Integrating Our Schools: Difficulties Facing High Tech High North County
Introduction
“Hey, white girl. Move out the way!”
Without looking up, I knew two things: 1) I was being spoken to and 2) I should move out of the way. At Thompson Middle School, there were less than 10 white girls in our entire school, and I knew that when it was time to change classes and walk through the halls, the faster I moved and looked at the ground, the less likely I was to run into any trouble. The halls were tough, but riding the bus was the worst for me. Once my older brother moved on to high school, I was the only white student on the bus, and I was the last to get picked up. By the time I climbed onto the bus, everyone was sitting 2 or 3 to a seat already. I would have to be someone’s third on a seat. I would walk down the aisle while the bus pulled away, not making eye contact, asking if I could sit down. Eventually, after being refused by everyone, the bus driver would yell into his mirror that somehow could see all of us, that someone better let ‘that white girl sit down’ or he was going to pull over the bus. Someone would always begrudgingly give me a few inches, and I would balance my way to school for the rest of the trip. This was Richmond, VA in the late 1980s, but if you look at the data from that middle school today, the racial makeup is the same. Today’s racial profile of my middle school, Fred D. Thompson Middle School, is 97% black, 2% white and 1% Hispanic. In a city where 40% of the population is white, there is something not lining up. Since leaving Richmond, I take this imbalance with me, and I am especially sensitized to race in schools.
When I moved to California, three years ago, I was struck immediately by the number of smaller charter school options for students. When I moved to San Diego, I was lucky enough to get a job at High Tech Middle Media Arts. One of the things that initially drew me to this school was the way that students were selected. I kept saying to my friends back East that this was how it was supposed to be. Students from all economic and cultural backgrounds were working together in groups on projects. These students would never have been in a schooling situation in which their varied backgrounds would put them in a classroom together, and here they were discussing books together and crafting projects together. In Virginia, I had seen the imbalance as a student, and I had been frustrated by it as a teacher. At High Tech High (HTH), the academically and economically blind lottery system brings in a diverse mix and represents the city in which it exists. This plan attempts to expose students to different types of students and provides a place for them to work together in groups. This integration of students in a school seemed initially to be too good to be true to me. I kept waiting for people to throw in the ‘but’ as they discussed the design principles or showed some of the student work, but the ‘but’ never came. One of the biggest pulls for me was the thought that goes into the lottery system for student admittance for the High Tech High Schools. Not all charter schools use such deliberate methods to attempt representation of the overall community demographics.
The HTH lottery system is organized based on zip codes. The thought is that the percentages of students from each zip code in the High Tech High community will be represented in the demographic make-up of the school. The reason this works for demographics is that even if one’s neighborhood is completely segregated by race, that zip code will integrate with students from all other potentially segregated neighborhoods. In spite of de facto segregation, students integrate and the school is representative of the area which the school serves. In addition to the zip codes, the HTH schools attempt to represent the national average of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch at the schools, which is currently around 40%. Although the percentage of free and reduced lunch students in California is closer to 60% now (9% increase last year), the national average is lower and more reflective in the HTH schools. (“Free and Reduced Price Meals”) After one year, I moved to High Tech High North County, where the zip code based lottery does not result in the same representation as in the San Diego campus.
High Tech High North County is located in San Marcos, CA. The three main cities that HTHNC serves are San Marcos, Vista and Escondido. Taking the average demographics of these 3 counties, HTHNC should have a student body that is 54% white, 42% Latino, 2% black and 2% Asian. HTHNC is instead 69% white, 16% Latino, 5% black and 1% Asian. The statewide average of 52% students qualifying for free or reduced lunch population is also not being met. Currently, HTHNC’s free and reduced lunch population is approximately 23%. There has been a lot of focus since the founding of this school five years ago, placed on how to diversify our current student body to make our zip code lottery reflect our community. With the help of my 12th grade students, we went into one of the communities, Escondido, to attempt to increase enrollment in our school from the underrepresented socioeconomic areas. I chose this issue of segregation in schools to examine for my leadership project, as I felt that the structures were in place for a truly integrated school in North County, and it has not become the reality. My work focused on the specific diversity issues facing High Tech High North County (HTHNC). However, I hoped that the results of my approach towards diversifying our student body could be used in other schools of choice that also hope to represent the diverse community in which they are located.
The segregation at HTHNC is no where near the segregation that still exists in Richmond public schools or in San Diego traditional schools. However, it is still enough to stand out to me and make me ask: 1. Why aren’t more Latino students applying? 2. Why aren’t more students who qualify for free or reduced lunch applying? Overall, this gets at my larger question: How can HTHNC become more representative of the community in which it exists?
Understandings: Context of US Schools
In the US school system, the federal and state governments have tried different methods of integration in our schools. They have tried involuntary integration such as forced busing, and they have also tried voluntary methods such as having parents apply to schools of choice like charter schools. Yet, today some public schools continue to be segregated institutions. In 2010, US schools were more segregated than they were in the late 1960s. (Lockette, 2010). In a Civil Liberties exploration in Teaching Tolerance, the follow data explains this new segregation: one-third of black students attend school in places where the black population is more than 90 percent. A little less than half of white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white. One-third of all black and Latino students attend high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch); only 4 percent of white children do.
In order to fully understand this backslide in integration efforts, it is important to follow the unfolding of the timeline of court cases and legislative efforts towards desegregation in schools. In the case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the crux of the case centered around Homer Plessy, a man who was ⅞ white, who attempted to ride in the white car of a train. The Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans recruited Plessy to violate the Separate Car Law passed in 1890. The Committee told the railroad of its intention. After the case went to the Supreme Court, they declared that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment as long as the facilities were equal.This led to 58 years of segregated schooling in which the segregated facilities were in reality not equal for black and white students.
Another segregation case occurred in San Diego County in 1931. This case was not heard by the Supreme Court as it was resolved at the state level and not petitioned. In Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, the Lemon Grove School District ordered the removal of 75 Mexican-American students (95% of whom were born in the US), and segregated them to an Americanization School. These families organized and filed a lawsuit in which ultimately, Lemon Grove Schools were told that the Mexican-American students segregation was in violation of California law. All the students were returned to an integrated school. (Alvarez, 1984)
It wasn’t until 1954, when the same integration held true for black students. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court examined the idea of segregated schools and overturned Plessy. Like the Plessy case, Brown v. Board was a planned effort to get a case to the Supreme Court to reexamine segregation in public schools. The court focused on the case of Linda Brown, an 8-year old black student who had to travel a great distance to reach her segregated school. Her white friends went to schools much closer with better physical structures. The Brown family as well as a number of other Topeka families went to Federal Court and then the Supreme Court. In the opinion of the court, they stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The court then gave a vague directive to integrate “with all deliberate speed”. (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954)
For some states, like Virginia, this meant they would speed the integration to a snail’s pace. The State Legislature in Virginia repealed the mandatory school attendance law so that public schools could be optional for the state’s counties and cities. Eventually most cities chose integration over closed school systems. However, in Prince Edward County, VA the school chose instead to shut their doors for 5 years to everyone so that they would not have to forcibly integrate. Private schools that received state funding for tuition only took white students. In 1964, the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private institutions, and it was then, five years later, when the schools were integrated. After schools were legally forced to be integrated, there were many factors that kept them still divided. (“Civil Rights Movement”, 2004) In most areas of the US, students attend the public school in their districts, and with many neighborhoods that remain racially divided, some schools still remain the same segregated institutions.
