This Compton Grad Made It, but Many Don’t

You’ve read a lot of negative accounts of life at Compton High School. Now meet Monique Boyce, 18, Compton High class of ‘97, currently a freshman at Stanford University.

She had been in the Compton schools since the fifth grade, educated in a system that has been victimized by mismanagement, incompetence and years of disregard for the welfare of students. The students are predominantly Latinos and African Americans who, for the most part, come from poor and working-class homes.

Monique was helped by good teachers and survived the bad ones. She learned calculus, science, Spanish and all the other subjects that got her into college, while taking part in school activities, including editing the yearbook.

That experience, however, was ruined when the annual wasn’t published. “The school was in debt to the publishing company,” she said. “I was mad,” she said, shaking her head at the still-bitter memory.

” I was mad. But I got over it.”

In her senior year, Monique fielded scholarship offers from Columbia, Yale, Berkeley and others in America’s collegiate top tier before settling on Stanford.

She relates these accomplishments without bragging, in such a calm, matter-of-fact manner that, if I had not been familiar with Compton High School, I would have had no idea of the difficult road she has traveled.

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I met Monique through the principal of Compton High, Billie Coleman.

We were walking through the campus, now slowly being restored after years of neglect. I had been thinking how hard it must be for young women and men to move from this school to college, or to a job that requires skills. I asked Coleman to put me in contact with one of the Compton kids who are now in college. He suggested Monique.

Monique is a tall, pretty, self-possessed young woman. She was home for Christmas, relaxing after finishing up a seasonal job in Compton. She also works at Stanford. We talked in the living room of her family home in a middle-class Compton neighborhood of carefully tended single-family homes.

I asked her about life at Compton High. Did she feel safe on campus?

At first, Monique said, “we used to have race riots between the black and Chicano kids.”

But a former principal, Edward Gilliam Jr., cracked down. “Mr. Gilliam really improved it,” Monique said. “He was really strict on the students. He was strict on the teachers. He kicked a lot of kids out. . . . And you have to look at other schools. They have a lot worse things happening. I still go up there to visit.”

Academically, she said, “I think people would be surprised at how many kids are high achievers.” But, she said, “the educational system is not that great. I think that if you’re a kid who is not serious about school, you’re not going to make it through Compton [and] you’re not going to do very well somewhere else after. If you go to the Compton schools, you have to be one who really cares about your education.

“Some of the teachers weren’t very good. My English teacher in high school was very good. In middle school, sometimes we had substitutes every day. Our algebra teacher left two weeks before the end of the semester when we were going to take our tests.”

When Monique transferred to the Compton schools in the fifth grade, she was put in a gifted program with other potential high achievers and remained on that track through high school. “The people in my class were the people who were going to college,” she said.

Her classes always had textbooks. “But in other classes,” she said, “they didn’t have enough books. They had to borrow them.”

And “we didn’t have many labs, only a few. I can remember doing only two in chemistry the whole year.”

Monique finished Compton High with mostly A’s. “On the SATs, I did OK,” she said, “not very high, but they were the highest at my school. I wasn’t satisfied, because I knew that other people in other places had much higher scores.”

At Stanford, Monique, who is African American, moved into a dorm that is 50% black, with the rest of the students of other races. Her roommate is white. The dorm atmosphere, she said, “helped me get a lot of friends early on.”

Academically, Monique worried that she couldn’t compete with the other Stanford freshman. She found that students from more affluent schools were ahead of her in math and aspects of science such as molecular biology.

“I was nervous, because I expected the other students to know more than I did and that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them,” she said. “It didn’t turn out that way. I tried hard to do the work. I thought if I tried hard, I could do it,” a feeling that was reinforced when she received a B-minus on her first college paper.

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Some of her high school classmates are attending other universities, proof that there is a path from Compton to college. The tragedy is that so few travel it.

Monique started in a gifted class in elementary school. But what about the smart kids who were overlooked and not placed on a fast track?

Moreover, Monique is a self-starter, determined to attend college since her early days in elementary school. She wasn’t stopped by poor teachers, a shortage of lab time, racial fights on the campus or the incompetence of a district that can’t even pay the yearbook publisher. But most kids, even the gifted, need more support.