Despite All Odds, Poly Still Excels

By DOUGLAS P. SHUIT

March 26, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A group of musicians is shooting the breeze at V.I.P. Records, a hangout for rappers across the street from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, when Poly’s cross-country team runs by.

“You never would have seen that 20 years ago,” says Kirk Jones, a former National Football League player who graduated from Poly in 1984.

The group at the record store is African American. Nearly all of the two dozen runners on the cross-country team are white. Jones points to the team with pride. He knows that 20 years ago, white athletes would have considered streets near the school too dangerous to train on.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, racial tensions threatened to rip Poly apart. Fistfights and rock and bottle throwing became all too common, and as many as 500 students fought in the school’s quad on three successive days in 1972. That incident forced authorities to station a dozen police officers on the campus.

Until then, Poly had enjoyed a great reputation, graduating a long list of famous alums: tennis star Billie Jean King, USC football legend Morley Drury, mezzo soprano Marilyn Horne, singer Thelma Houston, Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill, band leader Spike Jones and pro football stars Gene Washington and Earl McCullouch.

But a generation ago white flight and Long Beach’s changing demographics pushed the 103-year-old school to the edge of closure. Sitting in an ethnically mixed neighborhood plagued by drugs, gangs and prostitution, Poly seemed to have every reason to fail.

Instead, it is succeeding. Spectacularly.

The city rallied behind Poly, and has helped make it a shining example of how education can work in a tough inner-city high school in which 57% of students come from families on welfare.

The main problem earlier was racial tension rather than academic performance, said Long Beach Unified Supt. Carl Cohn, once a counselor at Poly. The clashes that once tarnished the school now seem like a distant memory.

Poly’s best students have their pick of offers from prestigious universities. Its sports teams rack up championships in cross-country, track, football and basketball. Even some of its rappers have moved on to fame--and notoriety.

No other high school in California produces such a combination of high achievers in the classroom and on athletic fields, allowing Poly to live up to its motto: “Home of Scholars and Champions.”

Poly ranks 19th among the nation’s high schools in students qualifying to take Advanced Placement tests.

Sixty-six graduates were accepted at UCLA last year--more than from any other high school. Other graduates enrolled at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and more than three dozen top universities.

The success of Poly’s athletic teams has been a constant through both the good times and the bad. It has sent 40 players to the National Football League, more than any other high school. Its cross-country team and boys and girls track teams captured state titles last year. Its football team--ranked second in the country last season by USA Today--and last year’s basketball team won championships in the state’s largest conference, the 508-school California Interscholastic Federation-Southern Section.

“It’s amazing how this school has endured over time as our flagship high school,” Cohn said.

Long Beach Poly draws its students from a densely populated area near Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, said to be home to 10,000 high school-age teenagers. The waiting list for admission is long. The pressure from frustrated parents is constant.

“It’s outrageous that the school district can’t find the money to make room for more students,” said Suzanne Schirmer, the mother of two eighth-graders, as she left a crowded admissions office recently. “I just came from a roomful of parents who want to get their kids in Poly. They said it’s hopeless. When we have kids packed in like this, I don’t know how they can learn.”

But they do.

Poly’s success is a direct result of a community rolling up its sleeves, putting aside its fears and refusing to watch a proud, tradition-filled school die.

A key step in turning things around came in 1969 with the formation of the Poly Community Interracial Council, composed of parents, alumni, students and teachers.

In sessions with raw emotions careening off the walls, council members would “fuss and fight,” but came up with innovative programs, said Mel Collins, Poly’s co-principal for student services and security.

Some council members “were movers and shakers in the city of Long Beach who took Poly High School very personal,” he said.

One of the group’s most innovative ideas led to a human relations program--now more than 20 years old--known as “the Poly experience.”

Groups of up to 130 10th-graders each year go to “Poly North,” a YMCA campground in Big Bear, on three or four successive weekends to mix with students of different cultures.