After Brown v. Board, state governments tried involuntary integration plans such as forced busing of students into schools outside of their local districts. The Supreme Court heard a case in 1971, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Schools in which busing in an effort to desegregate schools was held as constitutional. Again, in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), busing was deemed constitutional as long as desegregation existed across multiple counties. However, these efforts began to fizzle in the 1980s as the economy experienced a boom in the South. A lot of new residents moved into Southern states from the North, and they viewed forced busing less favorably. In the 1980s there was push back in some communities in which forced integration was unpopular.
The center of the Supreme Court busing decisions, Charlotte, NC, is an interesting area of the US to examine. In the 1990s, Charlotte schools moved towards schools of choice. One third of the schools in Charlotte were converted to magnet schools that had racial quotas. However, by 1999, these racial quotas had also been challenged by parents and students. One white student who was denied entrance to a school based on her race, and her father, William Capachione sued the school district. From this, eventually the Federal court ruled that the schools had become integrated and busing and racial quotas needed to end. The Supreme Court declined to hear this case. In Charlotte, in 2002 a new approach to attendance was called the “School Choice Plan”. In this the schools were divided into four large attendance zones which began to reinstate de facto segregation. Students could stay in their neighborhood home schools or they could rank their top three choices of other schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The first year of this program, 95% of all families submitted choices outside of their home schools. (Kane, 2005) When busing ended and school choice was implemented, two journalists from the Charlotte Observer wrote, “Busing teaches our children a terrible lesson. Rather than eliminating racial discrimination, busing promotes it by teaching children that the government should treat them differently on the basis of their race.” (Levin and Blum, 1999) In many public school systems, however, students do not get a choice in their schooling. As a result many neighborhoods across the US are economically segregated, which in turn can lead to racial segregation. Thompson Middle School, my alma mater, is a perfect example of segregation being firmly entrenched.
There have been some creative involuntary integration efforts as of late. One of these creative examples took place in Wake County, NC in 2008. Wake County, NC has three high schools into which children filter. Of these three high schools, one high school would be a high poverty school with over 75% of students receiving free or reduced lunch. Another would have around 60% of students receiving free or reduced lunch while the last high school had less than 10% of students receiving free and reduced lunch. In an effort to produce three more balanced schools that they deemed “middle class schools”, Wake County declared that all of the three schools would enroll only 40% of students who qualified for free or reduced lunch. They did not want any high-poverty schools, and this was a way to integrate without forcing busing. Socio-economic integration has been applauded by the US Department of Education and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, spoke in favor of the Wake County integration plan. This plan is minimally disruptive for students as population grows and students have to be reassigned. Even businesses in Wake County have claimed that segregated schools are bad for business and would prefer integrated schools. As a result of economic support and national attention, Wake County continues to push for integrated schools. (Strauss, 2011) Large school districts pushing for plans of integration are still absent for the most part in our educational landscape. In addition to these involuntary pushes for integration, there are voluntary plans of integration as well.
Enter schools of choice. Charter schools have more flexibility in the ways in which they enroll students. Charter schools are publicly funded elementary or secondary schools that operate with fewer restrictions than traditional public schools. In exchange for this lightening of regulations, charter schools establish other different types of accountability through their schools’ charters which will provide a “qualitatively different” experience than what is available in a traditional school. (NEA Policy, 2001) With this lessening of regulations, charter schools can also provide new ways of integrating schools, and then parents can choose for their children to attend these integrated schools if they are granted acceptance. However, according to Amy Stuart Wells, a Professor at the Teacher’s College at Columbia, “Our approaches to school choice over the past 20 years have been pretty unimaginative — and children are paying for our lack of imagination.” (Lockette, 2010) There are less regulation requirements, but charter schools are becoming more segregated than traditional schools (Lee, 2012).
In California, since the Charter Schools Act was passed in 1992, the number of charter schools has been increasing rapidly. Yet, only approximately 5% of California students attend Charter Schools. And within those Charter Schools, there is no guarantee of integration. Charter Schools admittance policies can be based on different factors such as neighborhoods in which a high percentage of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. This can lead to segregated charter schools as well. In May 2012, the New York Times published an article that focused on one particular charter school in Brooklyn, New York. In Explore Charter, 92.7% of the students are Black, 5.7% are Hispanic and the remaining students are of mixed race. New York City Public Schools over are 40.3% Hispanic, 32% black, 14.9% white and 13.7% Asian. Additionally, in Explore Charter, 80% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch as compared to a lower national average of 40%. Tim Thomas, who is a resident of the neighborhood in which Explore Charter is located, writes a blog and has asked white parents why they would haven’t enrolled their children in this charter school. Thomas explained, “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ” (Kleinfield, 2012)
This charter school is somewhat representative of the charter schools nationally in regards to segregation. According to a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, charter schools have been expanding in major cities with struggling school systems. Within this expansion though the charter schools are becoming even more segregated than the traditional public school system in which they operate. 70% of black charter school students are in schools that have 90% of the enrollment listed as non-white. Of these black charter school students, 43% are in schools with virtually all minority enrollment. The study also revealed that racially segregated schools face problems such as retaining teachers and having low graduation rates. These problems are not as prevalent in more integrated schools. The UCLA education professor, Gary Orfield who oversaw this study, reported that charter schools have not been proven to be better academically than regular public schools. Some researchers debate this conclusion, however. (Lee, 2010)
Charter schools have more flexibility in the way that students enroll. Some charter schools serve more focused geographic areas or neighborhoods, while some enroll students from different areas of a segregated city. High Tech High North County has been using the lottery system of enrollment explained above to enroll students since its founding. High Tech High North County was founded in 2007 with one 9th grade class. Each year another grade level was added until last year, 2010, when the school had four complete grade levels and its first graduating class. To enroll in the school, a student must enter the High Tech High lottery system. High Tech High schools use United States Census data to determine the percentage of school-aged students in each of the clusters that the schools serve. Each of the zip code clusters are then weighted to correspond with a desired level of enrollment from that cluster. To enter a student in the lottery, a potential student's family must first attend one of the four offered information sessions at HTHNC before a deadline in late February. At this point, a family can enter their student's name in the lottery system in which the main factor used is a family's zip code in the Point Loma and Chula Vista campuses. The main factor used in the North County campus is the city in which they live. Based on a computer-generated lottery system, the students are then selected and notified of their acceptance. This method is used to attempt to mirror the demographics of the area in which the schools are located. (About HTH, 2011)
HTHNC serves nine specific cluster areas into which students are grouped. Those areas are as follows in order of greatest population to least: 1) San Marcos 2) Escondido 3) Carlsbad 4) North County Out of Area (this could include Temecula or other areas not considered North County of San Diego) 5) Oceanside 6) Vista 7) North County Coastal (could include Encinitas, Leucadia, Solana Beach, etc.) 8) North County North (Fallbrook, Rainbow, Pala, Valley Center) 9) North County Inland (could include Ramona, Julian, etc.) These areas vary widely among economic classes and ethnic diversity. Additionally, any family that is eligible for Free or Reduced Lunch automatically gets a statistical advantage in the lottery as well to increase their chances to be accepted HTHNC. (See map of school districts above)
After students are accepted into the school and enroll, the 9th grade class is then broken down into subgroups by gender, ethnicity, free/reduced lunch and English Language Learners. This data is used to compare to the local areas that the school serves. The idea behind this acceptance method is that if HTHNC randomly selects students from the areas surrounding the school, then HTHNC will also represent the areas by gender, ethnicity and economic status. However, at HTHNC the students applying from these areas are not fully representative of the demographics of the surrounding cities. Historically, HTHNC has had an imbalance of more male students than female as well as fewer free/reduced lunch students than the local districts. Additionally, another subgroup of students that is represented at a much lower percentage than the surrounding cities is Latino students, both male and female. This is the main subgroup that I have chosen to focus on for my research.
