The Success of Price

When your mind’s eye scrolls down a list of San Diego’s top academic institutions, chances are pretty good Hoover High isn’t at the top. Once one of the city’s shining stars among secondary schools, the City Heights campus became better known in recent years as a blighted inner-city school with high dropout rates and low teacher retention.

But things at Hoover High—alma mater of baseball legend Ted Williams, among other notables—are changing fast. And for the better. Hoover is making a gallant comeback, thanks largely to San Diego entrepreneur and philanthropist Sol Price.

Five years ago, as part of an ambitious plan to boost the overall quality of life in City Heights, Price committed $18 million to improving conditions at three neighborhood schools: Rosa Parks Elementary, Monroe Clark Middle School and Hoover. His idea—dubbed the City Heights Educational Pilot—was to raise academic achievement, implement new teacher-training methods and inspire more community involvement. And it appears to be working. Test scores are up at all three schools, teacher retention is rising—and most importantly, the students are focusing on their futures.

Francisco “Paco” Torres, 16, who’s near the end of his junior year at Hoover and plans to attend San Diego State University, says things started to change for him at the beginning of his sophomore year. That’s when he got serious about his schoolwork and his life, he says.

“I realized it was time to take advantage of all the things that were available to me at this school,” Torres says. “My teachers are helping me and a lot of other people here make it to college. I’m taking advanced-placement classes in U.S. history and Spanish this year that’ll give me college credit if I pass the tests, which I’m studying for now. A lot of people at Hoover are talking about college; they’re thinking about the future.”

City Heights is the most densely populated area of San Diego, with approximately 80,000 people residing in just 5 square miles. It’s also one of the city’s most ethnically diverse regions. More than 30 languages are spoken by those in City Heights schools, and nearly 92 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals—a standard measure of low income.

“I’ve heard all the stereotypes about Hoover being a bad school and this being a bad neighborhood,” says Torres, who grew up in the area. “But if you’ve visited my school lately, you know that’s not true. I like it here. I’m proud of this school. What’s happening here proves kids in this neighborhood can make it if you give them a chance.”

Torres believes, as do many observers of the program, that the key component of Sol Price’s vision was linking the schools with SDSU. Price’s son Robert, president of Price Charities, says his father, who’s had an interest in revitalizing City Heights for at least a decade, proposed the SDSU link after observing a “total disconnect” between the inner-city schools’ curriculum and local universities.

“That’s when he came up with the idea of implementing a sort of teaching hospital model,” says Robert, “in which San Diego State’s faculty would work directly with grade schools, middle schools and high schools to encourage kids to get on the college track and stay in school.”

Along with SDSU, the San Diego Unified School District and the San Diego Education Association (the teachers’ union), Price formed the City Heights Educational Pilot. He subsequently agreed to fund the SDSU-supplied staff with $3 million annually for six years.

“There’s a very real connection now between our school and San Diego State,” says Doug Williams, Hoover’s principal. “Because of this program, there are so many more opportunities now for students in this area to succeed. It’s something that should be happening everywhere, but sadly it isn’t. One of our vice principals went to an education conference in Northern California recently, and the only thing the teachers were doing to get students interested in going on to college was wearing college T-shirts to school. Obviously, we do a little more than that here.”

The City Heights program illustrates how private citizens with vision and, yes, money can help revive a community. Contrary to what some believe, Hoover is not a charter school. Staffers work with the teachers’ union and the district, within the state education code. But while they still work in partnership with the school district, teachers are more autonomous than at other schools.

SDSU has supervisory authority over the schools through its president’s office and the program’s executive director, Ian Pumpian. The program works collaboratively in the operation and revitalization of the three schools, and apparently will continue beyond the original six-year plan.

“The agreement is now more permanent. It’s actually no longer a pilot program,” says Robert Price. “San Diego State will eventually be responsible for the staffing budget, and our role will evolve into finding other things to devote our resources to, as opposed to funding administration. We have a lot of work to do, but there are some good things already taking place.”

The program involves hundreds of SDSU faculty and staff. They help Hoover students plan classes, prepare for the SAT college-entrance test, complete admissions forms and apply for college financial aid. Scholarships to SDSU are also available. Recipients receive $6,000 per year, a laptop computer and special mentoring.

Among other benefits of the City Heights program:

* A marching band at Hoover. The school had no band but now has the third largest in San Diego because Sol Price believed the school needed one.

* The Synergy Program, which offers tutoring and activities from 3 to 6 p.m. on the Hoover campus. Between 200 and 500 students participate in this program daily.

* School-in-the-Park, in which third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classes each spend four weeks in Balboa Park, where they study art, science and natural history. The program was criticized at first for being too avant-garde, but even its critics concede it has resulted in higher test scores and heightened student interest in school.

* A literacy-science component for middle-schoolers.

* The use of children’s literature for English-language learners in high school.

* An on-site teacher credential program for elementary and secondary teachers, and teachers’ union waivers, which allow the program to “grow” its own teachers by educating them at the school in which they will work.

* A consistency program that allows teachers and students from seven classes at Rosa Parks to remain together from kindergarten through fifth grade to assure continuity, a crucial component in many children’s success.

* A business entrepreneur project that lets Hoover students develop business plans, then open and operate their own businesses, including such enterprises as coffee carts and student-run branches of local banks.

* A proactive reading-intervention program in kindergarten through second grade, and in the sixth and ninth grades, where tutors work individually with at-risk kids for eight weeks.

* A project that gives tours of the SDSU campus to seventh-graders to promote interest in college.

Debbie Cowan, an administration executive at Hoover who’s worked at several other schools in the district, says what’s going on at Hoover is “absolutely refreshing. There’s a pretty high level of teacher burnout at some of the schools in this district. But it’s different at Hoover. They’re trying things here, new things. Teachers stay here because this school is not as ‘Bersin-based.’ At some of the Bersin-based schools, I’ve seen burnout to the max. Teachers at Hoover have a little more independence.”

According to Hoover principal Doug Williams, the school district does not force-feed Superintendent Alan Bersin’s controversial Blueprint for Student Success to Hoover staff. On the contrary, he says, “We can pick and choose from the Blueprint. We adopt some things from it and take other programs from San Diego State. There are issues with the district, of course, but they’re not blocking us from doing what we’re doing. They’re very supportive.”

The Price family and its Price Charities began investing in City Heights when the crime-ridden area was considered such a civic problem that the City Council issued a declaration of emergency. Price’s nonprofit San Diego Revitalization Corps has helped raise the standard of living and lower the crime rate.

“In spite of all the good things the program is doing, the dropout rate is still too high at Hoover,” says Robert Price. “Test scores are important; the connection to San Diego State is important. But the most important thing is that these kids stay in school and graduate. We need to keep these kids out of trouble, keep them out of jail. And we need to make sure they are not getting pregnant. Everyone knows kids who graduate high school have a much better chance of making it in life than kids who don’t.”

He says Price Charities is now investigating a program to allow students to attend school and work in the same location. “It’s something my dad has thought a lot about,” he says. “We’re trying to find a campus for such a program. We’re still in the formative stages, but we think it would keep a lot more kids in school. Surprisingly, we haven’t seen anyone doing this sort of thing, anywhere. We just don’t know why more things like this haven’t been tried. But that won’t stop us from trying.”

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