Opening New School Is Labor of Love for Principal

Not long after he was named principal of a newly built elementary school in South Los Angeles, Robert Cordova Jr. was handed a binder with 100 pages (plus supplements) of “to do” lists -- purchase desks, stock the library, hire a plant manager, recruit the teachers.

He also had five months to get it all done.

“I was so excited, I was dancing around my house,” Cordova said of the chance to open a brand new school. Then it hit him. “I thought, ‘Five months? Dios mio!’ ”

Those five hectic months culminate today with the start of classes at a sparkling new campus -- one parent calls it a “blessing from God” -- in one of the city’s careworn old neighborhoods. The process of birthing a new school will be continually fine-tuned as the overcrowded Los Angeles Unified School District, after years of neglect, scrambles to open 160 new schools by 2012.

Cordova’s school will keep its temporary moniker, Jefferson New Elementary School No. 2, a few months longer, until the district’s elaborate school-naming ritual can be performed. For now, most people call it “Jeff 2.”

For Cordova, getting to opening day meant hours huddled with his laptop computer and his well-thumbed copy of the “Elementary School Activation Principal’s Handbook.” The book’s checklists seemed endless:

Order furniture (he picked aqua for the chair backs). Order textbooks (he decided to stack them in the multipurpose room until they could be checked into the computer system). Test security. And so on.

Then there was Cordova’s own list, one that represented his philosophy that a successful school must be a part of the community it serves: Talk to neighbors. Ask parents to hold house meetings. Contact local churches and businesses.

“Can we get everything done in time?” Cordova wondered one afternoon in May, about a week after the school office opened. He prepared to interview some teacher candidates while the school’s administrative assistant, Luz Vasquez, helped parents enroll their children.

Earlier that day, Cordova had unlocked Room 104 for first-grade teacher Barbara Jarvik, who had dropped by with succulents from her home garden. She volunteered to transfer from nearby Wadsworth Avenue School, one campus whose overcrowding Jeff 2 aims to relieve. Wadsworth, which enrolled 1,700 youngsters last school year, opened about 1912.

Jarvik’s eyes widened when she saw the well-designed built-in storage, the never-used desks and the light pouring through the big windows and bouncing off the pale yellow walls.

“The nice thing,” she said, “is it’s all brand new!”

“Yes, but it’s not the newness,” he replied. “It’s what we all bring to the school that counts,” revealing some of what led him into education and why he left the principal’s post at nearby Trinity Street School to launch Jeff 2.

“Can we all work together, with each other and with parents, to build a culture of learners?” Cordova continued. “That’s what it will take to make this a high-achieving school.”

Jarvik nodded in agreement.

Still, the sheer beauty of the campus, its buildings painted in soft yellows with teal and brick-red accents, is striking. While changing demographics led the district to shutter some schools, mainly in the west San Fernando Valley, aging campuses in older neighborhoods are bursting with too many students.

Last month, as Cordova led parents and kids on a campus tour, the adults seemed overwhelmed at first, moving in silence through airy classrooms that smelled faintly of fresh paint. Cordova switched smoothly between Spanish and English as he explained the school’s features, noting, for example, that children will be able to look up library books from classroom computers.

The parents viewed the multipurpose room with its special elevator to give wheelchair-bound students access onto its stage. They saw the gleaming kitchen and the wine-colored tables in the covered lunch area, the generous grass and blacktop playgrounds that cover half the 4 1/2-acre campus.

Gradually, the parents began chatting excitedly as they moved along, arriving with broad smiles back at the administration building.

The $20-million campus sits along East 42nd Place, not far from Jefferson High School. Its 39 classrooms have space for 831 students; about 1,000 kindergarten through fifth-graders are expected, so the school will operate year-round on four tracks.

Jeff 2 is one of 17 Los Angeles Unified schools to open this year in an unprecedented building boom funded by a series of voter-approved state and local bond measures. A lot of hope rests in these new schools.