In the current 2011-12 9th grade class enrolled at HTHNC, there are more Latino students than in any previous class at HTHNC. The overall percentage of Latino students is 21%. The current Class of 2012 students has a Latino student enrollment of 9%. This increase in the 9th grade class is more than double this size and substantial. However, the overall Latino population in the areas served by HTHNC is approximately 42%. This is a figure that I arrived at based on census data for the cities, however, it does not simply look at school-aged children. Of these cities that HTHNC services, Escondido is has a population of 46% Latino. Of this 46%, more than 1/3 of the Latino residents are under the age of 18. For this research, I chose to focus on Escondido as a case study in my efforts to increase diversity in HTHNC.
Why Escondido?
Over the last decade there has been some controversial legislation passed or attempted to be passed. One of these controversies culminated in 2006 with an attempted piece of legislation surrounding housing. The City Council tried to enact an ordinance that would have punished landlords if they rented to illegal immigrants. The legislation required that all landlords check the immigration status before considering an applicant. When asked about the segregation that exists in the city of Escondido, the proponent of the bill, Sam Abed, said that “the problem isn't having too many Hispanics, just that they don't try to assimilate into the community.” This measure went to the courts, and Escondido was told by the federal government to leave the issue alone in 2006 after they struck it down. However, when Sam Abed, the current Mayor, ran for office in 2010, he ran on an anti-immigration and conservative platform. In one of his mailers sent out to voters he had an image of undocumented immigrants running across the border with the tag line: “There is only one candidate we can trust to uphold the rule of law in Escondido.” (Morgan, 2010)
There are other policies as well that have been attempted and struck down in Escondido in the last five years. In 2008, a day-labor ordinance was proposed, but not adopted. This would have involved fines for day laborers, but no punishment for the person attempting to hire a day laborer. There was also a parking ordinance proposed as an attempt to restrict parking in inner city neighborhoods where many Latino families share houses and apartments. (Garrick, 2008) Additionally, in the 123 years that Escondido has been in existence, there has only been one Latino citizen elected to the City Council and that was in 2008. Current Latino Escondido residents are threatening to sue the City if they do not change the way that City Council members are elected. City elections are held as city-wide elections as opposed to elections done by districts within the city. This makes it possible to still leave out an entire portion of the city that is not in the majority. James Finburg, a San Francisco based attorney angling to take on this case states that "Unfortunately, the city of Escondido has been and continues to be unresponsive to the needs of its Latino residents. Rather than addressing the needs of Escondido's Latino community, the City Council has repeatedly pursued policies perceived in Escondido and throughout the rest of San Diego County as illegal." (Garrick, 2011)
Outside of the political scene, the schools are somewhat segregated as well. For this research, I am focusing solely on the middle schools in Escondido since they feed into the high school system. Escondido school system is divided into two districts- the elementary/middle school and the high school districts. The high school district for the first time this past year has given students complete choice in the Escondido High Schools that they attend. However, the middle schools still remain to be based on geographical districts in the city. There are five middle schools in Escondido: Del Dios, Rincon, Bear Valley, Hidden Valley and Mission. Three of these schools, Del Dios, Hidden Valley and Mission, are classified as persistently low-achieving middle schools. These are also the three middle schools with an average of 80% Hispanic students enrolled and 77% Free and Reduced Lunch students. These are not the schools that the majority of our Escondido students feed into at HTHNC. Most of the middle school students feeding into HTHNC come from Bear Valley Middle School and Rincon Middle School. At Bear Valley, the school population is 43% Hispanic with 31% qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Although these numbers are more reflective of the community, HTHNC does not generally receive applications from FRL students attending Bear Valley (Education Data Partnership website).
Out of all the surrounding cities, Escondido is still the second largest area that HTHNC hopes to pull students from (San Marcos is first). For this year’s current 9th grade class, HTHNC hoped to pull in 81 students from San Marcos. From Escondido, we hoped to pull 58 students. Although HTHNC had a surplus of applicants from Escondido, the Latino students from Escondido were significantly under-enrolled. It seems that only certain groups of families are applying to HTHNC in the first place. I decided that as a result of the large number of school-aged children Latino students, I wanted to see how HTHNC's efforts could be improved to appeal as a school to all groups of students.
Initial Speculations
In order to attempt to make a change and become more representative of the North County community, I had to make a few assumptions about why Latino students from Escondido might be hesitant to apply to HTHNC. After speaking with our former Director, Nikki Hinostro as well as other staff who have looked at ways to increase our diversity, I narrowed down on some of these and have been working off of these assumptions since.
Assumption 1: They don't know about HTHNC.
