The Many Roads to Learning

Public education in San Diego may be headed back to the basics, driven in large part by the city schools district’s emphasis on reading and writing, but there’s no shortage of innovative programs and projects designed to give students an extra lift. Here’s a roundup of some of the more successful programs offered in the county.

6 to 6: San Diego’s citywide after-school program has been recognized as a national model for maximizing “out of school” time by the After School Alliance, a national foundation that identifies top after-school programs throughout the country. Deb Ferrin, the city’s childcare coordinator, is justifiably proud. “It’s really important that schools keep their doors open to create safe environments for children during the hours their parents work,” she says. “The public school is a community asset that needs to be used.”

Launched in 1998 and funded primarily through a state grant and the city’s general fund, 6 to 6 has students do 90 minutes of homework and then provides recreation and playtime for the younger kids and special enhancement classes in creative writing, art and other fields for older students. The program, implemented by more than a dozen community-based nonprofits, now operates in every city elementary and middle school, serving some 25,000 children, with a waiting list to match. “San Diego is the first city in the nation to open every elementary and middle school in the city—that’s 202 schools,” Ferrin says.

Barrio Logan College Institute: Since 1995, this nonprofit organization has been preparing kids—mostly Latinos—for college through after-school tutoring, and parent, mentoring and technology programs. “We believe higher education is the key to transforming families,” says Samuel Ingersoll-Weng, tapped last October as the institute’s new executive director. “When the first kid in a poor family goes to college, the entire future of that family starts to change.”

The institute currently serves about 200 elementary-, middle- and high-school students. The oldest is José Ruiz, a Barrio Logan resident who has been with the program since its start and now attends the prestigious Bishop’s School in La Jolla. “José and most of our other older kids are well on their way to college,” Ingersoll-Weng says. “For the kids who started with us in grade school and are now in middle school, we’ve had such an impact that they hardly need us.”

High-Tech Tutoring: Students at Pauma Elementary School near Escondido, many of them Native American and Mexican-American, are getting on-line tutoring through UCSD’s Student Educational Advancement Division. Thirty Webcam computers provide personalized attention for students who need help with math and science, courtesy of a bank of UCSD undergrads stationed more than 45 miles away on the La Jolla campus. Students can sign on during class and after school.

The program is funded through a $1.4 million grant from GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs), a college-prep initiative for low-income students administered by the U.S. Department of Education. Over the past two years, UCSD has implemented similar Web-based tutoring programs at Gompers Secondary School in San Diego and at the Pala Indian Reservation in North County. UCSD spokesman Michael Dabney lauds the program for “bringing interactive on-line tutoring for academic enrichment to low-income areas that normally would not have access to computer technology—or computer access in general.”

UROK Reading Intervention Program: Alex Urbano believes that before kids can even begin to learn to read, they need to understand the basic sounds of the alphabet. This “phonemic awareness” approach is behind the success of the UROK Reading Intervention Program, in which teenagers and young adults at the MAAC Community Charter School in the South Bay have gone from virtual illiteracy to functional reading ability in just six weeks. The average grade-level improvement among the 18 participants was 2.17 for word reading and 1.71 for reading comprehension.

Urbano is the founder of the UROK Learning Institute, a private clinic for children with reading difficulties. The Reading Intervention Program is a partnership with the Sweetwater Union High School District’s charter school for at-risk 14- to 24-year-olds, many of them non-English speakers, who return to school to get their high school diplomas. “This is not rocket science,” Urbano says. “Everybody knows the practices we’re using. Individual and combination letter sounds are the foundation of learning how to read.”

San Diego Head Start: On the eve of its 40th birthday, the granddaddy of child-development programs is running strong, serving 10,000 preschool children of low-income families throughout the county. The local program is part of the national Project Head Start, launched in 1964 under President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Children from 3 to 5 are introduced to reading, writing, math and science, either through a network of more than 100 centers or by at-home study courses.

Recent innovations include organized field trips and a performing arts program, now entering its third year. An infant and toddler program, Early Head Start, was launched six years ago. Parental involvement is key. “We deal with children when they are most vulnerable,” says director Barbara Fielding.

School-to-Career Connection: High school and college students around the county can get paid internships through this partnership between the business and educational communities. A project of the nonprofit San Diego Workforce Partnership, established in 1974 by the city and county of San Diego and funded by the federal Department of Labor, the School-to-Career Connection finds businesses willing to hire students and give them hands-on experience. The experience comes in a variety of areas, including word processing and data entry, customer service, Web site design and event planning. Employees also are sent to schools to talk about their career and educational paths.

