Growth Checkup : King/Drew Medical Magnet School Hopes Expansion Won’t Spoil Success

Principal Ernie Roy wanders through the Spartan row of bungalows that passes for a campus at the King/Drew Medical Magnet School and ponders the question that will dog him this summer and into the fall: Will success spoil King/Drew?

In its 14 years, the Watts-area magnet school has become an anomaly among inner city schools: A campus where students beg to skip recess to work on their math assignments. Where a graduate who does not go on to college is the exception, rather than the rule. Where nary a gun or knife has ever been confiscated.

But its achievements are firmly grounded in two realities that are soon to change: its small size--220 students, each known personally by the school’s 10 teachers--and the opportunity for every pupil to spend part of each week at the neighboring hospital and research university.

Recently the magnet school won its long battle to replace makeshift classrooms with a permanent King/Drew High School of Medicine and Science by fall 1988, which means more students--1,700 to be exact--and less access to the hospital.

Over the summer, the panel of educators, parents and community activists who pushed so hard for the campus to grow will try to devise ways to prevent that expansion from wiping out the very essence of King/Drew. And it will be no easy task.

“Right now, the teachers come to me . . . [to] let me know that maybe a student’s mother has put him out of the house,” said Antoinette Norris, the school’s only counselor. “Will we be able to maintain the intimacy and the knowledge of the problems of our students? It’s a concern and a problem--with size comes an anonymity.”

King/Drew opened in 1982 with 30 students, among the first of the school district’s magnets and the only one of that early group to specialize in preparing students for medical careers. From the beginning, it had a close partnership with the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center next door, which had been built as part of the city’s recovery plan after the 1965 Watts riots.

Each student today spends several hours a week at the hospital, working in virtually every wing, from gerontology to gynecology. Many of them also do research in labs at the hospital’s adjacent research institution, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine.

The hospital experience is crucial to the magnet school’s success, broadening students’ perspectives as well as tempering their youthful enthusiasm with reality.

Sophomore Doreen Ramos travels more than an hour and a half each day from her North Hills home to get to King/Drew. She chose the school because she wanted to be a psychiatrist. But her experience working in the hospital’s emergency room--coupled with her growing awareness of how long she would have to go to school for that career--has made her think that maybe she’ll become a physician’s assistant instead.

“It’s been fascinating,” she said excitedly of her months in the emergency room. “I’ve seen gunshot wounds, stabbing wounds, I’ve seen a lady go into a seizure. They sometimes make me diagnose too, by the symptoms, and once I was right. Gallstones.”

What the hospital taught her about herself influenced her career choice as well. She knows now that she does not want to work in a respiratory therapy unit because when she was assigned there, she found she was sickened by watching patients gag.

Time at the hospital persuaded another sophomore, Domineke Green, to set her sights on a college degree in hospital administration instead of medical school. “I think hospitals need more leaders, someone to organize things,” Green said. “I can organize anything.”

But once the planned expansion is complete, it will be hard to give students that same experience because the hospital cannot absorb 1,700 students.

Roy believes it might be possible to replicate those experiences on a larger campus if the school forges similar partnerships with other hospitals and universities around Los Angeles.

He also is developing a “cluster” proposal for the school, which would group students by interests and then rotate them into various work sites. The new school will add a scientific emphasis, along with medicine, which might allow liaisons with research institutions.

Roy has been among those pushing for the $68-million expansion, which was approved by the school board in late May after years of false starts, each marked by a groundbreaking ceremony on the vacant lot around the corner from the school.

But getting his wish means that, beyond the subtleties of making large seem small, he must fill 1,500 additional desks.

The school has only 87 students now on its waiting list, and 100 more for whom King/Drew was second choice, after Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet, the 1,600-student school that opened six years ago at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. The district’s third medical magnet is in the San Fernando Valley, at Van Nuys High School.