When initial recruiting efforts began in 2007, the new staff, led by Nikki Hinostro the Director went out in the community to work on recruiting students. They handed out flyers at swap meets, stood in front of Wal-Mart, put advertising on NPR, and tried other similar methods of canvassing and getting out into the community to make students aware of HTHNC. Last year as well, there was a group of Latino students led by two teachers at the school, Geoff Roehm and Andrea Frias, that went out in the community to specifically target Latino communities to make them aware of the charter school in San Marcos. Although it is difficult to assess their complete impact, Nikki Hinostro reported that she didn't think her initial efforts in front of random stores or other venues in the communities had much of an impact. She said that although there isn't data to report how families heard about the school, she “never had a family come up to her at an information night and report that they had heard about the school from a flyer.” (Hinostro, interview 2011) Additionally, I spoke with Katie Weisburg who tried similar recruiting efforts when the High Tech High Schools opened down in the Point Loma campus. She explained that they also stood out front of stores in low income neighborhoods and passed out flyers at Swap Meets. Although her evidence is also anecdotal, she also claimed that “these methods were not as effective as making partnerships in elementary and middle schools with the student body that High Tech High needed.” (Weisburg, interview, 2011)
Through my research, I found a similar approach of canvassing a community with flyers and information in Boston. There are 14 Charter Schools in Boston that decided in 2010 that they wanted to recruit more English Language Learners into their schools. The schools put together a complete marketing blitz which included distributing fliers throughout seven diverse neighborhoods in Boston. Additionally, they set up a toll-free number with information and put together a multi-language website with information. Their goal was to either fill out applications or convince parents to attend their charter school recruitment fair. (Vaznis, 2010) This was reported as successful when the number of applicants and attendees of the information fair increased last year. (Goldstein, 2010) I think that the combined effort of these 14 schools may have been more successful in Boston than in North County San Diego because of the massive amount of manpower and canvassing being done to create awareness. For the HTH schools, it has been a smaller effort of a few teachers or staff.
Assumption 2: Parents don't understand what a charter school is.
In addition to perhaps not being aware of HTHNC, I also speculated that parents might not understand charter schools because these schools can look very different than what school looked like when these parents were enrolled themselves. According to a 2010 national survey, 60% of Americans are confused as to what a charter school is. They often mistake it for a paid private school or think that there are strict academic requirements to get into the schools. (Cavanaugh 2010). In the same above mentioned Boston recruiting drive, one of the spokespersons said that “one of the most basic tasks will be explaining what a charter school is. Charter school advocates say that many parents, regardless of their ability to speak English, have the misconception that charter schools are private, tuition-charging institutions.
The 12th grade math class at HTHNC conducted community surveys around common misconceptions of charter schools. The HTHNC went out in groups of 3 with different hypotheses centered around misconceptions of charter schools. In each study, the students were instructed to have a random sampling size group of 50 or higher. All students used age and gender as further factors and tried to balance age groups as well as gender. The only exception of this was students that were looking to see if particular age groups knew more about charter schools and targeted smaller age ranges. The HTHNC used an online survey as well as in-person surveys in Carlsbad, San Marcos, Escondido and Oceanside. As a result of these surveys, some trends were noticed in regards to misconceptions surrounding charter schools. Some of the relevant results to this research from these surveys are as follows:
As a result of these surveys, it seems to be important that misconceptions are addressed among the families interested in attending HTHNC.
Assumption 3: People don't have a reason to trust HTHNC. After examining a lot of the issues and speaking with other High Tech High staff, I think that because people in the community don't know about HTHNC or understand the charter school system entirely, they have no reason to trust people they don't know with their children. At a school that a student is programmed to attend, families know that other people in their community have gone to that school. Whether it is perceived as the best option or not, it is a known entity to parents. I feel that this is the biggest factor limiting the diversity at HTHNC. When the original High Tech High School was founded, there were also issues with the demographics of enrollment. Katie Weisburg, who was an assistant to the Chief Operating Officer, noticed the discrepancies in the free/reduced populations. They were underenrolled as compared to San Diego Schools as a whole. She said that although they tried targeting different neighborhoods with flyers, it wasn't until they started working with organizations already in the communities that people started to trust people from High Tech High. Weisburg decided to partner with San Diego Elementary and Middle Schools in the areas with the student body that HTH was lacking. After making a connection with a counselor on the staff at these schools, parents began to trust the HTH staff as well since they were working with someone familiar. After making this realization and addressing the trust and connections within the community, she saw the community start to warm to the idea of High Tech High for their children. As word of mouth traveled, Weisburg claimed that this created an increase in diversity of applications relatively quickly. These assumptions led me to design my project based around a model that could make students and families aware of charter schools, but more importantly focus on gaining the trust and confidence of Escondido Latino families.
Assumption 4: Transportation
After meeting initially with Dawn Ayles, the counselor at Del Dios Middle School, she suggested that the students may see the distance of a school in a different city as an unrealistic school to attend. In reality, HTHNC is 7 miles away from Del Dios Middle School and accessible by public transportation. However, the transportation does not run frequently that goes directly to the school. Although HTHNC provides public transportation passes to students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, the distance and label of a different city may seem daunting.
The Action
After examining the attempts made so far with marketing efforts and examining the social and political climate of Escondido, I agree that the best way to get students to enroll into HTHNC is to earn the trust of parents and students through a community partnership. As a result, I enlisted the help of two of my 12th grade Government classes to attempt to make this community partnership. This also provided the opportunity to raise awareness about what the school is about. The first step of this partnership was finding two Escondido Middle Schools that would be willing to work with us. Since my focus is mainly on 9th grade students and HTHNC, I decided that I would only focus on partnering with middle school students. The HTHNC 12th grade students also needed to have some buy in to work with students in a way that is relevant to them. For Government class this year, I decided to teach the majority of my Government content through the lens of the education system. The students were asked to find and focus on an issue within the middle schools and to come up with an action plan to affect some change. My 12th grade students found partnerships with two Escondido middle schools over the course of this school year (2011-12).
The first school that the students worked in was Del Dios Middle School in Escondido. According to the California Department of Education, Del Dios has a demographic of 81% Latino students and 67% Free and Reduced Lunch students. Counselor Dawn Ayles informed us as well that they are in their 2nd year of Program Improvement and have had five principals over the last four years. Some teachers welcomed the HTHNC students while some were not sure what the high school students could do to help out. Over the course of the 2011-12 school year, 49 HTHNC 12th grade students spent a total of 15 weeks in the classrooms at Del Dios Middle School. The HTHNC students were divided among eight different 8th grade classrooms and one 7th grade classroom at Del Dios. Some ways in which they developed relationships included HTHNC students pushing into the classrooms at Del Dios and working with struggling students. Other students were asked to lead mini-lessons on different, often impromptu, topics.
Through this connection with Del Dios, we were also able to bring a group of 16 students to HTHNC to shadow some of these 12th graders for one day during Exhibition week in December. After this day of shadowing, we debriefed with the Del Dios students to talk about their experience. One of their counselors as well as an assistant principal spent the day at HTHNC with the students. A few weeks later these students were then guided through the application process with their counselor and me. 13 of the students from Del Dios applied for acceptance into next year’s 9th grade class.
