With Nowhere to Go but Up, a School Learns It Has Friends

Competition may be about putting forth your best effort and ignoring the result, but what do you do when the state says your school is the worst in California?

If you’re Paula Thayer, you say it might have been the best thing that ever happened to you.

“We were feeling very ashamed,” said Thayer, principal at Saul Martinez Elementary School, a campus of immigrant farm workers’ children in the far-flung desert of Riverside County. “But all these people lifted us up.”

The people she’s talking about are the dozens of well-wishers who have offered encouragement, money and time since the school came in dead last this year in California’s first ranking of public schools.

They are the people who drive miles across the desert, sometimes getting lost among the grape fields, to help children learn to read. Some sent checks. An energy company sent $5,000. A Tustin boy used his birthday money to buy books for the school.

A closet is now stuffed with new school uniforms. The library is filling up with donated books. And there’s a new attitude on campus.

Test scores confirm that something good is happening. Coachella Valley Unified School District Supt. Colleen Gaynes said that Stanford 9 results due for release later this month show that the students at Saul Martinez Elementary have made “significant improvement” in reading and math.

“I’m very proud of the teachers, students and community,” Gaynes said.

Equally proud are parents such as Israel Alejo.

“You can tell the difference between before and now,” said Alejo, a recreation worker at the Salton Sea. “To me, it went from being a day care to a school.”

Alejo and Gaynes credit not only the efforts of the community, but also Thayer and her no-nonsense leadership style.

The outpouring of support “gives you an absolute faith in human beings,” said Thayer, 60, a tall, outgoing woman who runs a tidy campus surrounded by grape fields where her students’ parents can be seen picking in the triple-digit heat. “People that didn’t even know about us cared about us.”

Thayer is emotional as she describes, over the roar of a straining air conditioner, the changes at her school. But she was shedding real tears in January, when the state released its first Academic Performance Index. Designed to finally give the public a definitive measure of the state’s schools, it ranked 4,807 public elementary campuses. At the bottom was the Coachella Valley school for kindergarten through grade 3.

At the time, Thayer tried to point out the challenge that teachers face every day trying to help poor students compete with the children of Stanford professors who attend the state’s top-ranked school in Palo Alto.

Many districts cite a large number of immigrant children as a reason for low test scores. But its remote desert location--desolate, ash-colored mountains on one side, marching columns of squat grapevines on the other, a sky scorched to the washed-out blue of an old beach umbrella above--makes Mecca one of the most forlorn destinations in the United States. Those who work the fields are often the least sophisticated of border crossers.

The children here not only don’t speak English, many don’t even speak mainstream Spanish, instead conversing in a dialect called Tarasco.

When Thayer dressed up as Mother Goose as part of the school’s reading program, she got quizzical looks. The students were unfamiliar with nursery rhymes. She said not one had paints or crayons at home, if they had a home. Some slept in cars, others under the stars.

But at a time when taxpayers are tired of hearing about failure in the classroom and excuses from educators, Thayer wasn’t sure anyone would care about the challenges her staff faces.

When she arrived on campus in January 1999, she imposed a firm new style of discipline and instructional methods at the school, where one-third of the teachers are working with emergency credentials.

The students file by in straight lines to the cafeteria and to recess. There is no litter or graffiti on the 2-year-old campus, made up entirely of portable classrooms. Each classroom now has a “word wall,” a large list of English words stuck on a board. It’s basic vocabulary-building, and Thayer made sure every teacher started one.

An idealist whose small office is adorned with a signed portrait of Cesar Chavez, Thayer has a style that is all about hugs and nothing about coddling.

“We’re very strict here,” Thayer said. Her attitudes are based on her strong belief that poverty need not be “a life sentence.” She also is convinced that compassion is too valuable to be tarnished by the sort of pity that accepts failure.

“We don’t feel sorry for anybody,” she said. “Despite the fact that the students go back and speak Spanish at home, these are not going to be excuses for anybody.”

But Saul Martinez Elementary has a lot going against it that has nothing to do with teaching methods. The school district went bankrupt several years ago and was put into receivership. The district is still paying $1 million a year on its debt, which means there is $1 million less for classroom essentials. At one point, funds were so short that class sizes were increased to 45 students.

In January, the Academic Performance Index was announced, and it all seemed to get worse.

“We did a lot of crying,” said Thayer.

Benefiting From the Kindness of Strangers

But then the letters started arriving. They came from doctors, from educators, from the successful daughters of immigrants, all bearing the same message: Keep trying; don’t give up on those kids.

Thayer has preserved the notes on a large poster board.

“We knew we worked hard,” she said. “But academically we were struggling. All these people uplifted us every day.”

One of the people responsible for the new attitude around campus is Marilyn Glick, a former aide to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands). Retired and living in Del Webb’s Sun City community in Palm Desert, Glick read about the struggles at Saul Martinez and felt she had to do something. She called Thayer and offered to volunteer.

Soon, Glick and friends Martha Janis and Selma Sherman organized a program called Read to Me, in which Sun City retirees journeyed 20 miles to work with students.

It hasn’t all been smooth going. Glick got lost the first time she made the trek. But she and Janis, who owned a furniture business in Los Angeles, persevered and have signed up 12 other Sun City residents to help next year.

For Glick, 65, the effort has been both a labor of love and a way of paying back. “A lot of us have parents or grandparents who came from Europe,” she said.

The relationship between the poor children and the retirees has made for some strange sights.

There was the day the women showed up with Nordstrom sacks filled with Ziploc bags full of cookies. One girl sat puzzled because she had never seen a Ziploc bag and didn’t know how to open it.

Then there was the time they brought in designer clothes for the students. “They had these shirts with polo ponies on them,” Thayer said, laughing. “My own kids didn’t even get that.”

The school’s ranking was a blow.

But Thayer she used it to motivate the staff.

The staff drew a giant thermometer and posted it in the cafeteria to record the number of books read by the students this year. The goal was 50,000. “When we got there, we decided to keep going,” Thayer said. They finished at 80,859.

To recognize the school’s accomplishment, Gov. Gray Davis sent a $5,000 check.

“We’ll spend it in the library,” Thayer said as school drew to a close this week.

The new Academic Performance Index will be released later this summer, Thayer said. Everyone who came together to support the school will learn then how far public spirit can carry the teachers and students of this inappropriately named spot on the desert.

“I would be very surprised,” Thayer said, “if we’re still the lowest in California.”