GLENDALE : Retiree Suggests More Cash, Not School Reform

Former Jefferson School Principal Paul Estep wants to take politics out of education.

After 40 years with the Glendale Unified School District, Estep, who retired last month, said lawmakers must allocate more money to cash-strapped districts instead of calling for educational reform.

“It grieves me deeply to hear politicians say reform education,” Estep said. “The system does not need reform, it needs more resources.”

Estep, 61, spoke of his attempts to deal with dwindling resources during his tenure with the district, first as a teacher, then as a physical education supervisor and, finally, as an elementary school principal.

While there is less money today to hire teachers and administrators, teachers have been able to improve their skills by drawing from a myriad of instructional materials available in the 1990s, Estep said.

“In the 1950s and 1960s we didn’t have the educational resources we have now--teachers did their own work with very little sharing then,” he added.

Since he began his career as a sixth-grade teacher at Glenoaks School in 1954, Estep said he has seen the district change from a mostly Anglo English-speaking student population to a more diverse student body.

Today, 50% of the district’s 28,659 students have difficulty reading, writing and speaking English, and many cannot even converse in English when they enroll in one of the district’s 28 schools.

This phenomenon--which started to occur as more Armenian, Latino and Korean immigrants settled in Glendale in the mid 1970s--diverted teachers’ attention from academics to language instruction, Estep said.

“It became apparent that we were trying to teach these kids and they didn’t understand us,” Estep said.

Estep, who has four children and eight grandchildren, said schools have also been forced in the past decade to deal with social problems affecting many students, including a lack of food and clothing.

Administrators at Jefferson School, which has 725 pupils, initiated classes to talk with parents about their children’s behavior and how to cope with it, Estep said.

These classes accompany an attempt by district officials to actively engage parents in their children’s education--a policy that was not practiced in the 1950s, Estep said.

Despite the problems faced by the district and families today, Estep said, children are still learning.

“Kids are learning as much as they did years ago, but the level at which they are learning is different,” he said.

District spokesperson Vic Pallos said Estep, who was presented an engraved crystal apple by the Board of Education in June to commemorate his many years in education, was the only district retiree in 1994 to have served for so long.

“It’s very unusual for someone to serve in the capacity that he has,” Pallos said.