San Diego High School Principal Honored

A San Diego high school principal credited with helping reduce the dropout rate in her ethnically diverse school was named Principal of the Year on Thursday by the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals.

The honor comes with a $10,000 grant for Doris Alvarez, 60, principal at Hoover High School since 1987. She plans to use the money to help her students start their own businesses.

Under Alvarez, the school’s dropout rate has declined sharply, the school has opened a health clinic and the percentage of students going to college has climbed to 50%.

“We just don’t let our students drop out,” Alvarez said by telephone from Washington, where she had gone to accept the award. “If they don’t fit in one program, we have night classes or weekend classes. We have all kinds of ways to have them make it through the system.”

Located in a blue-collar section of East San Diego, Hoover High has 1,900 students. The student body is 22% African American, 51% Latino, 20% Indochinese and 6% white. Many of the students are recent immigrants and more than 30 languages are spoken at the school.

When Alvarez came to the school, the dropout rate was 13%. Now it is 2.3%, compared with the national rate of 5.3%.

“Schools like ours can work when you marshal the community, the teachers and the students, and everyone is moving in the same direction,” Alvarez said.

The Principal of the Year award is given annually by the principals’ association in partnership with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

Alvarez has been an administrator in the San Diego school system since 1981. She holds a doctorate in education from Claremont Graduate School and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Diego State.

When Hoover High set out to establish a health clinic, the effort was nearly scuttled by opposition from the bishop of the San Diego Roman Catholic Diocese, the late Leo Maher. Maher opposed the clinic because he believed it would dispense birth control information and make abortion referrals. Alvarez overcame Maher’s opposition through a compromise that moved birth control information off campus.

MetLife official Gail F. Praslick said that Alvarez, along with facing the daunting tasks common to all principals, also had to face “added challenges--poverty, a high crime rate [and] a vastly multilingual student body.”

Praslick added that Alvarez “takes controversial risks for the benefit of her school.”

Timothy Dyer, executive director of the principals association, said that before Alvarez, Hoover High was “the kind of place you see in movies about decrepit urban schools infused with gangs and apathetic students.”