you do, never tell her that Latinos and other ethnic minority students, especially those at Nimitz, are troublemakers who don’t want to learn and have parents who don’t care.

In the six years she’s been principal, Simpson says, she has attacked the problems of a large school with limited resources, a staff that resisted change and a lot of kids who face “unbelievable odds.”

Nimitz serves 3,600 students in Huntington Park, Maywood and Bell--making it the second largest middle school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Ninety-eight percent of its pupils are Latino, 51% speak little or no English and most live in poverty.

Before her arrival, Simpson says, the school was plastered with graffiti, kids walked the halls during class time and the faculty had little focus.

Simpson says she has come more than halfway in turning such problems around by stressing non-traditional teaching methods, pushing high technology in the classroom, demanding parent involvement and making kids believe that college is a real possibility.

She and others say this strategy has helped improve attendance, lower the dropout rate, raise state test scores--though not as much as she would like--and create an environment for young thinkers.

Not everyone likes Simpson’s style of ganas , or perseverance. Her first days at Nimitz were rocky, including an assembly where the kids booed her because she told them they had to take school seriously.

She also weathered an early confrontation with a group of teachers who complained to the district that her methods were creating chaos.

Many teachers back Simpson, but others remain disgruntled or have left. In six years, she says she has hired 90 teachers for a staff of 150--although both teachers and administrators say the turnover may result from a combination of factors including conflicts with Simpson, personal reasons or frustration with teaching in the middle-school system.

“It is not common, but it is not uncommon when you have that many teachers leave a school,” says Roger Segure, grievance director of United Teachers-Los Angeles. “I’ve known more teachers to leave.”

“I’m not here to be popular,” Simpson says. “I’m here to be effective with children. I know there are some teachers who think I’m lukewarm and others who think I walk on water. All the bad teachers hate my guts because I push for life and passion in the classroom.”

“My detractors say to me, ‘You know what your problem is, Lupe? You are trying to make a middle-class school in a poor area. And that is not real in this society.’ And I say to them, ‘If that is not real, then I might as well not come to work.’ ”

There is one criticism Simpson says she is completely guilty of: “(Some teachers) feel I am overwhelmingly sensitive to children and parent’s needs. . . . But I only have to please parents--because they are the taxpayers--good teachers and those children.”

She says she embraces the idea that the school must answer to and involve its parents. Simpson has started parenting classes and encourages mothers and fathers to visit classrooms.

“She makes children and parents aware of their rights,” says Carlos E. Ruvalcaba, whose two kids attended Nimitz and are now in high school. “But mostly (she stresses) the right to demand the best education possible. And I had never heard this before from an educator.”

Parents also like Simpson’s strong belief in student counseling. She says such outreach has been more effective in changing behavior than the discipline programs--”a form of control” previously enforced. Her goal, she says, is to make the kids “responsible, caring individuals.”

Other new programs include self-esteem training for teachers and students, after-school tutoring, a career center and college counseling and biannual career days involving many minority professionals.

One of the most visible signs of change is the IBM Writing Project, involving hundreds of classroom computers purchased with grants available to schools in poor communities.

With the computers came a kind of creative independence that has fired up the school. That enthusiasm is ablaze in the Model Technology Center, a computer-crammed room packed with students doing homework before and after school.

By this time next year, Simpson’s dream--with the school’s arsenal of computers and media, reading, language arts and robotics centers--is to make Nimitz a magnet school.

John Liechty, LAUSD’s director of middle schools--and Simpson’s boss--says the principal is “ball of energy.”

“Sometimes that energy gets her in trouble, which is why people take exception to her. But nothing is too great for her to go after if it is for the good of the kids.”

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“I have gone through a metamorphosis,” Simpson says, recalling the low standards and negativity she says she faced at the start.

She came to Nimitz--her first principal’s assignment--from a job as assistant principal at Drew Middle School in South Los Angeles.

At her first student assembly, she says, she told the kids, “ ‘You’re not going to be walking around the halls any more. You’re going into the classroom, you’re taking your books home, you’re going to demand homework because that’s what getting an education means.’

“You know what the kids did? They booed me. I felt humiliated. Everything I believed in was for these kids. I went back to my office, closed the door and started to cry.”

Toward the end of her first year, a group of teachers wrote memos to district authorities saying Simpson’s agenda for change was not welcomed.

“These teachers came in and essentially told me, ‘We’ll tell you what to do and you do it. We run the school, you don’t,’ ” she recalls. After a three-week leave and the district’s endorsement, she returned more committed to her philosophy.

Lucille Findley, a sixth-grade English teacher at Nimitz and the teachers’ union chapter chair, says she and other teachers don’t always see eye to eye with Simpson. She says her group’s grievance list--not for publication--is long. She talks about teachers who have left, some because of stress allegedly brought on by Simpson’s style.

“If we had a situation at Nimitz where we were all on one team working together, our work would be accomplished much more successfully,” says Findley, who has taught at the school for eight years.

“Some teachers tend to be leery of her (Simpson),” says assistant principal Faye Banton. “It goes back to their past history.” And to a “deep-seated resistance to change in order to meet the needs of an ever-changing student population,” she says.

Math teacher John Bruno admires Simpson “for putting her foot down and not letting people push her around.”

William Holtzclaw, a fifth-grade teacher says, “If anything gets done for minority kids, it’s going to be minority teachers and principals who are going to do it. I’m not sure if it’s the right way, but for some it’s the only way.”

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Simpson says she pushes for change “because the role of the principal is to be an educational leader, a visionary.”

And because she’s a “fanatic for kids.” As a child of poverty herself, she fought for “equality and fairness” in and out of the classroom.

“I never was afraid of going to the office to speak up for myself,” she says, adding that she even enrolled herself in kindergarten.

And in college she defied a counselor who told her that higher education was not a place for a Latina.

At Cal State Los Angeles Simpson received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and a master’s in counseling and science. She immediately landed a job at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, where she taught reading, English and math for six years. The next three years she taught English as a second language for the Los Angeles school district. After 12 years as a counselor at various schools, she worked at Drew before coming to Nimitz.

“If we want to get anything done, it is going to take drive,” she says, surrounded by students during one lunch break.

“Kids need what I grew up with: an ‘I’ll-show-you’ attitude. I say to them, ‘Go back in there and show that teacher that you can do it.’ ”

She ticks off a litany of names of students with whom she has shared that message. She points to Mario Mayorga, 14, who stands nearby.

“He’s much better now. He’s gone from all Fs to A’s, Bs and Cs. His self-esteem has come a long way,” she says.

Mario says he likes sports, mathematics and “Miss Simpson.”

“She’s cool. She’s nice. She’s a good principal,” he says.

“How do you know that?” Simpson asks.

“I know. From a long time ago,” says Mario.

“What happened a long time ago?” Simpson says.

“I did something bad,” he says, “and you made me go to class. You talked to me and you told me I was a good kid. You listened to me. You made me feel happy.”

Says Joanne Ruiz, 13: “She’s like a mom. She cares about our problems.”

“I am a mom,” says Simpson, who, with husband John Simpson, 48, director of community services for Los Angeles City College, has two children, ages 8 and 13.

And like a mom she says she wants “for each kid at this school to feel special and individual.”

“They have to feel that they are worthy of something, because today I don’t think that ethnic minorities feel that way in this country. At Nimitz, kids know they’re not the problem, they know that they’re not stupid. They know that they are going somewhere.”