New Team, New Hope for School

When Sylvia Rousseau began visiting Locke High School this fall, she found students running through hallways during class and playing hooky in the middle of the day. She found teachers griping about incessant noise and fights.

Rousseau, the “local superintendent” in charge of schools in much of South Los Angeles, hoped that the atmosphere would improve at the campus near Watts. When they didn’t, she took radical action: She reassigned the principal and an assistant principal and moved in her own staff.

She transferred troublemakers to other schools. Her team and Locke staffers enforced relentless tardy sweeps. They made their presence known throughout campus, shepherding stragglers to class and talking with students about their responsibility for getting an education.

Six weeks later, Locke appears to be a calmer place. Halls are mostly quiet during class time. Far fewer students can be found wandering the campus and jumping fences, and the number of fights is way down.

Rousseau’s was an extreme approach to an extreme problem--one that extends far beyond the Locke campus. Nationwide, urban high school campuses are struggling to maintain order and discipline even as they face enormous pressures to improve their academic standing.

“How could I look at this school and not do anything?” said Rousseau, a former high school principal. “I had to decide whether we were an employment agency or an educational institution.”

Some teachers are skeptical, wondering if the calm will remain. Others complain that Rousseau hasn’t addressed deep-rooted problems, including a revolving door of new teachers, filthy bathrooms and a lack of basic supplies, such as up-to-date textbooks.

But many on campus say the superintendent has dramatically changed a school where chaos had long been the norm.

“It just seems peaceful now,” said senior Rosa Cuevas. “It’s not as hectic as it was last year.”

Adding to the chaotic atmosphere were some heated controversies. Last summer, students protested random daily searches for weapons at the school. In a pending federal lawsuit, eight students accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of violating their constitutional protections by searching them without reasonable suspicion.

District officials defended the practice, saying it keeps schools safe.

The school ranks in the bottom of the state’s school performance ratings and is among 10 low-performing schools in Los Angeles whose test scores have triggered visits from state evaluators.

Evaluators found the same problems at Locke that Rousseau had noticed. Their report on Locke is due next month.

Rousseau began visiting the campus when school started in September. She returned half a dozen times over the next two months. Not seeing any improvement, she made what she described as an anguished decision to change the leadership. In early November, she reassigned Annie Webb, principal since 1995, to an administrative post in Gardena. Assistant Principal Angel Perea also was moved, to Bethune Middle School in South Los Angeles.

Rousseau, who moved her office to Locke for several weeks, said the moves were not meant as discipline and involved no pay cuts. Instead, she cited a Board of Education policy that allows administrators to be transferred if the moves are in the “best interest of the educational program of the district.”

Reached at her new job, Webb declined to comment other than to say, “I need some time.”

Perea could not be reached for comment.

However, the administrators union sharply criticized Rousseau’s decisions, saying she singled out individuals for problems borne by whole school communities.

“I think sometimes the district, under the guise of accountability, looks for a scapegoat,” said Dan Isaacs, an official with the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles union.

Isaacs described Webb as a dedicated principal. “She’s an extremely capable, conscientious and hard-working person and has tried to bring leadership to Locke over a number of years,” Isaacs said. “Running a high school in an urban community is not an easy task nowadays. To blame a single individual is not a fair measure.”

Rousseau said she doesn’t blame Webb solely. But she believed that it was time for a change.

“Sometimes schools just get sick,” she said. “You have to do some extraordinary treatment.”

L.A. Unified Supt. Roy Romer agreed, saying he fully supports Rousseau’s remedies. “There was not enough discipline, too much graffiti, simply not enough order,” he said of Locke. “Most of all, there was no message school-wide that ‘We’re here to learn.’ ”

Rousseau’s “treatment” has been anything but easy. A week after the tardy sweeps began, students set paper inside a cabinet on fire in the tardy room; the fire was put out. But the new measures appear to be working. The volume of traffic in halls and the quad is way down, teachers and students said.

“Dramatic is an understatement as far as the change in the numbers of students we see in the halls during class,” said Zeus Cubias, a math teacher.

If Rousseau has succeeded at anything, teachers say, it has been to instill higher expectations in a school that outsiders tend to write off as a failure.

“There are massive amounts of potential here,” said Lomes Hamraj, a physics and computer teacher. “There are kids who want to learn. There are teachers who want to teach. The system is not doing justice to them.”

Rousseau has tapped Gail Garrett, a longtime Locke teacher who has spent the last two years as an associate principal at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale, as Locke’s new principal. Garrett says she intends to build on Rousseau’s work.

“My expectations are on the ceiling,” said Garrett, who starts in January. “I won’t accept anything less.”