Educators Owe Mentors for Unlocking Potential

It’s a hot summer afternoon, and the open-collared Joe Spirito is mincing no words on the subject of a public school’s real purpose.

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“What kind of man are you just because you can read?” he asks, turning his palms skyward.

“I mean, if you lie, cheat, steal, what the hell good are five A’s on your report card?”

Spirito, the superintendent of Ventura schools, pauses a moment. Then he leans forward, stabbing the air with his right index finger:

“I used to think the whole business was about curriculum, you know, the three Rs--reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic. BALONEY! Sure, I got kids getting into Stanford and West Point, but if all this curriculum is so good, why do I have all these expulsions, concealed weapons, so many dropouts?”

No one, of course--not even the mercurial Joseph Spirito--can claim to have all the answers to such disturbing questions.

But the rough-and-tumble Spirito is in there swinging, trying to find out. And, though their styles are far more button-down by comparison, so are his fellow superintendents from four other major districts in Ventura County.

As schools open for the 1995-96 academic year, the people who run the county’s neighborhood school systems show up for work each day pondering not just the issues of declining state funding and fractious school boards, but also more basic questions about the nature of teaching kids something that matters.

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Is it a multiplication table? Or a character trait such as honesty?

Is it the fact that Bolivia’s principal export is tin--or the fact that knowing such a random piece of trivia means nothing to a video-driven life threatened by alienation, cynicism, violence and drugs?

How, then, do our school leaders perceive the real needs of their students--whether in bilingual Oxnard, hodgepodge Ojai or middle-class Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley? And what, after the school board debates are over, do they feel are the real factors that cause some students to succeed and others to fail?

In wide-ranging interviews, Ventura County school Supts. William Studt of Oxnard, Andrew Smidt of Ojai, Gerald Gross of Thousand Oaks, Mary Beth Wolford of Simi Valley and Joseph Spirito of Ventura talked about some of the different problems of their districts.

On one key point, they all agreed:

No matter how ideal the teaching setting, academic learning and character development are severely impeded or do not occur at all if a child is left on his or her own. Each student needs an advocate--whether a parent, teacher, uncle, aunt, or guardian.

Without such a Big Brother figure, the superintendents say, a student will inevitably be lost to the all-powerful influences of peer groups and to unchecked opportunity for potentially self-destructive behavior.

It happened in their own lives, they added. Each one of them was helped along the way by the influence of just such a mentor.

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“My No. 1 problem,” says Joe Spirito, “is the parent who blows it off. I’m talking about the parent who basically says, ‘I send my kid to you, now do your job.’ Well, it doesn’t work that way. Because the kids who have parents like that, they’re the ones you see on the street. They’re the ones in the gangs.”

Plainly, the superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District doesn’t blame the children.

The son of an immigrant from Italy, who oversaw the cleaning and maintenance of the Connecticut state Capitol building in Hartford, Spirito grew up in a house with a strict work ethic. He worked as an elevator boy at the Capitol at age 16.

Though his first interest was music--he got a job playing trumpet in West Point’s marching band following high school graduation--he entered teaching upon graduating from college because, he says, he loved kids and was influenced by an educator, Lou Adazio.

“Lou believed in me,” says Spirito. “He sat me down and told me what my course must be in education--to teach in elementary, junior high school and high school, and then be a principal in all, and then go on to be a superintendent. The guy was so supportive. I felt it, spiritually, too. But I didn’t think any of it was really possible. Lou got to me. He showed me things were possible.

“The truth is, I wrote down these goals that Lou gave me and taped them over my and my wife’s bed. As the years went by, I connected the dots, and each time I got a job, I’d think, ‘My God, I’m doing this.’ ”

Spirito is moved in recounting this and his voice drops:

“He made my life. He died before I was named superintendent, but I walked up to his open coffin and I said: ‘Lou, I’m gonna do it.’ I get chills talking about it.”

