Reforming School : Students, Educators Hope Plan Will Help Unlock Potential

When Assistant Principal Lee Griffin looks at Compton High, she sees beyond the sprawling hodgepodge of some 20 aging buildings, many of them defaced by graffiti. And beyond roofs that leak with every storm.

She sees something more than hundreds of students who speak limited English and student test scores that are among the lowest in the state.

When Griffin looks at Compton High, she sees potential.

Now she and a core of hopeful, resolute educators and students are getting a shot at unlocking that potential. With a $1.4-million state grant, they are trying to reinvent Compton High.

“Maybe our test scores are the worst,” Griffin said. “Maybe too many of our families are dysfunctional. But we are also a microcosm of society. If we can change for the better here, there isn’t anyone who can’t do it.”

The school’s plan is to set up “villages” and “academies.” The purpose of the village program is to create a family atmosphere that keeps students in school and learning. The goal of the vocational academies is to give students a skill that can be turned into a job.

Organizing the effort is Griffin, 62, a plain-speaking, motherly administrator who raised seven children after becoming a widow at age 35. With equal ease, she tosses off a salty joke, offers a withering discourse on educators who aren’t doing the job or bear-hugs a startled student whose wit pleases her.

Griffin sees the project as her last, best chance to reform a system that has worked for too few.

“We have kids that are functionally illiterate,” Griffin said. “They have been passed through the system, and by the time they’re 14 or 15, they are embarrassed to turn out for school.”

Many students finally give up.

This year, Compton High graduated 232 students. The class has shrunk 64% since the ninth grade, Griffin said. Some of the grads will attend UC Berkeley or another prestigious college, but too many get left behind, Griffin said.

Administrators hope the village concept will help. The school set up two villages last school year. Each has four teachers who share about 120 students. The teachers plan lessons together, but also are charged, as a group, with helping students cope, said math teacher Barbara Parrish.

Parrish now keeps track of students even when they are outside her class. “I am in constant contact with the other teachers,” Parrish said. “A student is my student whether he’s in my class or not, and the students know that.

“It’s seems that the students actually belong to me. I feel like we are a family.”

Next year, all ninth-graders will go into villages. Each village will have a part-time adviser who also can help students with academic and family problems.

At least one-third of Compton High students do not live with their parents. Many are in foster care or with other relatives after escaping abusive households. Students go to school from poverty-plagued neighborhoods rife with crime and gangs.

These teen-agers need an extended family, Parrish said.

Without the extra attention, many students rebel and cause trouble, said Maria Espinoza, 17.

“I had no friends here in the ninth grade,” said Espinoza, who will be a senior next fall. “Because I dressed weird, no one would talk to me. Nobody noticed if you were absent.”

Maria, an honor student, was a voting member of the committee that hired the first village teachers. Besides several students, the committee included administrators, teachers and parents who interviewed staff members and outside applicants.

In the fall, administrators plan to introduce the follow-up to the village plan: five academies to teach job skills.

“We’re not teaching things that lead to jobs any more. That’s wasting the kids’ time and that’s why they’re dropping out,” said Principal Charles R. Watkins, who is leaving the school to become the district director of student services.

Under the new plan, every student will choose an academy to enter in the 11th grade after taking introductory courses in the 10th grade.

The academies will be: Visual and Performing Arts, Public Service, Industrial Technology, International Business and Hospitality, Travel and Tourism.

In Hospitality, Travel and Tourism, for example, students can choose to learn about travel-agency or restaurant work. Students will still have traditional academic requirements and will still be able to enroll in college preparatory courses. But they also will take business classes, receive job training and get work experience in area businesses, such as Compton’s Ramada Hotel.

In addition to obtaining a diploma, students will graduate with a certificate from their academy.

Compton High is one of 144 schools that received state grants to remake academic programs. More than 820 schools applied for the money, which is distributed over five years.

Some of the Compton High money will be spent on computers and other supplies needed for academy courses and improved classes in more traditional areas such as English and mathematics.

For the plan to work, said Griffin, students must believe in it. So a team of teachers and about 20 students wrote and conducted a schoolwide student survey. The survey, taken in May, questioned students on what they liked and disliked about the campus, classrooms, school rules, teaching, activities, security and even the food.

The goal is to let students guide some of the reforms.

“We didn’t talk directly at them like a teacher would,” said Leticia Sims, 16, who helped conduct the survey. “I said: ‘We want to feel what you guys want and need at the school.’

“I told them: ‘If you feel you have to express things your way using colorful language, go ahead.’ ”

And they did. In the surveys, which won’t be tallied until the fall, students wrote about wanting more clubs, more activities and less graffiti on the walls. They want to resume publishing the discontinued school newspaper and yearbook.

One student called the school “a hellhole.” But another said, “What I like about my class is that I actually learn something.”

In a random sample, even the most critical and negative students desired the best from school. They found racial tensions troubling and wanted to get along. They disliked bad teachers. They admired the school’s good teachers and asked for more.

The students wanted to learn, which gives Compton High educators reason to hope.

“I don’t care who your kids are. You can teach anyone if you have a plan,” teacher Nancy Miller said. “We’ve got to give these kids a program that has some meat in it.”

Along those lines, much of the grant money will be spent on teacher training. A recent county report criticized Compton teachers as backward and ineffective.

“Would you give a new BMW to a mechanic who only knows ’57 Volkswagens?” Griffin asked. “That’s what you’re expecting parents to do when they turn kids over to us.

“Only 35% of the teachers are accepting the idea of change and are trying and ready,” she said. But 95% could do the job, and the number of converts willing to try is gradually growing, Griffin said.

The project has already scored some modest success. Student attendance was slightly better in the villages than in other ninth-grade classes. Attendance at parent-teacher conferences was much higher than in the past, Parrish said.

But overall parent involvement has been disappointing. An October potluck drew only about 40 of some 240 village parents.

The reformers also face another hurdle: changing a Compton school system where management problems, an ongoing financial crisis and instability have hampered academic efforts. The district removed or reassigned three of the school’s four administrators in last week’s annual shuffle of administrative jobs, including Principal Watkins, a well-liked administrator who stood strongly behind Compton High’s reform project.

Watkins said the reform effort will be in good hands with new principal William Savant Jr., who was an assistant principal at Santa Monica High School.

“I think he’s a very qualified administrator and he’ll keep the program going in a positive direction,” Watkins said.

Compton High educators said they will forge ahead through all obstacles.

“If I ever really thought nothing was going to change. . .,” Griffin paused and would not finish the thought.

“I want this to happen,” she said instead. “And I believe it can happen.”