Jeff 2, for example, will relieve overcrowding at three campuses. While they will still use multi-track schedules, those schools now will offer a full 180-day term for the first time in years. That is 17 more days of instruction, the same as for students in more affluent, less crowded neighborhoods.

District officials and civic leaders hope the better learning conditions will lead to higher achievement and fewer dropouts. And Cordova sees Jeff 2 as a chance to turn things around for families, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.

The small bungalows and modest apartment buildings surrounding the campus used to be occupied mainly by African Americans, but more and more Latino families have moved in over the years.

Parents there say they worry about gangs and crime and drivers who speed through residential streets. Cordova hopes he and the teachers can help organize families to work toward improvements.

“I really feel, in this area particularly, schools have really separated from their communities,” he said. “People feel disenfranchised, and too often they see the school as just another institution that oppresses people.”

He wants his students to get more out of school than he did, a bored kid steered into vocational arts classes.

“I didn’t feel good about school, and I thought I would never go on once I graduated.” Cordova was drafted shortly after high school and fought in the Vietnam War. He remembers promising himself after watching other former “shop kids” die that if he survived he would get more education and make something of his life.

By the time he got to Jeff 2, he had racked up more than two decades of experience working in elementary schools.

So it didn’t take long to spot things that planners overlooked. Such as the lunch-table arrangement that left no room for students to line up for food. And the open second-story landing in the main classroom building that overlooks a paved central courtyard.

“I looked up at that, and all I could see was a student falling out,” Cordova said. “I know those railing heights meet state standards, but they won’t stop a second-grader. I told the district, ‘We’ve got to change that, no matter what it costs.’ ”

He won that battle, though the work had not yet been completed as of Friday, and the cost was still unclear.

Getting some lunch tables unbolted and moved was a snap -- but they had to go outside the covered area.

Then there was the vandalism. Despite the school’s security system, workers had to clean up graffiti three times and replace seven broken windows. Someone set a fire in the lunch area one night, but a parent who lives across the street saw the smoke and called firefighters before damage occurred.

Cordova wants to add surveillance cameras but was told he must pay for them out of whatever might be left of the $1.5 million he got to stock the school.

Meantime, aided by Sheila Kines, who spotted the fire, he is stepping up his efforts to enlist the help of the neighbors.

“This is so beautiful, a blessing from God,” said Kines, whose son will attend Jeff 2. “A place like this is a big chance for our community to do better, and we have to teach our kids not to be tearing it up.”

Other things went like clockwork.

Cordova thought the shelving of 8,000 books in the library would take all day, but when they arrived late last month, the job was nearly done by noon. Rochelle Arsenault, a district librarian sent to oversee the stocking, explained the efficiency. Two book companies inserted checkout cards in each volume, packed them in Dewey Decimal system order and sent workers to help shelve.

“That looks fabulous!” Cordova fairly shouted when he checked on the progress. “The library is coming to life!”

A few yards away, in a conference room, kindergarten teacher Cynthia Fraire was helping prepare track assignments and explaining why she left Trinity for Jeff 2. It had nothing to do with new library books, or new desks, or new anything else.

“That wasn’t an attraction at all,” Fraire said. “We did some great things at Trinity.”

Indeed, many parents felt the same way.

“I didn’t want my daughter moved, because we really liked Trinity,” said Maria Felix, noting that her fourth-grader, Kimberly, learned to love reading so much that she now volunteers to help with the housework so her mother has time to take her to the library. Felix volunteered at Trinity and has held one of the house meetings Cordova has used to reach out to parents.

And that, perhaps, is among the first lessons to be taught at Jeff 2. Trinity Street was built about 1904 and has so many students it requires four lunch periods to feed them all. But it’s a community, and Felix, Cordova and Fraire hope to recreate and enhance that atmosphere at their new school.

That resonates especially with Fraire, who grew up in the community where she has taught for the last seven years. “It’s really nice going over to students’ homes, to go to their birthday parties or to dinners,” she said. “It forms bonds and builds trust and understanding. I know it works.

“I’ve seen the results.”