Educated Decisions : Bassett District Is Experimenting With Its Own Version of School Choice

On paper, the Bassett Unified School District looks like dozens of heavily Latino, lower-income districts in urban California, with achievement scores hovering a good distance below the state average.

But the 5,150-student district in La Puente, Industry and unincorporated Bassett in the San Gabriel Valley is undergoing a home-grown revolution.

Starting in September, parents and teachers will get to choose from an array of school types, from magnet K-8 schools to a fast-track middle school for ambitious students to an academy complete with uniforms, strict discipline and an emphasis on parent involvement.

The goals are to keep junior high students away from gangs and drugs by placing most of them in schools with elementary-age students, to make better use of the district’s strapped bilingual resources and to offer programs geared to all learning speeds.

Most of all, backers hope that by having to make choices, parents will learn to demand a role in their children’s education, despite the language barriers many face.

“We believe the key to academic success is the parent,” said Supt. Linda Gonzales, who designed the plan.

Parents already are responding. In a district where teachers were frustrated by many parents who seldom asked questions or offered help, 300 parents showed up in driving rains for a recent meeting to learn about the new academy. In fact, interest is so high the school is nearly full.

In restructuring the schools, teachers and administrators have looked to a handful of existing programs that have worked particularly well for Bassett students. Those programs, including an elementary school art gallery and a middle-school leadership class, will become more central to the curriculum.

The district’s four elementary schools will become kindergarten through eighth-grade schools. Although all will teach the basics, each will offer a special approach or program.

At Van Wig School, for example, the curriculum will tie into the school’s art gallery, where children trained as docents give bilingual tours of the exhibits to students from other schools and districts.

Exhibits in the makeshift gallery--complete with glass-covered pedestals and brochures--have included Latino culture and the histories of Egypt and Greece, which student docents performed in mime. Last week, teachers and students were busily assembling a China exhibit, and the children were beginning to study for the grand opening later this month.

“It’s really great because you get to learn about the cultures of your ancestors,” said student docent Susan Luc, 11.

Erwin School will group students by communication skills rather than by traditional age-dictated grades.

Another school will focus on performing arts and technology. At the fourth school, 50% of the teachers will be bilingual, Gonzales said, although all four schools will provide bilingual programs.

Bassett’s middle schools are also changing.

Torch Middle School will offer accelerated programs for ambitious students who have leadership potential, with an elaborate curriculum based on the “Project Adventure” course already in place, Gonzales said.

Project Adventure is designed to teach children about trust, success and failure, in part through a set of ropes set up along 40-foot poles in the schoolyard, said district psychologist Robert Martin.

On a recent morning, students gathered in the schoolyard to show off their teamwork. They climbed onto the high ropes, jumping off with only the faith that the students and teachers below would hold the other end of the rope and keep them from plummeting to the ground.

“All this is teamwork. You have to trust the other people,” said Danny Barragan, 14. His favorite: a shaky pole that serves as jump-off point for a tiny trapeze hanging overhead.

Barragan snugly fastened his protective helmet and rope harness, climbed the pole, and leaped six feet through the air to grasp the trapeze before being lowered to the ground by his rope harness.

“It teaches kids to support each other. They learn that things can be done differently, that there’s no right and wrong way. They become leaders,” said Andrea Bohren, a physical education teacher who will run Project Adventure courses next year. “I have students this year who were really afraid to speak in public, and now they are going to help me run classes.”

Edgewood Middle School will undergo perhaps the most drastic change, becoming a private-style academy serving Grades 1 through 8 in a strict setting that stresses manners, discipline and ethics.

The academy will require home visits by teachers, and a commitment from parents to check homework and assist their children with school projects, said Principal Robert Watanabe.

Despite the higher expectations, teachers are lining up for slots at the school; a dozen are on the waiting list.

“Mine are all signed up for Edgewood,” said Elizabeth Osborne, foster mother to seven girls, six of them biological sisters.

“Since my daughters have already been denied so much, I just know I had to do whatever I could to make them whole. Edgewood will have stricter discipline, and they are going to be taught values.”

Although the high school is refining its vocational programs to teach skills to students so they can work their way through college, the majority of the changes will not occur until the 1994-95 school year, Gonzales said.

By offering parents a wide range of programs now, the district hopes to head off an exodus of students to private schools if a statewide voucher program is instated, said school board member Anna Aguilar. The changes are designed to offer parents some of the same kind of specialized attention that private schools offer, she said.

Open-enrollment districts are not that rare statewide--in Southern California, the Claremont and Irvine Unified School Districts have offered parents choices for two decades. But Bassett officials say the scope of their reorganization and community involvement is unusual.

Bassett’s 1992 California Assessment Program scores fell well below the average state level and the average county scores; in fact, only about 50 districts out of 800 scored below Bassett.

Gonzales hopes to change that.

After getting her doctorate at Claremont Graduate School, the Honduras-born superintendent decided she would work in a district that was 80% Latino or more.

She found Bassett, which is 82% Latino, 7% Anglo, 4% Asian, 3% African-American and 4% other.

Gonzales was an assistant superintendent at Bassett for three years. When she applied for the top post last June, she presented her restructuring plan to the board.

“People don’t realize that a lot of people in the barrio are high achievers,” she said. “This is about meeting the needs of higher-achieving students who also live in the barrio.”

The low test scores would bound upward if the schools showed respect for children’s backgrounds and if parents were brought into the educational system, Gonzales reasoned.

Even parents acknowledge their own apathy is partly to blame.

“We have to involve ourselves more, see how their reading and writing is going, and help them advance. Without that, the students will fall behind,” said Arcenia Vizcarra, a parent of two elementary schoolgirls.

Vizcarra was one of 200 volunteers who on a recent Saturday morning went door to door to inform parents about the upcoming changes.

Although most parents have been supportive of the changes, some worry that putting seventh- and eighth-graders back with elementary-age students will jeopardize the younger students’ safety and expose them to gang activity.

But school officials hope involving the older students with the younger children will help the older ones realize that they are still kids. At Edgewood Academy, for example, Watanabe wants to turn older students into tutors for the younger ones, he said.

Vizcarra is convinced the move will benefit the older children.

“We want them to keep on being children longer, so they don’t move so early to the world of adults,” she said.