‘Honors’ School Plan Falters in Inglewood

It was supposed to be where Inglewood’s best and brightest would prepare for college, but a year after its creation, the future of the city’s first “honors” high school is already in question.

The problem began late in the school year when West Los Angeles College--where the high school students took their courses--announced that it no longer had the space to accommodate City Honors High School.

The Inglewood Unified School District scrambled to find an alternative and decided City Honors could continue as a special academy within Morningside High School, one of the city’s two high schools.

The students would still take college preparatory classes and be able to take college courses on the high school campus.

But some parents scoffed at the idea, complaining that their children would end up at one of the very schools they were trying to avoid.

For the past two years, both Inglewood high schools have received the lowest possible ranking--one out of 10--on the state’s Academic Performance Index. City Honors was supposed to be an alternative to those schools, but parents say it is becoming a watered-down version of the program they were promised.

“These are some of the brightest kids. How come they’re splitting them up and putting them in this environment and sending them to a school that scores so poorly?” said Pat Black, whose 15-year-old son, Fred, attended City Honors last year. “Why do I have to go outside the district so that my son can attend a blue-ribbon school?”

School board officials are considering other possible sites for City Honors but, with summer drawing to a close, they know they don’t have much time.

“The question is, how fast can we possibly move?” said interim Supt. Paul Possemato. “We’ve just got to put everything else aside and hopefully we can salvage a good program.”

About 150 students who accepted admittance to City Honors will be affected. About 25 have asked the district for waivers to attend other districts.

If Cynthia Ace’s daughter, Brittany, 15, is accepted into another program, she will leave the district, she said. “Fail me once, shame on you,” Ace said. “Fail me twice, shame on me.”

Asmait Haile, 15, who attended City Honors last year, said she was not sure what she would do.

“I just feel like we got stepped on,” Asmait said. “I did my part and they didn’t do theirs. But I’ll go to an Inglewood high school if I have to. Some people went there and went to good colleges.”

The City Honors students’ reluctance to attend Inglewood high schools disturbs senior Adriana Zuniga, who has taken several honors and advanced placement courses at Morningside.

“The courses I’ve taken are nowhere near easy, but they wouldn’t know that because they’ve never even been on this campus,” Zuniga said. “They haven’t taken the time to know anything about it. Our parents wouldn’t let us come here if it was a bad school.”

Other parents who attended an open house at Morningside agreed.

“From what I understand, they’re going to have the same teachers and same classes, so we’re trying to convince her to come here,” said Ramiro Delgado of his 15-year-old daughter, Renee, who has applied for a waiver to attend El Segundo High School.

The creation of City Honors High School came less than six months after the district rejected a proposal for a charter high school in town. The district said it wanted time to implement its own changes and City Honors was born.

Students were selected on the basis of grades, scores on standardized tests and an interview. Once they graduated, parents were told, City Honors students would have fulfilled entrance requirements for the University of California and each would have enough college credits to earn an associate’s degree.

But throwing children barely out of the eighth grade onto a college campus proved to be a challenge.

Some students were not ready for the college math and withdrew or failed, said Principal Evangeline Lewis. There were also tensions between the students and some college staff members, who were not comfortable with so many teenagers on campus.

“If we could do it all over, there’d probably be fewer kinks and more of a support staff, but hindsight is always 20/20,” Lewis said.

Parents complain that the school was put together in a rush and wasn’t planned properly. They fear the same thing is happening again. But school district officials said the West Los Angeles situation was just a case of luck.

“We were the victims of bad circumstances and got the rug pulled out from under us,” Possemato said. The district never had a written contract with the college that guaranteed use of the campus for a set number of years. And there are still no official contracts with local colleges to offer classes at City Honors High.

“At this time we are doing nothing with the honors program, but we did mention that we’d be interested in continuing to offer courses at their site,” said Joe Mendez, a spokesman for West L.A. College. “It’s merely a discussion.”

Parents attending the recent open house at Morningside were repeatedly assured that the students would still attend college courses at the new school site. But when school board members asked for specifics during a board meeting last month, district officials had none to offer.

“We’re messing with kids’ lives,” said board President Cresia Green-Davis at the meeting. “We’re putting a carrot out there but the carrot is rotten. I haven’t seen any plans of how the classes are going to be offered. We need to have contracts. If you’re going to put an honors high school out there, we need to do it so well that parents wouldn’t have a problem wherever it is--because it’s so great they’d be clamoring to get in.”

June Allen, whose daughter, Dakota, 14, attended City Honors last year, couldn’t agree more.

“You know, we were looking at putting her in private schools, but then I heard that my own neighborhood was doing something worthwhile and I wanted to be a part of it,” Allen said. “But now we come to find out that it was just a half-baked plan.”