Additionally, 47 HTHNC 12th grade students had a similar mentorship set up at Rincon Middle School in Escondido. Rincon Middle school has a population of 54% Latino and 54% Free and Reduced Lunch. They are also very open to the idea of project-based learning and welcomed the HTHNC students in. The Principal informed me that his staff has attended PBL workshops put on by the High Tech High system. The principal, Jon Centofranchi stated his goal for the HTHNC students was to “make a one-on-one connection with a middle school student each day that they were in the classrooms.”
Findings: Data Collection
During the debrief of the shadow day with the Del Dios students, we asked them to write what struck them about the day, five of their responses centered around a feeling of safety.
As this theme of feeling safe in a classroom was brought up and discussed, I decided to ask my 12th graders for their observations of Del Dios middle school. The 12th grade students work with the middle school students for only one class period each week.
They were asked:
1. Have you seen evidence of any bullying in the classroom or in the passing period to class? 42% wrote that they had seen some evidence of bullying in the classrooms they were assigned to.
2. Would you classify the relationship between the students and teachers as positive, negative or neutral? 50% observed that the relationship between the teachers and students was usually negative.
The survey then asked to give evidence of the negative or positive behavior that they saw. Students that saw positive relationships wrote:
“The teacher explained things again if the students asked questions.”
“Mr. Ngo has good projects and the kids love him.”
“The teacher jokes with the kids.”
Students that saw mostly negative relationships wrote:
“The teacher gets defensive when a student asks a question.”
“[He] doesn’t care if the students get it or not. He’s mostly doing math review for the STAR test, but when they don’t get it he yells at them for not trying.”
“I heard the teacher tell a group of girls to shut up. They were being rude, but she was rude right back to them by telling them that.”
This feeling of safety and or teacher student relationships was one that I had not examined before. I started thinking that this feeling of safety was also linked to the positive relationship students have with teachers at their school and the safe classrooms the teachers create.
After this shadowing day, the next step was getting those students who were interested to apply to the lottery. We had three information sessions as well, which I attended. Out of the connections we made, 11 students have applied for the High School from Del Dios and attended an information session with their parents. Eight of these students are free/reduced lunch students. Last year only four new students from all of Escondido schools qualified for free or reduced lunch. Although the numbers are small this doubles the amount of applicants that qualified for free or reduced lunch this year. Furthermore, of these 8, 7 of them are Hispanic. High Tech High North County’s desired amount of new students from Escondido is 28 students (14%). There are 3 other middle schools in Escondido, and traditionally 2 of those schools are where the majority of our applications are from. This year, 5 of the students from Del Dios were offered admittance into HTHNC from the first round of the application. 3 of the 5 admitted students were free and reduced lunch students. After the initial round of acceptances, there will be another round of acceptance letters that go out. Hopefully, in that second round some of the other students from will be also be admitted.
At Rincon Middle School, we did not do a shadow day with the Rincon students. We let them know individually that the deadlines for applications were coming up, but the timing wasn’t good for the school to bring students for a day of shadowing. Surprisingly, zero students applied for admittance to HTHNC from Rincon Middle School. Part of this could be that the Rincon students did not see HTHNC in person so it was still unknown to them. Also, I think it might have something to do with the different environment at Rincon. In the same survey that the HTHNC students who went to Rincon answered, the responses were quite different.
1. Have you seen evidence of any bullying in the classroom or in the passing period to class? 6% of the HTHNC students said they had seen evidence of bullying at Rincon
2. Would you classify the relationship between the students and teachers as positive, negative or neutral? 96% of the HTHNC students saw a positive relationship between the students and teachers, and the remaining 4% wrote down neutral.
The survey then asked to give evidence of the behavior that they saw. Students that saw positive relationships wrote:
“The teacher waits at the door for the students when they come into class.”
“The students work in groups in the math class, and the teacher is a little strict but lets them talk to try to figure out the problems.”
“The teacher reads with the kids when they do SSR.”
“The PE teachers look they are having fun during PE class.”
The HTHNC students did not provide evidence for the neutral observations of teacher student relationships.
Discussion
This process has highlighted the issue of trust that I explored early on in this process. However, I also learned from the middle school students that feeling safe in a school was on the forefront of students’ minds. For the students coming from middle school, they aren’t as concerned about the types of courses offered or perhaps even the structure of the teaching. They want a place where they feel safe and where they know they can develop a positive relationship with their teachers. Since it is rare that middle school students seek out a different high school than the one prescribed by their school districts, having students take ownership of where they wanted to go to high school was a big deal.
As briefly mentioned above, the feeling on campus at Rincon was different for the students than the feeling on campus at Del Dios. If a student feels relatively safe and has a positive relationship with their teachers they might not feel compelled to look to make a change. At Rincon, if students were to apply to HTHNC it would most likely need to come from the parents. Parents with contented children may not look for an alternative to the course their student is already on. At Del Dios, however, the 11 students that applied mostly all applied at school and then went home and told their parents about the required information night that they needed to attend. One student who was accepted brought an older brother and had not told his parents that he had applied until after he was accepted. At the beginning of my research, I asked myself why aren’t more Latino students and students who qualify for free and reduced lunch applying to HTHNC? What I learned from our experience in our two schools is that they are more likely to apply if the students themselves are looking for a safe school, and the parents often come into the equation after the student takes the initiative to apply.
Ultimately, I didn’t think about what parents want and students want as being different things. From our relationship the students built, we learned they thought about safety. I still think that parents look for people or a place that is known to them or that they can trust. Parents entrust a school to work with their children for 6-8 hours five days a week. It is not a simple decision for parents or students to take a risk with a new school that they haven’t learned to trust yet. North County, and specifically Escondido, is a city that struggles with racial and economic tension. It doesn’t surprise me that an unknown entity such as HTHNC has had a tough time convincing certain groups of students to apply. Trust is not established from simply handing out a flyer to a student or a parent at a store in which they are shopping. This technique could certainly pique someone’s interest, but it takes an entirely different level of understanding of a school to entrust a child to them.
Overall, new Latino students applied to HTHNC that might not have if they had not seen the inside of our school. If my research were strictly about numbers, I could measure this project as a small success. But I think that the bigger success that came out of this was the connection and presence HTHNC established in two new schools in Escondido. For both the HTHNC students and the Escondido middle school students, the relationship was mutually beneficial. The 12th grade students seemed genuinely excited for our weekly visits, and the Del Dios students were curious and warmed up to the HTHNC students in the classrooms as they began to approach them for help with their schoolwork. The HTHNC students that went to Rincon were able to help out the teachers that were interested in integrating some aspects of project-based learning. These connections at the schools will hopefully set off a chain reaction in which the few students coming from these schools to HTHNC will open the door for many more students in the future to consider applying to our school.
