District Removes Principal From Troubled School

Dhyan Lal, the tough-talking, controversial principal who took the helm at Jordan High School in Watts 2 1/2 years ago and helped restore order, will not return to the campus this fall because test scores have not improved fast enough, officials say.

Jordan’s scores on the statewide Academic Performance Index assessment inched up last year. But the school, located between two of the most troubled public housing projects in Los Angeles, still ranks at the bottom of state scores.

“You can easily say it met its target and it’s doing well, but I envision much more for our children,” said Sylvia Rousseau, local superintendent for District I, which oversees the school. “There is a lot of hard work to do [to achieve] the kind of vision and image we have for what schools can be and should be for all children. Some of that, sometimes, involves changes in administration.”

She said Lal would remain an L.A. Unified administrator but that his specific job had not been determined.

Lal, 55, did not return phone calls to his office and home this week seeking comment.

Some teachers and students criticized Lal for what they called poor leadership and flippant remarks to staff and students. But many others say Lal, whom students referred to as “Doc,” had uplifted the schools and that they are sad to see him go.

“This is a principal who has done fantastic things for this school, and he is getting dumped,” said Julie Neilson, a college counselor at the school who emphasized that Lal encouraged more students to graduate and attend college.

However, during the four years of standardized state tests, Jordan has consistently remained, along with several other Los Angeles high schools, in the bottom ranking out of 10 tiers in performance evaluations. In addition, its students did not do well on the state’s high school exit exam, with 79% of 10th-graders failing it last year.

Over the last two years, the state began reassigning principals and taking control of low-performing campuses that were not improving their test scores enough. Rousseau said she is pushing for higher academic achievement, an increase in graduates, more arts programs and leadership opportunities for youths, and those changes were not occurring fast enough.

But Celia Ramirez, 18, a recent graduate from Jordan, said Lal was worth keeping. He encouraged them to pursue their goals and quelled gang problems on campus, she said. He also counseled Ramirez on career decisions and helped her enroll in classes that enabled her to graduate a year ahead of schedule, she said.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Ramirez, who will attend Long Beach City College in the fall, said of Lal’s removal.

Steven Harris, 18, recently graduated from Jordan and plans to attend Grambling State University to major in economics. He is thankful for the letter of recommendation Lal wrote and his words of encouragement. He described Lal as “a great motivator. He gets your attention. He can stand silent in a room and get everyone’s attention.”

Teacher Paul Broughton said he remembered a time before Lal’s arrival when hundreds of students would roam the halls during classes. Now there is more order and less tardiness, he said. Broughton helped circulate a petition protesting Lal’s transfer, and nearly 50 of the campus’s 100 staff members signed it, he said. He added that he did not ask teachers with emergency credentials, who make up nearly half of the teaching staff, to sign because they may not be permanent.

But others said they were not happy with Lal’s leadership.

Miranda Manners, a Jordan teacher, said Lal was not supportive of some veteran teachers, yet he hired many young teachers with emergency credentials who lacked experience.

“He would surround himself with these novices who would be in his debt,” she said. “He would give them so much responsibility and leeway.”

She added that Lal bragged about how “he’s transformed our ghetto school into this fabulous institution. I’m not impressed. We went from an F-minus to a D-minus.”

A native of Fiji, Lal came under fire last year from some teachers who said he sometimes made offhand jokes about women and minorities, such as: “You know all Asians look alike.” He said he did not mean to offend people and was using humor in an attempt to ease tensions. After some of his comments were printed in a profile of him in The Times, some teachers at the school said they rarely heard such remarks again.

Lal used his own immigrant background to relate to the mainly minority and low-income students at Jordan. He moved to Glendale at the age of 13 after an American family sponsored him to receive an education in the U.S. As a student at Roosevelt Middle School in Glendale, which was mostly white at the time, Lal said he encountered racism because of his dark skin and limited knowledge of English. He later said the experience “made me into a better person.”