“People thought 10th-graders needed an orientation to Poly High School to be better able to deal with the diverse nature of its student population,” said Collins, who ran the camp in the late 1970s.

“What we do is take away outside influences, like family and friends, cars and clothes,” he said. “The playing field is leveled. By the end of the weekend, extraordinary things happen. It seems to have a very eye-opening, lasting impact.”

Magnet Programs Make Academics Shine

School officials also launched two magnet programs for gifted and academically talented students that are widely credited as instrumental in Poly’s turnaround.

One magnet is the Center for International Commerce, a four-year program focusing on global studies and international trade, with a heavy emphasis on languages such as Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

The other is the Program of Additional Curricular Experiences, whose 700 students take Advanced Placement tests each year with a pass rate averaging between 70% and 80%. Those students accounted for the lion’s share of Poly’s UCLA admissions last year.

The magnet programs, Cohn said, “were clearly designed to bring in white youngsters from other parts of the city.”

But they yielded other benefits as well.

Poly administrators say the magnets created a form of “public prep school.” Those programs also are believed to have raised academic performance for the entire student body.

“When students see other students succeeding, they think it’s cool to succeed in the classroom,” said Shawn Ashley, Poly’s co-principal in charge of instruction and curriculum.

Poly also divided its student body into “academies”: fine arts, business and math and science among them. As a result, for four years students share the same teachers and counselors and attend classes with like-minded peers.

“When you do that, you make a school of 4,200 seem more like a school of 600,” Ashley said.

In a bold experiment with its school day, Poly adopted a system of block scheduling. Under the system--originally designed only for the gifted programs--students attend three 90- to 95-minute classes a day on alternating days.

The longer classes, initially controversial, fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that public school students become restless after 55 minutes or so.

“They said our kids would never sit still that long,” said Greta McGree-Budai, who administers the Center for International Commerce magnet. “We proved them wrong.”

State education codes permitted most of the changes, but the block scheduling had to be negotiated with the teachers union.

Today, the racial polarization that once threatened the school’s future has all but disappeared. The student body is 40% Asian American--many from immigrant Cambodian families. African Americans make up 21%, whites 17%, Latinos 12%, Filipinos 8% and Native Americans and Pacific Islanders 2%.

That differs from the city’s overall makeup, which is 39% white, 29% Latino, 16% African American and 15% Asian American and Pacific Islander. But it is similar to the city’s other high schools and reflects the diversity of Long Beach’s younger population.

Such racial diversity and the stiff athletic competition attracted San Diego Padre star Tony Gwynn, even though he had to get up before dawn to catch a school bus.

“I remember I was very concerned,” Gwynn said. “The year before, someone had been shot on a bus.”

But Poly has been spared that kind of violence in recent years. People of different cultures have learned to pull together, school officials say. Members of large Latino and Asian gangs attend the school, but police say the campus has had no serious incidents in the past few years.

“School administrators do a lot of things internally to make it safe, and we do a lot of things externally to make it safe,” Long Beach Police Sgt. Joe Battle said. He said uniformed city and school district police officers, on-campus faculty monitors and a plainclothes student intervention team all help keep the campus peaceful.

One example of Poly’s cross-cultural exposure is the enthusiasm sophomore Reggie Butler, an African American starting linebacker on the football team, shows for writing Japanese characters.

“I’ve already learned two of the three sets of characters,” said Butler, 16, who carries a 3.7 grade point average in one of Poly’s two magnet programs. “I learned two sets my freshman year, as well as basic sentence patterns and how to hold a basic conversation. This year I’m refining my conversational abilities.”

Poly also boasts an outstanding science curriculum.

In a thank you note to the school, former student Lee Koffler said a chemistry class he took at Harvard, taught by a Nobel Prize winner, “covered the same material that Mrs. [Joyce] O’Donnell’s class had covered.”

“I felt that going to school at Poly gave me a good taste of life in the ‘real’ world. Indeed, it is a rare experience to go to an inner city public school with more than 4,000 students; it is even more rare to receive an outstanding education in such a place.”