Since the Connection was launched in 1994, more than 250 businesses have participated, from the San Diego County Water Authority and the police department to SeaWorld, the Catamaran Resort Hotel and NASSCO. “Our goal is to create some relevance to the students, to draw some parallels between what they learn in school and how they apply that later on,” says employer-outreach specialist Monica Muñoz.

Sex-Segregated Learning: At San Ysidro High School, a $51 million facility that opened last July, boys and girls are taught ninth-grade algebra in separate classes, a practice principal Hector Espinoza tested a few years ago at Hilltop High. “The program is really for the girls, because of the lack of opportunity for them to be steered on the pathway to math and science,” he says. “At Hilltop, I put a separate class together, and the social environment was just much more conducive to learning. The girls didn’t feel intimidated, didn’t feel they couldn’t answer and didn’t fear being harassed.”

This isn’t the only innovation Espinoza has brought to San Ysidro High, the first new high school to be opened in the district in 12 years. “We’re the only public high school in California with uniforms, and we start school at 9 a.m.,” the principal says. “We have no tardy problem, and our kids come in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

Attendance Incentive Program: When former SDG&E chief Tom Page was first elected a trustee of the Grossmont Union High School District four years ago, he couldn’t believe the student absentee rate of 8 percent, which was costing the district millions of dollars in lost per-capita funds each year. He sat down with Superintendent Granger Ward and came up with an incentive program to keep kids in school. Principals of the district’s 11 high schools were each told that if they managed to increase monthly attendance by 1 percent over the previous year, the school would get $4,200 in cash to use as the principal pleased.

The program was implemented two years ago, and Page notes with pride that the average attendance rate is now 95 percent.” He says the district’s poorest school, Cajon Valley, realized the most dramatic gains, with average monthly attendance rising from around 85 percent to 93 percent. “They really got behind the program,” Page says. “All the teachers wore buttons that read ‘Attendance counts.’”

AVID: This internationally recognized program for boosting the potential of students in the middle of the academic spectrum originated in San Diego. In 1980, spurred by court-ordered desegregation, Clairemont High School teacher Mary Catherine Swanson launched Advancement Via Individual Determination to recruit average students for advanced classes and then provide them with the academic and moral support needed to put them on the path to college. Students take a special AVID class in which they are coached by college tutors and work in collaborative groups using a curriculum focused on writing and inquiry.

AVID now serves more than 70,000 students in upwards of 1,000 schools in California alone, and program supporters note that 95 percent of its graduates go on to college. All told, there are 1,500 AVID high schools in 21 states and 14 foreign countries.

Mar Vista High in Imperial Beach is one of 80 national AVID demonstration schools. “It seems kids at the top get a lot of help, and at the bottom, but what about the kids in the middle, the ‘C’ types who have academic potential but need additional support?” says principal Louise Bach-Phipps. “This is the only program of its kind that addresses their needs.”

Human Performance and Well-Being Program: This two-year alternative to standard physical education requirements at Rancho del Rey Middle School in Chula Vista recently won an award from the California School Boards Association. Instead of typical P.E. classes, seventh- and eighth-graders supplement traditional sports with lessons on such topics as nutrition, exercise, drug abuse and depression. Students also are required to perform eight hours of volunteer work, including teaching younger kids to read.

Library Outreach: The San Diego Public Library system works closely with city schools to ensure library collections are in sync with curricula and reading lists, says library director Anna Tatar. Homework centers have been set up in branch libraries and the central library downtown, equipped with computers and assorted reference books. City workers also visit these centers to provide homework assistance, “so you might have a police officer and a firefighter helping the kids,” Tatar says. In addition, librarians visit schools and offer tours to make sure students know how best to use the library and its many resources.

Tatar is particularly proud of the summer reading program, which attracts as many as 35,000 students. “This way they keep up with reading and don’t forget things over the summer,” she says.

Coming up: a 25,000-square-foot library on the Logan Heights Elementary School campus, courtesy of a $5.3 million state grant. The facility, complete with homework center and a digital reference area, is slated to open in 2005.

CLASS (Corporate Leaders Advocating Success Skills): Launched in 2001, this program of the Economic Development Corporation sends business leaders into high schools to give students a taste of what awaits them once they graduate. “We teach them what it will take to succeed in the business world,” says Cindy McHugh, EDC’s manager of workforce education. “We teach them interpersonal skills, working as a team, putting together a résumé, things like that.”