Throughout this process, I felt that it was important for both the HTHNC students and the Escondido students to know that the project was one that was authentic. I did not want the HTHNC students to feel that I was using them to be recruiters for our school. I also didn’t want the Escondido students to feel like we were coming in to sell them something. As a result of this, I had to work with the counselor at Del Dios and the Principal at Rincon very closely to make sure that the end result for both students was a positive and mutually beneficial relationship. If they ended up applying to HTHNC it was through an authentic relationship and real exposure to the school. It was essential for all three of us to have conversations before introducing the students to each other so that we could plan what the best way to establish positive one-on-one student relationships. By having weekly check-ins we were able to improve on what we planned as well. I felt like it was a balancing act the entire time though to make sure that my main emphasis was on establishing positive relationships built on trust.
Another thing that I needed throughout this project was patience. As a leader at my school, I have been working on slowing down and involving other people when I have an idea that I think will work. When we originally went to Del Dios I wanted to talk about HTHNC to the students early on. I thought we could plant a seed early and then continue to revisit it. This would get Del Dios students interested in our school. However, I had to remind myself that I was working in someone else’s community. We were really guests at both Del Dios and Rincon, and as guests, I had to put our agenda on hold until the students developed authentic relationships with each other. The shadow day did not happen until halfway through the year. It wasn’t my suggestion to have a shadow day at HTHNC although I wanted to bring the Del Dios students on to our campus. Once the counselor suggested it, I jumped on the idea. It worked for the Del Dios students and the administration at their school because it was originally their idea, and I agreed to set everything up.
Again, if you look at just the numbers, the increase in applications from free/reduced lunch applicants and Latino applicants was not overwhelmingly high. However, the 11 students that applied from Del Dios Middle School, did so because they had a glimpse into HTHNC. For them, HTHNC went from being an unknown and strangely named school, to actual people that attend the school. They felt the energy leading into a school-wide exhibition. HTHNC students with names and connections to Del Dios and Rincon students made this charter school become a reality for some of these students. There was a lot of unpacking and effort put into to making a relationship with those 11 applicants. With positive experiences at HTHNC for these students, word of mouth will travel in their community and more diverse students from Escondido will hopefully continue to apply. Next year, HTHNC will have an established relationship with these Escondido middle schools to continue to build trust in a community that has built up walls. With these continuing relationships, HTHNC will hopefully grow into a representative school for North County and a truly integrated public school.
Works Cited
About High Tech High. (2011, October 21) Retrieved from http://www.hightechhigh.org/about/
Alvarez, R. Jr. (1984). The Lemon Grove Incident: The Nation’s First Successful Desegregation Case. San Diego History Center. Retrieved from http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/86spring/lemongrove.htm
Anderson, N. (2010, February 4). Study: Charter School Growth Accompanied by Racial Imbalance. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020303959.html
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
California Department of Education. (2012) Del Dios Middle School Enrollment (Data File). Retrieved from http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/Enrollment/
Cavanagh, S. (2011). On Rhetorical Battleground, ‘Reform’ Proves Potent Weapon. Education Week, 30. 1-25.
Garrick, D. (2011, December 7). Escondido: Latino Residents Threaten to Sue Over ‘Unfair’ Elections. North County Times. Retrieved from http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/escondido-latino-residents-threaten-to-sue-over-unfair-elections/article_32dc4d57-5a55-53a4-81df-179ca0a4defc.html
Goldstein, M. (2010, March 14) How to Insure Fairness and Financing. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com /2010/03/14/the-push-back-on-charter-schools/
Hinostro, N. (2011, October 22). Personal Interview.
Kane, T. (2005). Implementing Public School Choice in Charlotte, NC: Impacts on Student Outcomes, Competitiveness and Racial Segregation. Institute of Education Sciences. Retriveved from http://ies.ed.gov/funding/grantsearch/details.asp?ID=98.
Kleinfield, N.R. (2012, May 11). A System Divided: Why Don’t We Have Any White Kids?. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/education/at-explore-charter-school-a-portrait-of-segregated-education.html?_r=1
Lee, M. (2010, September 14). Hispanics Now Largest Group in Escondido. San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.utsandiego.com/
news/2010/sep/14/hispanics-now-largest-group-in-escondido/?print&page=all
Levin, M. & Blum, E. (1999, August 12). End Busing, Seek Quality Education. Charlotte Observer. Retrieved from http://www.charlotte.com/observer/opinion/view/pub/049962.htm
Lockette, T. (2010, February 10). The New Racial Segregation at Public Schools. Teaching Tolerance. Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/rights/145553/the_new_racial_segregation_at_public_schools
Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. (2012) Free and Reduced Price School Meals (Data File). Retrieved from http://www.kidsdata.org/data/topic/dashboard.aspx?cat=39
National Education Association Policy on Charter Schools. (2001). Statement Adopted by the 2001 Representative Assembly. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/18132.htm
Student and Community Profile in HTHNC WASC/CDE Accreditation Report. Retrieved October 16, 2011, fromhttps://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/hthnc-wasc/.
Vaznis, J. (2010, January 30) Charter Schools Start Recruiting Drive. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/news/education /k_12/articles/2010/01/30/charter_schools_start_recruiting_drive/?page=1
Virginia Historical Society. (2004) The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.vahistorical.org/civilrights/pec.htm
Weisburg, Katie. (2011, October 21). Personal Interview.
Introduction
“Hey, white girl. Move out the way!”
Without looking up, I knew two things: 1) I was being spoken to and 2) I should move out of the way. At Thompson Middle School, there were less than 10 white girls in our entire school, and I knew that when it was time to change classes and walk through the halls, the faster I moved and looked at the ground, the less likely I was to run into any trouble. The halls were tough, but riding the bus was the worst for me. Once my older brother moved on to high school, I was the only white student on the bus, and I was the last to get picked up. By the time I climbed onto the bus, everyone was sitting 2 or 3 to a seat already. I would have to be someone’s third on a seat. I would walk down the aisle while the bus pulled away, not making eye contact, asking if I could sit down. Eventually, after being refused by everyone, the bus driver would yell into his mirror that somehow could see all of us, that someone better let ‘that white girl sit down’ or he was going to pull over the bus. Someone would always begrudgingly give me a few inches, and I would balance my way to school for the rest of the trip. This was Richmond, VA in the late 1980s, but if you look at the data from that middle school today, the racial makeup is the same. Today’s racial profile of my middle school, Fred D. Thompson Middle School, is 97% black, 2% white and 1% Hispanic. In a city where 40% of the population is white, there is something not lining up. Since leaving Richmond, I take this imbalance with me, and I am especially sensitized to race in schools.
