SAN DIEGO - Four years after a hesitant school board responded to public pressure and unanimously approved a petition to convert Gompers Middle School into Gompers Charter Middle School, the board approved of a second Gompers charter: Gompers Preparatory Academy, a ninth- through 12th-grade high school that will open this fall to current eighth- and ninth-grade students.
This vote on Jan. 27, taken quietly with no board discussion, few audience members and minimal media coverage, stands in stark contrast to the intensity of the vote four years earlier. It was then that a bitter philosophical divide among board members and groups of SDUSD teachers over the value of charter schools and their role in the public school system was exposed.
At that tumultuous March 1, 2005 meeting, attended by over 300 people, a mobilized group of parents and community activists told the school board that approving the Gompers charter was needed to break the cycle of chronic under-achievement in one of the district’s lowest-performing schools.
This was more than an ordinary charter conversion.
The reconstitution of Gompers four years ago was one of the few instances nationwide when a school that had failed for four consecutive years to make adequate academic progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act opted to become charter as a way to make fundamental changes.
Converting Gompers Middle School, once labeled one of the most dangerous schools in the state, to charter status after years of abysmal academic failure was a Herculean task made even more difficult by last-minute demands from the district.
Yet the community, led by popular Gompers principal Vincent Riveroll, was undeterred, convinced that the autonomy associated with charters would give the school the necessary freedom from union constraints and school district red tape to raise achievement, enforce discipline, and reduce truancy, drug use, crime and campus disorder.
“This is an example of how the charter school movement can come in and have a really constructive role to play in some of the most challenging schools that our country needs to address,” said Jed Wallace, president and chief executive officer of the California Charter Schools Association and former head of the High Tech High charter school organization based in San Diego.
Wallace said the Gompers charter process and eventual school district approval drew the attention of the media and education leaders nationwide.
“It was certainly a trend-setter and one that’s been watched at a state level and at a national level,” he said.
Wallace called the Gompers transformation relevant to the future of urban education, saying CCSA maintains regular contact with GCMS “as they continue to do what we think is vital work, perhaps the most important work that’s happening in the charter school movement.”
“GCMS has made great headway and has some really encouraging trend-lines as far as their student achievement goes,” he said. “It’s a special school for us, and we support them however we can.”
In its three full years of operation, GCMS has recorded gains on the state’s Academic Performance Index, which is a number between 200 and 1,000 calculated by the state that measures and rates a school’s academic achievement based primarily on the results of standardized tests given to students each spring.
Now in its fourth year, GCMS scored an API of 564 in 2006, a 595 in 2007, and a 622 in 2008. In addition, each of the school’s four major demographic subgroups, African-Americans, Hispanics, English language learners and low-income students, all met their growth targets, according to data obtained from the Calif. Dept. of Education, and have shown improvements each year.
Expansion to high school
Evidence of progress at GCMS and parent interest in continuing the success into the upper grades propelled the Gompers board of directors to consider next steps. Gompers Preparatory Academy was the result.
Honoring Brian Bennett
Read [1] [2]how one Gompers and education advocate changed the lives of many students.
A lengthy, detailed proposal and a GCMS track record of steady improvement helped convince trustees to approve the charter for Gompers Preparatory Academy, the vote came with considerably less dissent than that four years earlier.
“I was a little surprised that there was no discussion, but that’s fine,” said trustee Katherine Nakamura, one of three current board members in office four years ago for the first Gompers vote. “I’ve always been supportive … so this was no problem. It was an easy decision for me.”
She said board members have visited GCMS and seen its success firsthand, which may have influenced their votes on the high school charter.
The two other current trustees who voted on the Gompers charter in 2005 are John de Beck and school board president Shelia Jackson.
Jackson, the board representative from District E where Gompers is located, said she had she had misgivings four years ago about the middle school charter.
“That was because the district is responsible to deliver quality education to its students,” said Jackson, who felt SDUSD had been unresponsive to the needs of the school. “I wanted us to hold the district more accountable. … I felt very strongly that the district should have done more to help the community.”
But she had no reservations about the high school charter, “They have enough classrooms for growth, and if they’re working with the students and being successful, there’s no reason not to let them continue growing,” Jackson said.
De Beck, who voted with Jackson and former board members Luis Acle and Mitz Lee in 2005 to remove Riveroll as head of Gompers, sees the situation four years ago differently, blaming much of the uproar on “a bad relationship” between Jackson and Riveroll.
“Gompers was treated badly in the first place because Shelia was mad at the principal,” he said.
“I was always thrilled by Riveroll,” de Beck said. “The only reason I basically supported Shelia early on was I was trying to build board solidarity.”
De Beck described Riveroll as an “inspirational leader” and said, “He’s the kind of principal kids love and will work hard for. He’s going to be down there 24 hours a day if he has to, just to make it work. You can’t do anything but admire that kind of dedication.”