Though he has no expectation that every student will find a mentor so formative as to influence a career choice, Spirito lives by his conviction that an essential part of the human condition is to “need somebody.” Those whose need goes unmet, suffer and fail. This is especially true in a person’s youth, he says, because that is when a life course is substantially charted.

Parents, moreover, don’t always fill that need, and Spirito’s view is characteristically pungent on this count: “Sometimes you get a parent who’s ignored the kid all along. I send home letters. We call them up--and nothing.

“Then it comes to graduation time, and the kid is two credits short. That’s when they call and say, ‘Aunt Tillie’s flying in from Peoria, can’t you adjust for the two credits so my son can graduate?’

“No, No, No!” Spirito bellows.

“All parents love their kids, it’s true,” he continues. “But many don’t understand commitment--the seriousness of the responsibility of being a parent. As a result, a parent is not always right.”

Spirito has gained attention over the last year for proposing uniforms in the public schools and spearheading ambitious instruction in character development. He does these things, he says, because he believes so many students have lost their way, and that uniforms send a message that school is a place of work and learning.

He cites an unstated imperative from parents: “Really, they want three things for their kids: ‘Keep ‘em safe, teach ‘em how to read and write, and please teach ‘em not to steal.’ ”

As a result, he says his three top educational priorities are based upon parents’ wishes: character and ethics instruction, emphasis on basic skills classes, and a dress policy that makes it clear that school is a place to “come dressed to learn.”

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Like Spirito, William Studt is the son of hard-working parents. His father ran a creamery and egg distribution business, and Studt himself bused tables and worked as a landscaper part time while a high school student in the Antelope Valley.

Even so, the superintendent of the Oxnard Union High School District is the first to say he was aimless in school but for his love of sports, favorite among them pole vaulting. It took a surprise advocate--the person “from nowhere,” he says--to get him on track.

In his case it was a history teacher, a Mr. Kratz, who accused Studt of “underachieving” and told Studt that he “wouldn’t tolerate it anymore.”

“I remember thinking, as he told me this, ‘Who the hell is he?’ ” Studt says. “But he had this interest in me, and so I sort of bucked up.” Then, when Studt’s achievement skyrocketed, Kratz made a surprise call to Studt’s father to lavish praise. Says Studt, “I was truly elated.”

“Who I am today--it was that guy, that Mr. Kratz. I’d love to meet him again, because he showed a real faith in me. You’ve got to have that.”

He pauses a moment.

“A lot of kids [in Oxnard] come and go. I try to make some connection with them. The kids need that connection.”

But Studt takes care to point out that no program, no curriculum, no administrative edict can bring such a thing about.

“The only way that happens,” he says, “is for an individual to extend some kind of personal invitation.”

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How can a school district extend the personal invitation to hundreds, even thousands, of students?

“It’s true that we can’t solve society’s problems--we’ve probably taken on too great a burden and, to some degree, lost sight,” he says. “But parents can’t or don’t always make that connection, and that’s life. But it’s the students who don’t connect with their parents, for whatever reason, who find their way to alcohol, drugs and trouble.”

Studt cites no clear mandate from parents. Indeed, if there is one subject that continues to frustrate him, it is the community’s choppy involvement in Oxnard public schools.

“The community is central to our success,” he says. “But we’ve become so fragmented. You’ve got families. School administrators. Politicians. The truth is, we need a refocusing of what education is about--and the role of family and community in it.”

He cites last year’s open meetings on gangs as one sad example of community involvement.

The gang presence “lurks below the surface” in and around Oxnard schools, Studt says, and represents a force that’s “always there, where something could happen at any time.” But meetings on understanding and combatting gangs, while starting off with promise, dwindled.

“After nine months, all we were left with at those meetings were cops and teachers and pastors,” he says. “We were, at that point, preaching to the choir. And we’re not going to solve the gang thing without mobilizing the community at large.”

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Fears of trouble in Oxnard schools weighed so heavily on Studt that he instituted weapons searches with the use of metal detectors.