When I moved to California, three years ago, I was struck immediately by the number of smaller charter school options for students. When I moved to San Diego, I was lucky enough to get a job at High Tech Middle Media Arts. One of the things that initially drew me to this school was the way that students were selected. I kept saying to my friends back East that this was how it was supposed to be. Students from all economic and cultural backgrounds were working together in groups on projects. These students would never have been in a schooling situation in which their varied backgrounds would put them in a classroom together, and here they were discussing books together and crafting projects together. In Virginia, I had seen the imbalance as a student, and I had been frustrated by it as a teacher. At High Tech High (HTH), the academically and economically blind lottery system brings in a diverse mix and represents the city in which it exists. This plan attempts to expose students to different types of students and provides a place for them to work together in groups. This integration of students in a school seemed initially to be too good to be true to me. I kept waiting for people to throw in the ‘but’ as they discussed the design principles or showed some of the student work, but the ‘but’ never came. One of the biggest pulls for me was the thought that goes into the lottery system for student admittance for the High Tech High Schools. Not all charter schools use such deliberate methods to attempt representation of the overall community demographics.
The HTH lottery system is organized based on zip codes. The thought is that the percentages of students from each zip code in the High Tech High community will be represented in the demographic make-up of the school. The reason this works for demographics is that even if one’s neighborhood is completely segregated by race, that zip code will integrate with students from all other potentially segregated neighborhoods. In spite of de facto segregation, students integrate and the school is representative of the area which the school serves. In addition to the zip codes, the HTH schools attempt to represent the national average of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch at the schools, which is currently around 40%. Although the percentage of free and reduced lunch students in California is closer to 60% now (9% increase last year), the national average is lower and more reflective in the HTH schools. (“Free and Reduced Price Meals”) After one year, I moved to High Tech High North County, where the zip code based lottery does not result in the same representation as in the San Diego campus.
High Tech High North County is located in San Marcos, CA. The three main cities that HTHNC serves are San Marcos, Vista and Escondido. Taking the average demographics of these 3 counties, HTHNC should have a student body that is 54% white, 42% Latino, 2% black and 2% Asian. HTHNC is instead 69% white, 16% Latino, 5% black and 1% Asian. The statewide average of 52% students qualifying for free or reduced lunch population is also not being met. Currently, HTHNC’s free and reduced lunch population is approximately 23%. There has been a lot of focus since the founding of this school five years ago, placed on how to diversify our current student body to make our zip code lottery reflect our community. With the help of my 12th grade students, we went into one of the communities, Escondido, to attempt to increase enrollment in our school from the underrepresented socioeconomic areas. I chose this issue of segregation in schools to examine for my leadership project, as I felt that the structures were in place for a truly integrated school in North County, and it has not become the reality. My work focused on the specific diversity issues facing High Tech High North County (HTHNC). However, I hoped that the results of my approach towards diversifying our student body could be used in other schools of choice that also hope to represent the diverse community in which they are located.
The segregation at HTHNC is no where near the segregation that still exists in Richmond public schools or in San Diego traditional schools. However, it is still enough to stand out to me and make me ask: 1. Why aren’t more Latino students applying? 2. Why aren’t more students who qualify for free or reduced lunch applying? Overall, this gets at my larger question: How can HTHNC become more representative of the community in which it exists?
Understandings: Context of US Schools
In the US school system, the federal and state governments have tried different methods of integration in our schools. They have tried involuntary integration such as forced busing, and they have also tried voluntary methods such as having parents apply to schools of choice like charter schools. Yet, today some public schools continue to be segregated institutions. In 2010, US schools were more segregated than they were in the late 1960s. (Lockette, 2010). In a Civil Liberties exploration in Teaching Tolerance, the follow data explains this new segregation: one-third of black students attend school in places where the black population is more than 90 percent. A little less than half of white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white. One-third of all black and Latino students attend high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch); only 4 percent of white children do.
In order to fully understand this backslide in integration efforts, it is important to follow the unfolding of the timeline of court cases and legislative efforts towards desegregation in schools. In the case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the crux of the case centered around Homer Plessy, a man who was ⅞ white, who attempted to ride in the white car of a train. The Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans recruited Plessy to violate the Separate Car Law passed in 1890. The Committee told the railroad of its intention. After the case went to the Supreme Court, they declared that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment as long as the facilities were equal.This led to 58 years of segregated schooling in which the segregated facilities were in reality not equal for black and white students.
Another segregation case occurred in San Diego County in 1931. This case was not heard by the Supreme Court as it was resolved at the state level and not petitioned. In Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, the Lemon Grove School District ordered the removal of 75 Mexican-American students (95% of whom were born in the US), and segregated them to an Americanization School. These families organized and filed a lawsuit in which ultimately, Lemon Grove Schools were told that the Mexican-American students segregation was in violation of California law. All the students were returned to an integrated school. (Alvarez, 1984)
It wasn’t until 1954, when the same integration held true for black students. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court examined the idea of segregated schools and overturned Plessy. Like the Plessy case, Brown v. Board was a planned effort to get a case to the Supreme Court to reexamine segregation in public schools. The court focused on the case of Linda Brown, an 8-year old black student who had to travel a great distance to reach her segregated school. Her white friends went to schools much closer with better physical structures. The Brown family as well as a number of other Topeka families went to Federal Court and then the Supreme Court. In the opinion of the court, they stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The court then gave a vague directive to integrate “with all deliberate speed”. (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954)
For some states, like Virginia, this meant they would speed the integration to a snail’s pace. The State Legislature in Virginia repealed the mandatory school attendance law so that public schools could be optional for the state’s counties and cities. Eventually most cities chose integration over closed school systems. However, in Prince Edward County, VA the school chose instead to shut their doors for 5 years to everyone so that they would not have to forcibly integrate. Private schools that received state funding for tuition only took white students. In 1964, the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private institutions, and it was then, five years later, when the schools were integrated. After schools were legally forced to be integrated, there were many factors that kept them still divided. (“Civil Rights Movement”, 2004) In most areas of the US, students attend the public school in their districts, and with many neighborhoods that remain racially divided, some schools still remain the same segregated institutions.
After Brown v. Board, state governments tried involuntary integration plans such as forced busing of students into schools outside of their local districts. The Supreme Court heard a case in 1971, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Schools in which busing in an effort to desegregate schools was held as constitutional. Again, in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), busing was deemed constitutional as long as desegregation existed across multiple counties. However, these efforts began to fizzle in the 1980s as the economy experienced a boom in the South. A lot of new residents moved into Southern states from the North, and they viewed forced busing less favorably. In the 1980s there was push back in some communities in which forced integration was unpopular.