He said he had no ambivalence about the high school vote. “It would be very hard to stand up against that when we haven’t shown better alternatives in southeast San Diego,” said de Beck, criticizing what he considered to be lackluster performance at nearby district-run Lincoln High School.
“I’ve never been against charters if they do better than we do,” he said.
De Beck’s support of the Gompers charter for high school was based on the performance and the successes of Gompers Middle and that it had done better than it did when it was a district school, he said.
As contentious as the vote was four years ago to approve Gompers Charter Middle School, Wallace was not surprised that the vote to create a Gompers charter high school generated no debate.
“It’s a pretty straight-forward and compelling case,” he said. “When you bring forward something that is clearly offering value to the community, often you’ll have action without board comment.”
In addition, the 5-0 vote approved the GPA charter for five full years, the maximum allowed, through June 30, 2014.
Gompers Preparatory Academy will open this fall with grades 9 and 10, and will add 11th grade in 2010 and 12th grade in 2011. The feeder middle school, GCMS, now serves sixth through ninth grades. Organizers of the newest SDUSD charter promise that GPA will continue the work of Gompers Charter Middle School, including its founding principles and its connection with the University of California, San Diego.
The GPA vision
Ensuring college access for all students through a rigorous college preparatory curriculum with a “highly disciplined school culture and family-school-community partnerships” is the main mission of Gompers Preparatory Academy, according to the GPA proposal. [3]
GPA intends to build upon the success of Gompers Charter Middle School and its ties with UCSD, which provide the school with “a wide range of intellectual, material and research resources,” including teaching interns, professional development experts and student tutors, the application reads.
GPA founders hope to replicate the success UCSD has had with students attending Preuss Charter School located on the campus of UCSD. Preuss students, many of whom are bused to Preuss from the Gompers neighborhood, are primarily low-income students who are often the first in their families to go on to attend college. Preuss Charter School students record consistently high scores on state achievement tests and Advanced Placement tests.
The GPA governing board of directors will be the same as the GCMS board which, besides Riveroll, includes teachers, parents, community activists and San Diego heavyweights like former state Senator Dede Alpert, UCSD professors Cecil Lytle and Bud Mehan, former San Diego County Urban League leader Cecil Steppe, and education experts Kimiko Fukuda, Scott Himelstein and David Valladolid.
The push for a Gompers charter high school was triggered mostly by parents wanting to continue the mission and principles of the middle school that have led to increased academic performance, higher expectations, a safer campus, improved behavior and attendance, and a stronger link between students and their school.
Another reason for the creation of GPA, the report claims, is that the two high schools operated by San Diego Unified in the southeastern area of San Diego, Lincoln and Morse, are overcrowded and unable to guarantee enrollment for all Gompers middle school students. Those not accepted are bused to schools outside the community, which GPA proponents say decreases parental involvement and reduces the time students have before and after school for vital extra-curricular activities.
The Gompers charter high school is projected to open this fall with about 250 ninth and 10th graders, and will have a maximum enrollment of 456 students when all four grade levels are fully operational. The school will be located on property adjacent to the existing Gompers middle school, in the Chollas View neighborhood of southeast San Diego.
GPA will be funded directly by the state and expects to receive just under $2.2 million the first year it operates with all four grades. As a non-profit enterprise, GPA will also solicit charitable donations.
The student population at GPA is projected to mirror that of GCMS, which is about 85 percent low-income, 71 percent Hispanic, 21 percent African-American, and 40 to 45 percent English language learners (ELL). The expectation of high numbers of ELL students has made English language proficiency, and academic and functional literacy, one of the school’s top goals.
Community service, global awareness, respect and hard work are goals beyond the academic education that GPA hopes to provide.
Growth of charter schools
The charter school movement, begun in 1992, has exploded in the past 10 years, with over 4,600 nationwide and about 750 in California, the highest of any state, according to the California Charter Schools Association.
Charter schools are public schools freed from the constraints of many school district policies and union contracts that regulate employment and compensation practices. Most charter schools have their own governing boards and are free to hire their own employees, establish salary schedules that can vary based on specialty of knowledge and range of experience, and set school policies such as school uniforms or longer school days.
In exchange for the independence, they must adhere to state academic standards, show improved student achievement and maintain financial stability.
Supporters say the early success of GCMS can be attributed in part to the freedom to hire employees who were fully invested in the school, rather than being assigned unwilling teachers who left to work at other SD Unified schools as soon as seniority rules allowed them to exit.
Parents of students attending successful charter schools often ask educators to continue the same program at higher grade levels, Wallace said, so it’s not uncommon for charter schools like GCMS to expand to upper grades.
“This happens pretty frequently,” Wallace said. “A lot of charter schools, especially charter schools that are serving populations of low-achieving students, want to have a longer runway with their kids, and GCMS came to the same conclusion a lot of other folks do.
“You feel such great pressure to do whatever you can, and I’m sure that GCMS is in the exact same situation. This is a quite natural step for them to take.”
Marsha Sutton is an SDNN contributing writer.