Poly’s exterior and the nearby neighborhood of run-down motels and liquor stores give little hint of the academic excellence and the talented musicians and athletes behind the sprawling campus’ iron gates and chain-link fences, some topped by coiled razor wire.

More than three dozen football coaches have visited this school year, salivating over prospects such as star quarterback Chris Lewis, a junior who carries a 3.5 grade point average in the Center for International Commerce magnet program.

Junior basketball forward Shea Anderson scored 1,300 on his SAT. A member of last year’s team, guard Michael McDonald, now plays for Stanford. Another former Poly honor student, Tyus Edney, was a star guard who played on UCLA’s 1995 national championship team.

“It’s a really big thing with my family, the grades,” Lewis said. His sister Robyn, also an outstanding student at Poly, is a freshman on Stanford’s national championship volleyball team.

“When you recruit from Long Beach Poly, you know that academically they are pretty solid,” said UCLA track coach Jeanette Bolden. Her team includes Poly grad Andrea Anderson, a biochemistry major and the defending Pac-10 champion in the 200 meters.

Bunmi Ogunleye, 17, carries a 3.8 grade point average and is the defending state long jump champion. Ogunleye, whose parents are from Nigeria, has completed three years of Japanese, is taking Advanced Placement calculus and will enroll at UCLA next fall.

As well known as Poly is for its academic and athletic excellence, it has also produced some of the most popular names in rap music, including Snoop Doggy Dogg, Daz, the Twinz, Nate Dogg and Steady Pace, who all got early tastes of the power of their music during impromptu rap sessions on campus.

“We were all students then, trying to learn the music scene,” Steady Pace, 25, recalled while hanging out recently at V.I.P.

The third-largest school district in the state, Long Beach is taking steps to duplicate Poly’s academic success at its eight other high schools. But Cohn said the process could take years.

“Parents and the business community expect a good academic program at each,” he said.

Those parents lucky enough to get their youngsters into Poly are happy. Larry Jackson, president and general manager of Long Beach Transit, said he was warned about Poly several years ago when he was considering high schools for his academically gifted son, Dustin.

“You hear a lot about the neighborhood it’s in,” said Jackson, who is white.

But Dustin enrolled in Poly anyway. The upshot: straight A’s all four years and graduation with a weighted 4.62 grade point average. Dustin also was one of only two students in Southern California that year to score a perfect 1,600 on his SATs.

Dustin is now at Stanford, majoring in physics. Jackson said his son never had the slightest bit of trouble outside the classroom either.

“The most valuable part of his experience at Poly was that his friends, who we all grew to love, were of every creed and ethnicity you could imagine,” Jackson said. “We’ve had an absolutely terrific experience.”

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Profile of Long Beach Polytechnic

Polytechnic High School opened in 1895 when it was called Long Beach High School. It had four different campuses before changing its name to Polytechnic in 1911 and settling in at 16th St. and Atlantic Avenue. The school was destroyed in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and rebuilt in increments during the 1930s. From its earliest days, Long Beach Poly has educated a long list of students who went on to prominence in various fields. A sampling follows with year of graduation where available.

ATHLETES:

* Billie Jean King, tennis champion. (1961).

* John Rambo, Olympic bronze medalist, high jump. (1961).

* Carl Weathers, pro football player, actor, Apollo Creed in “Rocky.” (1965).

* Tony Gwynn, San Diego Padre outfielder, eight-time National League batting champion. (1977).

* Mark Carrier, Chicago Bear all-Pro defensive back. (1986).

* Willie McGinest, New England Patriot all-Pro defensive lineman. (1990).

* Tyus Edney, Boston Celtics guard, led UCLA’s 1995 NCAA basketball champions. (1991).

ENTERTAINERS:

* Spike Jones, bandleader (1929).

* Van Heflin, Academy Award-winning actor. (1926).

* Marilyn Horne, Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprana. (1951).