The increased offerings in science at the future King/Drew high school may attract more students, Roy said, and the school probably will launch a student recruitment campaign next year. The school has not recruited since its early years, but word-of-mouth has kept the small campus at its maximum enrollment.

Increasing the ethnic diversity of the student body could prove a more vexing problem. Magnet schools were created in the late 1970s as part of the district’s court-ordered plan to better integrate schools. District guidelines call for their student populations to range between 30% and 40% white.

Although students come to King/Drew from all over the city, more of them are from the inner city than anywhere else and about 98% are minorities--more than two-thirds of them black--while fewer than 2% are white.

“King/Drew is one of the best-kept secrets in the L.A. Unified School District and I think location is a big part of it,” said Norris, the counselor. “People hear we’re in Watts and they just start assuming. Parents will say, ‘I don’t want my children down there.’ ”

Then there is the question of whether the prospect of hard work will attract or repel prospective students. Unlike magnet schools for gifted students, King/Drew does not require a certain grade-point average or test score for entrance. But once students are accepted, the school pushes them hard, requiring a full academic load and up to five hours of homework nightly.

“We have students who’ve come here with Cs and Ds and the first semester is quite a shock,” Roy said. “But they recognize the pressure is on here to succeed, they do homework during lunch and pretty soon they’re getting Cs and Bs.”

All students take Algebra II, for instance, and many take more advanced courses. For the first time next year, math teacher Ernest Ramsey will teach two advanced placement courses, in statistics and in calculus, which offer students the possibility of college credit. To prepare students, Ramsey taught the prerequisites--trigonometry and math analysis--after school this spring, and eight students stayed to take the extra class.

The attitude at King/Drew epitomizes an increasingly popular philosophy in education reform: Set the bar high and students will stretch to reach it. When Ramsey’s morning class ended one day in June, a student rose from his desk to ask whether he could work through recess and, if his next period’s teacher agreed, for another hour as well.

“Strong students put a demand on us to offer a strong program,” Ramsey commented as the boy returned to his seat.

While enrollment of Los Angeles students at California universities and colleges has been declining in recent years, according to a recent state report, college attendance among King/Drew alumni has risen steeply. All but four of last year’s 67 graduating seniors were headed to college, the vast majority to four-year institutions.

As head of the curriculum committee for the new school, Ramsey is charged with figuring out ways to spread academic motivation to a larger student body and teaching corps. When asked how that will occur, Ramsey raised his eyebrows: “It’s going to be a big challenge, and I don’t have any ideas yet.”

The magnet school has not consistently tracked post-graduation progress of its former students, but it has anecdotal evidence in the form of telephone calls from those who went on to medical school and other health careers. Tracking graduates is one of Roy’s goals for the coming years, he said.

Penelope Velasco, 25, is among those who made it to medical school. Currently home with her family in Pacoima for the summer, Velasco will return for her second year at Creighton University in Nebraska. She said her hospital work in high school was “very encouraging” and caused her to switch her emphasis from surgery to obstetrics because she so enjoyed working with new mothers and their babies.

Another former student is back as a substitute teacher at the magnet school.

At 26, Robert Jones has an English degree from UC Berkeley and is working on a master’s degree in psychology at Mt. St. Mary’s college, with hopes of continuing through the doctoral program there.

Jones fell short of his goal of being a doctor because his grades at Berkeley were not high enough to get into medical school. Still, he credits the magnet school with giving him both the confidence to try to become a doctor and the resourcefulness to find another avenue when he did not succeed.

The magnet school broadened the perspective of the Mid-Wilshire teenager, who had always wanted to go into medicine, but had no doctors in his family or neighborhood to serve as mentors.

“What we got here was special. It’s like a family,” he said, scanning the drab campus as though it were nirvana. At the new school, “there are going to be a lot of great things here for the students. I’m glad for them. . . . But the smallness is what really brought the program out for me, and I’m not sure how they’re going to make that happen.”