Ailing School, Bold Achiever

Late Thursday afternoon, 17-year-old Ana Olazava, first in her class at Compton’s Dominguez High School, will stand on the weathered athletic field and deliver her valedictory speech.

It will be short and pleasant, betraying none of her frustrations with high school. Parents will nod and teachers will smile.

Hers is the irresistible story of the inner-city valedictorian, the immigrants’ daughter whose success seems to redeem the promise of tough schools in tough places like Compton.

“This is one of the finest students I’ve encountered anywhere,” says Dominguez High Principal Kelcey Richardson.

To spend a day with Olazava is to see that it is true. But getting to know the valedictorian--and other top students at underperforming high schools--can often be more dispiriting than inspiring.

Shadowing Olazava’s successes are the failures of her school district, still struggling eight years after an unprecedented state takeover.

The limitations of such schools are often most apparent to students who are smart and driven. In a tough urban high school, they feel the absence of resources--not enough top teachers, too few high-level classes, overburdened and undertrained academic counselors--most deeply.

Across town from Dominguez at Centennial High, some ambitious seniors last fall complained to the U.S. Department of Education that their classes were not tough enough to prepare them for college.

“I complain more than most of my friends,” says Olazava, “and usually people don’t listen. I think a lot about how I might have learned more and things might have been better at a different school in a different place. I certainly could have been better prepared here.”

Olazava is desperate not to appear ungrateful; she points out that she has opportunities her classmates envy. But she, her friends and even some teachers sense that in another place, her natural talents could have carried her even further.

Born in Los Angeles to a Guatemalan mother and a Mexican father, neither of whom went beyond the ninth grade, Olazava lived in Bell Gardens before moving to Arizona for a year in fifth grade. Her school in Yuma was excellent. She can’t help but think she would have achieved more if she’d stayed.

But by sixth grade, the job prospects for her father, Moises, a supervisor with a recycling company, led her back to Compton, where the family could afford to buy a house.

A year earlier, the state of California, citing financial mismanagement and rock-bottom test scores, had taken over Compton’s schools. Over the last eight years, five different state administrators have run the district, with only the last achieving any measure of success.

Olazava felt the chaos. She was admitted to a magnet program at Dominguez High in the ninth grade, only to see it eliminated less than a year later. Her teachers came and went.

And although administrators talked of adding Advanced Placement courses, such high-level offerings were few and often scheduled at conflicting times.

Last fall, she couldn’t sign up for an upper-level French class because it conflicted with AP calculus. And she couldn’t take physics because it met at the same time as AP English.

“I complained like I always do, but you can’t win that one,” she says. “They would have had to change the schedules of 100 students to accommodate me.”

Despite such obstacles, Olazava showed initiative. She took the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history last year even though her history class was not taught on the Advanced Placement level. She did not get a passing score, meaning that she could not receive college credit for the class.

Olazava took every honors class she could fit into her schedule, earning the respect of the faculty and a grade-point average of 4.18.

Outside the classroom, she made the varsity cross country team and finished the Los Angeles Marathon twice. She worked with the school’s Human Relations Club, which administrators credit with reducing violent interracial disturbances that had erupted in earlier years.

She helped relaunch the dormant theater program at Dominguez, taking roles in two plays. In last month’s campus production of “Stand and Deliver,” based on the movie about high-achieving calculus students at East Los Angeles’ Garfield High, Olazava played the school’s demanding principal.

But at Dominguez, no one was nearly as demanding. Olazava never did more than an hour of homework a night. She even received a few Bs in classes so boring she couldn’t bring herself to pay attention. “That’s my fault,” she says. “But clearly, to prepare for college, I should have been given more work.”

“We don’t have the staff to push as much as we’d like,” says Moyofune Shabazz, college and career counselor. “Ana has done well because of her maturity level and leadership. She pushes herself.”

Pressure also came from her father, who recognized his oldest daughter’s promise and told her he would accept nothing less than the highest marks in the school. “My dad was so sure I’d be valedictorian that he would have killed me if I hadn’t” achieved that honor, Ana says with a laugh.

She was also egged on by other students in Dominguez’s honors and Advanced Placement courses, a close-knit if competitive group made up mostly of girls.

“At this school, it’s the other girls who really look out for you and push you,” says Olazava’s friend and classmate Victoria Wilform. “One of my jobs as a friend is to make sure Ana doesn’t slack.”

Olazava and friends say Dominguez has shown recent signs of becoming more attentive to its top students’ needs. The number of AP courses will rise from three last year to 10 next year, and Richardson, in his third year as principal, is hiring more teachers to handle them. There are more books, fewer graffiti and classrooms newly wired for the Internet.

Richardson brought in Shabazz as the new college counselor this year, and the school has been more aggressive about promoting college. Helped by a new University of California policy guaranteeing admission to the top 4% of qualified high school seniors, the number of Dominguez students admitted to UC campuses tripled this spring, to 18.

Over the previous four years, only 26 students from the entire Compton school district made it to the UC system.

Olazava’s record is such that she would have been UC material even without the recent surge. Based on her standardized test scores, colleges from Northwestern to Cornell sent her recruiting letters. She was so intrigued by material from Washington University in St. Louis that she sent in an application. But Dominguez never got her academic records there, a slip-up that the school blames on the post office. Financial considerations dissuaded her from other name-brand, out-of-state schools.

Ultimately, Olazava was admitted to all four UC campuses to which she applied; she chose UC Santa Cruz over UCLA because it is quieter. Scholarships and loans will pay for all but $2,000 of the annual $16,000 in tuition, room and board costs.

“I need to get out of the city and really study,” she says.

She wants to major in economics, learn Chinese and Portuguese, act in a production of a Shakespeare play, and find a job that will require international travel.

“After Dominguez, I think the first year at Santa Cruz will be incredibly challenging,” she says. “I can’t wait.”