The program began with a five-class pilot and has now been in 125 classrooms, reaching more than 3,000 students. Each business leader signs up for eight weekly visits, capped with a tour of his or her workplace and a mock job interview.

Globalbiz: As part of its effort to promote global trade, the San Diego World Trade Center has set up a program for high school students to learn more about international businesses. At an intense week-long class on the University of San Diego campus, students learn about the world economy from such executives as Frontier Trading’s Wendy Gillespie, and they go on field trips to international companies like Kyocera. They then get a six-week internship with a company heavily involved in international commerce.

“We like to get them thinking internationally before they make their decision to go to college or pursue a career,” says Crystal Cowan, program manager with the San Diego World Trade Center, part of a business development network of 300 centers in 100 countries. “Business is becoming increasingly globalized, and it is essential that our youth learn the fundamentals of conducting business internationally.” Junior Achievement and the San Diego Work Force are partners in the program.

Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program: This state-funded mentoring program matches veteran teachers with new teachers to help guide newcomers through their first two years of working in the classroom. The focus of the first year is classroom management and organization; the second year, subject matter and content. The teachers meet as often as they want, and the veteran periodically visits the new teacher’s classroom to monitor performance. “I love it,” says Betty Bond, a longtime third-grade teacher at Hope Elementary School in Carlsbad who is currently paired with a sixth-grade teacher, also at Hope. “It’s the best program to help new teachers get accustomed to the classroom, to give them a feeling of support and that there’s somebody there with them.”

Charter Schools: The state Charter Schools Act of 1992 gave teachers, parents, students and community members the right to establish and maintain nonsectarian schools that operate individually from local school boards but still receive state funding—as long as they meet state-specified education requirements. According to the San Diego County Office of Education, 46 charter schools currently operate in 17 local school districts—from the much-ballyhooed High-Tech High in San Diego to Guajome Park Academy in Vista, where students learn by developing major projects, such as starting a new business. Guajome was singled out as a role model by the U.S. Department of Education and is currently building a $23.9 million new home for the academy that will include a video-editing studio and a student-run juice bar and fitness center.

Grossmont school board member Tom Page says charter schools are, in essence, “a response to people who have looked at public education and say it is failing.” One of Grossmont’s 11 high schools, Helix High, is a charter school. While Page applauds some elements—“For example, they have a senior project that’s required of all students before they graduate”—he’s uncertain whether the overall concept is better than standard education. “I asked the principal whether there’s any net benefit,” Page says, “and he said, ‘We think so, but it’s hard to prove.’”

Homeschooling: Homeschooling advocates were up in arms last summer when the state Department of Education threatened to crack down on children who aren’t taught by credentialed teachers or in private schools that file yearly affidavits certifying they meet state education requirements. “Homeschooling—a situation where noncredentialed parents teach their own children, exclusively, at home, whether using correspondence courses or other types of courses—is not an authorized exemption from mandatory public school attendance,” reads a terse department memo.

Yet parents who still want to teach their kids at home have an option: Most local school districts offer programs for homeschoolers under the “independent study” moniker. The San Diego Unified School District even maintains a separate school devoted to meeting the needs of students who’d rather learn at home. Mount Everest Academy provides an array of support services for children and their parent-teachers. Families get the same texts and support materials as regular teachers, and work under the supervision of a credentialed teacher who spells out exactly what’s to be studied and when the work is to be done. Parents instruct, while the supervising teacher reviews the work and evaluates academic progress to ensure state education code requirements are met.

Mount Everest also includes an on-site science lab and resource library. Administrators say enrollment has remained fairly constant at 350 but may increase with the new, tighter state requirements.

SBC Knowledge Network Explorer: SBC, the telecom formerly known as Pacific Bell, has assembled an “application design team” that includes former teachers and librarians to develop on-line lesson plans and resources for K-12 schools, community colleges and public libraries. Among them are “Blue Web’n,” which offers links to top educational sites, and “Filamentality,” which lets teachers and librarians create Web-based activities “so students know right where to go to get research information,” says Mary Lasica, a member of SBC’s education team. Special cyber-activities currently featured include “Searching for China” and “Webtime Stories,” an annotated collection of sites for children’s literature.

SBC also holds training sessions for educators, to maximize the material on the site. “This is free training for teachers,” Lasica says. “Budgets have shrunk, and it takes time to integrate new technologies and resources into the classroom.”

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »