Base School Has Right Stuff

Lancaster parent Don Logan doesn’t have a good feeling about his local public schools.

From his perspective, they seem overcrowded, dangerous and academically mediocre. It didn’t help this month when the state removed the top administrators at Lancaster’s Antelope Valley High School for their failure to improve students’ standardized test scores.

But those issues are academic for the 47-year-old NASA administrator. Like a small but steadily increasing number of civilians working at Edwards Air Force Base, Logan has qualified to send his 16-year-old daughter, Jessica, to one of the highest-performing public high schools in the region -- the 400-student Desert High, located within the heavily guarded gates of the famous aviation test site.

The campus is an anxious parent’s dream: It’s small, safe and graffiti-free, and the cool kids are the ones who do their homework.

The frequent booms are not from gang violence, but from the experimental aircraft breaking the sound barrier over the desolate border between Los Angeles and Kern counties.

Desert High’s standardized test scores are the best of any high school in Kern County and the nearby Antelope Valley. Its 2002 Academic Performance Index score was 739, placing it among the top 20% of all California schools.

Of this year’s 82-member senior class, about 75% are going on to college -- from West Point to Temple University to the University of Texas -- and many of the rest are heading into the military.

Two on-base elementary schools and a middle school are equally successful. And while their primary goal is to educate on-base military kids, more students in recent years have come from the families of Edwards’ civilian workers -- the private-sector aerospace engineers, support staff and administrators like Logan who support the base’s mission of testing the world’s most daringly innovative flying machines.

In the last six years, the number of nonmilitary students at the four schools has jumped from 225 to about 475 in the overall enrollment of about 1,800, said Mike Summerbell, assistant superintendent for tiny Muroc Joint Unified School District, which oversees the Edwards schools and three others off base.

Downsizing of the armed forces is one reason spaces have opened up for nonmilitary students: In the last decade, total military personnel at Edwards has shrunk from 3,800 to 3,200.

But Summerbell thinks the word has also spread among the civilian employees in the Mojave Desert’s “Aerospace Valley” about the base’s phenomenal job perk -- the equivalent of private-school education for free.

“I wish I’d had my kids go to school out here,” said John Haire, Edwards’ civilian spokesman. “I considered it, but only after it was too late -- after the kids had gotten established socially in their schools. But for a long time, I didn’t know it was possible to enroll them.”

It’s not always easy to get into Desert High. Nonmilitary parents hoping to transfer their kids to base schools often are put on a waiting list, and are the first to be bumped if the military population increases.

“People feel like it’s a real prestigious thing to have their children go here,” said Muroc Supt. Bertha Boullion. “We have wing commanders’ kids and NASA engineers’ kids.”

Others agree that Desert High feeds off the rarefied culture at Edwards, whose legendary Air Force Flight Test Center has been responsible for some of the most important milestones in aviation, including Chuck Yeager’s first-ever breach of the sound barrier in 1947.

On the surface, the culture of the air base is difficult to discern at Desert High. Student dress is as casual as at any public school, and perhaps more so due to the desert climate. But military values, including a sense of discipline and hard work, predominate.

Children of military personnel also know their misbehavior can be reported to their parents’ superiors and harm mom’s or dad’s standing in the service.

“It’s not that our school is any harder or easier than any other schools,” English teacher Bob Favarato said. “It’s just that most of the kids here do most of the work most of the time. It boils down to values.”

It also helps that the main business at Edwards is rocket science.

Engineers and other base scientists are among the judges of Desert High’s yearly science fair, which is mandatory for students taking college preparatory courses.

The school prides itself on its science and math programs. This year, junior Cody Lewis won first place in the mammalian biology category at the state science fair. The year before, he said, he worked with base scientists on a project studying wind energy, collecting his data on Edwards’ airfield.

“I just love it out here,” said Lewis, a resident of nearby Rosamond whose mother is a Desert High science teacher. “It’s like we’re in our own little system.”

Although one of the most geographically isolated schools in Southern California -- the base is about 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles -- Desert High has no problem attracting teachers. Their salaries are among the highest of their peers in Kern County, due in part to $5 million in special federal impact funds the district receives each year -- a quarter of its overall budget.

The federal money is meant to help school districts in areas where local tax revenues are negatively affected by the presence of such nontaxable federal properties as military bases. In California, however, school funding comes primarily from the state and is largely based on a school’s average daily attendance, not the amount of tax revenue generated in a given district. That makes the federal funds an especially nice perk for the schools at Edwards.

At Desert High, Boullion said, the funds help maintain small, manageable classes -- one reason government teacher Brett Dobson prefers to make the hourlong drive from Tehachapi rather than teach in his local school system.

The student-teacher ratio at Desert High is about 23 to 1; in Advanced Placement courses, it can be as low as 9 to 1, campus officials said.

“We don’t have the big problems other schools do, so we can focus on teaching,” said Dobson, 31. “It’s easy compared to everywhere else.”

Favarato, who has taught at some tough California public high schools, said the worst behavior problem at Desert High is tardiness -- and that is often caused by the intense security checks students must go through at the gate when the national threat level is elevated.

Student life here is different in other ways too. Jessica Logan says the military police crack down on kids hanging around off campus, especially skateboarders. “They kind of follow people around,” she said. “They’re not very fun.”

And most notably, turnover is intense, because of military reassignments -- which means many Desert High freshmen will graduate elsewhere.

“We’ll lose about 25% of our student body this summer,” Desert High Principal Charles Hildebrand said. “As a football coach, it’s kind of scary when you don’t know if your star quarterback is coming back next year.”

But Lewis said that too has a positive side. “Every other week there’s a new kid transferring in, and it’s usually very easy for them. Because almost everybody here knows what it feels like to be the new kid.”