“It just got to the point,” he says, “where I’d leave school and say to myself, ‘Well, we got through this day without a problem. What the hell might happen tomorrow?’ ”

The measure was hotly debated and divisive. Civil libertarians decried rights violations. Studt, on the first day of instituting the program, says he recalls driving to school thinking, “This may explode on me, and it might be the last day of being superintendent.”

Instead he got “about 50 calls” of support from community and business leaders.

Even with such a mandate, Studt says it means nothing to attend safer schools if the students are going without the support of at least one parent, “or anyone else who cares.”

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Growing up, Supt. Gerald Gross of the Conejo Unified School District joined six brothers and a sister working the family’s farm in Michigan. He jokes that “the imperative in my house was to get out of the house . . . and sustain yourself.”

Not a particularly good student and not without his own brushes with trouble-- “I set my grandmother’s woods on fire, but it wasn’t really on purpose”--Gross nonetheless was driven by his family’s ethic of self-reliance and a tiny farming community of uniform values.

It guided him through a stint in the Navy as a cryptographer and then on to college--but only after a key advocate he met along the way helped him sort out the choice for college or seminary training.

He found another mentor in college, who led him to work for a Ph.D. in educational psychology with a specialty in the grueling field of research statistics. Gross went from being someone who says “I never took a book home in high school” to a superintendent who unselfconsciously muses, “I found I loved the structure of statistical projections.”

Among some of the more basic statistical findings he cites are that 80% of Thousand Oaks students go on to some form of college and that the Conejo district’s high schools rank 19th in the state for the amount of advanced placement credit earned by graduates.

Lurking behind statistics, however, are harsher everyday realities.

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Some students, for no apparent reason, don’t connect with school. In Thousand Oaks, where Gross says “we have maximum parent involvement,” an unspecified number of students “just don’t make it.” And this, just as it does with his colleagues elsewhere in the county, vexes him.

Gross is an acolyte of Abraham Lincoln, certainly America’s iconographic symbol of the view that if a person learns the three Rs, he or she will succeed. Yet Gross, whose office is filled with Lincoln memorabilia, only wishes it were so. Society just isn’t what it was in Lincoln’s day.

In recent years, Gross has heard complaints from members of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce that local businesses needed--and in many cases were not getting--graduates with even the most basic proficiencies in language and math. And, indeed, Gross is given to insisting that the three Rs still form “the core” curriculum around which “everything else is secondary.”

But “I hear our kids watch as much TV as do homework,” he says, “and I believe the violence we see--gratuitous violence in TV and film--has to affect the way our kids deal with violence. . . .We’re now facing the demands of forming a character education program, trying to find a way to get it into the curriculum.

‘Are we addressing honesty and civic responsibility?” he asks. “We’re going to have to if you’re going to compete with voucher [proposals] and private schools.”

If traditionalist Gross is perhaps the least enthusiastic among county superintendents for expanding the social mission of the public school system, he does say that the students who are not responding to school pose his greatest problem--and greatest mystery.

“If I had a magic wand on opening day, it would be to unlock the secrets to bring these kids up so that they could compete,” he says. “Too dang many kids just don’t have what it takes--and that’s the parent, the teacher, the big brother who can give them that special push.”

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Andrew Smidt, superintendent of the Ojai Unified School District, is acutely aware that today’s world is not Lincoln’s--or even that of our grandparents.

“We serve a pluralistic society,” he says. “We can’t change values, we only have a shot at values. We have to work with parents and the entire community.”

Descended from a family of seven pharmacists, Smidt grew up in a house with a clear work ethic. From the time he was in grammar school, he worked part time in his dad’s pharmacy. He got married one year out of high school and undertook all of his college training--20 years of it, through his doctorate--in night classes that he paid for himself. That work sensibility, in tandem with his family’s own religious values, are his anchor.

“It’s a value-driven family relationship that says, about most things, ‘You make this work,’ ” he says.

He brings this distilled pragmatism to his approach to education in Ojai. While he says that Ojai places priority on “literacy, numeracy, and citizenship,” he also underscores a trust that the school leadership must have for “explaining why we want to teach what the kids must learn.”

He notes that he visited an assembly line recently and watched a woman pulling newly manufactured white, plastic chair after white, plastic chair out of boxes. That is a doomed job that a robot will soon perform, and Smidt says schools must prepare students for the next level in that process.

“The kid who comes out of [Ojai schools] ought to know how to build the machine that does that job,” he says. “For a student to maintain the lifestyle of his grandfather--in a factory job such as that woman had--is harder than ever. Things are more complex today than when we went to school, and the schools need to respond to that.”

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But in responding, the schools need to know what’s important and what isn’t. That drives Smidt to communicate priorities in a way that emphasizes community values rather than empty schoolhouse rules.

He distinguishes between rules, “which don’t work because they simply get broken,” and norms, “which define the way a community feels about something.”

He cites racism as an example.

If a wide range of Ojai parents and citizens gather to reinforce a community norm that states “we do not tolerate racist behavior,” then students will abide it, Smidt says. A schoolwide edict is hollow by comparison and presents the student only with an expression of authority.

The keys, of course, to a dialogue between school and community are those parents and individuals who care enough to make the difference in a student’s life.

Left without parental and community norms that frame the school setting, Smidt says the student’s only reference is the peer group. In the high school years, says Smidt, “peer group influence is more powerful than anything.”

This year he will go to the community to help him place emphasis on: attendance, homework, part-time employment that does not interfere with school or extracurricular activities, involvement in extracurricular activities, and zero tolerance for racism.

His appeal to community leaders will be simple.

“Will you help us enforce this?”

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Mary Beth Wolford, superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District, is the classic high achiever.

“You like to please your parents,” she says, “so I met their expectations.”

Raised in Oakland, Wolford won admission at 16 to both Stanford and UC Berkeley, choosing the latter because, as a working-class kid, she feared being “out of place” in Palo Alto.

She majored in fine art and worked 25 hours a week to pay for her schooling. She was a student government leader, president of the pan-Hellenic society overseeing all Berkeley sororities, and otherwise the kind of student drawn to being one of the best and the brightest.

She started out teaching that way, quickly getting assigned to the talented and gifted classes. But she had a disabled child of her own. She says it was her own child who helped her temper her intellect with compassion.

In Ohio in the 1960s, Wolford founded a special school for disabled students. While she cites her father as a great advocate of her own academic interests, she credits her daughter as being the real character “mentor” who made the difference.

In breaking educational ground on behalf of her disabled daughter and others like her, Wolford says, “I returned to teaching and education with a very different perspective.”

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The teaching of the disabled is by definition individual. Its success turns on individual connection-- instilling the belief in the student that he or she has value and promise.

It’s a model for all education, Wolford has come to believe.

Wolford established notable new programs for the disabled in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District in Northern California, before becoming a school administrator. That experience tapped a natural business acumen, she says.

Indeed, she recently scored what she calls her “greatest coup,” the deeding to the Simi district of 1,850 Wood Ranch acres by a developer in default to the district. The land, if developed, will produce a revenue stream in a district scraping for funds, Wolford says.

As a result, she sees herself as the Simi district’s “developer,” her eyes constantly trained on revenue and the budget.

Yet Wolford is quick to join her Ventura County counterparts in also citing her desire to promote more parental involvement in the schools.

Toward that end, she calls the effort to make connections at every level--among employees as well as between students and their advocates--her “Bridges to Understanding” program. She even conducts off-site conferences under that banner.

Just so nobody forgets it, she has placed upon her desk a model of the Golden Gate Bridge, tangible and recognizable symbol of the mentality that seeks, above all, to connect.

The bridge in Wolford’s office is intended to convey a message not unlike the message of a plaque that Joe Spirito keeps in his office:

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”