The center of the Supreme Court busing decisions, Charlotte, NC, is an interesting area of the US to examine. In the 1990s, Charlotte schools moved towards schools of choice. One third of the schools in Charlotte were converted to magnet schools that had racial quotas. However, by 1999, these racial quotas had also been challenged by parents and students. One white student who was denied entrance to a school based on her race, and her father, William Capachione sued the school district. From this, eventually the Federal court ruled that the schools had become integrated and busing and racial quotas needed to end. The Supreme Court declined to hear this case. In Charlotte, in 2002 a new approach to attendance was called the “School Choice Plan”. In this the schools were divided into four large attendance zones which began to reinstate de facto segregation. Students could stay in their neighborhood home schools or they could rank their top three choices of other schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The first year of this program, 95% of all families submitted choices outside of their home schools. (Kane, 2005) When busing ended and school choice was implemented, two journalists from the Charlotte Observer wrote, “Busing teaches our children a terrible lesson. Rather than eliminating racial discrimination, busing promotes it by teaching children that the government should treat them differently on the basis of their race.” (Levin and Blum, 1999) In many public school systems, however, students do not get a choice in their schooling. As a result many neighborhoods across the US are economically segregated, which in turn can lead to racial segregation. Thompson Middle School, my alma mater, is a perfect example of segregation being firmly entrenched.
There have been some creative involuntary integration efforts as of late. One of these creative examples took place in Wake County, NC in 2008. Wake County, NC has three high schools into which children filter. Of these three high schools, one high school would be a high poverty school with over 75% of students receiving free or reduced lunch. Another would have around 60% of students receiving free or reduced lunch while the last high school had less than 10% of students receiving free and reduced lunch. In an effort to produce three more balanced schools that they deemed “middle class schools”, Wake County declared that all of the three schools would enroll only 40% of students who qualified for free or reduced lunch. They did not want any high-poverty schools, and this was a way to integrate without forcing busing. Socio-economic integration has been applauded by the US Department of Education and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, spoke in favor of the Wake County integration plan. This plan is minimally disruptive for students as population grows and students have to be reassigned. Even businesses in Wake County have claimed that segregated schools are bad for business and would prefer integrated schools. As a result of economic support and national attention, Wake County continues to push for integrated schools. (Strauss, 2011) Large school districts pushing for plans of integration are still absent for the most part in our educational landscape. In addition to these involuntary pushes for integration, there are voluntary plans of integration as well.
Enter schools of choice. Charter schools have more flexibility in the ways in which they enroll students. Charter schools are publicly funded elementary or secondary schools that operate with fewer restrictions than traditional public schools. In exchange for this lightening of regulations, charter schools establish other different types of accountability through their schools’ charters which will provide a “qualitatively different” experience than what is available in a traditional school. (NEA Policy, 2001) With this lessening of regulations, charter schools can also provide new ways of integrating schools, and then parents can choose for their children to attend these integrated schools if they are granted acceptance. However, according to Amy Stuart Wells, a Professor at the Teacher’s College at Columbia, “Our approaches to school choice over the past 20 years have been pretty unimaginative — and children are paying for our lack of imagination.” (Lockette, 2010) There are less regulation requirements, but charter schools are becoming more segregated than traditional schools (Lee, 2012).
In California, since the Charter Schools Act was passed in 1992, the number of charter schools has been increasing rapidly. Yet, only approximately 5% of California students attend Charter Schools. And within those Charter Schools, there is no guarantee of integration. Charter Schools admittance policies can be based on different factors such as neighborhoods in which a high percentage of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. This can lead to segregated charter schools as well. In May 2012, the New York Times published an article that focused on one particular charter school in Brooklyn, New York. In Explore Charter, 92.7% of the students are Black, 5.7% are Hispanic and the remaining students are of mixed race. New York City Public Schools over are 40.3% Hispanic, 32% black, 14.9% white and 13.7% Asian. Additionally, in Explore Charter, 80% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch as compared to a lower national average of 40%. Tim Thomas, who is a resident of the neighborhood in which Explore Charter is located, writes a blog and has asked white parents why they would haven’t enrolled their children in this charter school. Thomas explained, “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ” (Kleinfield, 2012)
This charter school is somewhat representative of the charter schools nationally in regards to segregation. According to a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, charter schools have been expanding in major cities with struggling school systems. Within this expansion though the charter schools are becoming even more segregated than the traditional public school system in which they operate. 70% of black charter school students are in schools that have 90% of the enrollment listed as non-white. Of these black charter school students, 43% are in schools with virtually all minority enrollment. The study also revealed that racially segregated schools face problems such as retaining teachers and having low graduation rates. These problems are not as prevalent in more integrated schools. The UCLA education professor, Gary Orfield who oversaw this study, reported that charter schools have not been proven to be better academically than regular public schools. Some researchers debate this conclusion, however. (Lee, 2010)
Charter schools have more flexibility in the way that students enroll. Some charter schools serve more focused geographic areas or neighborhoods, while some enroll students from different areas of a segregated city. High Tech High North County has been using the lottery system of enrollment explained above to enroll students since its founding. High Tech High North County was founded in 2007 with one 9th grade class. Each year another grade level was added until last year, 2010, when the school had four complete grade levels and its first graduating class. To enroll in the school, a student must enter the High Tech High lottery system. High Tech High schools use United States Census data to determine the percentage of school-aged students in each of the clusters that the schools serve. Each of the zip code clusters are then weighted to correspond with a desired level of enrollment from that cluster. To enter a student in the lottery, a potential student's family must first attend one of the four offered information sessions at HTHNC before a deadline in late February. At this point, a family can enter their student's name in the lottery system in which the main factor used is a family's zip code in the Point Loma and Chula Vista campuses. The main factor used in the North County campus is the city in which they live. Based on a computer-generated lottery system, the students are then selected and notified of their acceptance. This method is used to attempt to mirror the demographics of the area in which the schools are located. (About HTH, 2011)
HTHNC serves nine specific cluster areas into which students are grouped. Those areas are as follows in order of greatest population to least: 1) San Marcos 2) Escondido 3) Carlsbad 4) North County Out of Area (this could include Temecula or other areas not considered North County of San Diego) 5) Oceanside 6) Vista 7) North County Coastal (could include Encinitas, Leucadia, Solana Beach, etc.) 8) North County North (Fallbrook, Rainbow, Pala, Valley Center) 9) North County Inland (could include Ramona, Julian, etc.) These areas vary widely among economic classes and ethnic diversity. Additionally, any family that is eligible for Free or Reduced Lunch automatically gets a statistical advantage in the lottery as well to increase their chances to be accepted HTHNC. (See map of school districts above)
After students are accepted into the school and enroll, the 9th grade class is then broken down into subgroups by gender, ethnicity, free/reduced lunch and English Language Learners. This data is used to compare to the local areas that the school serves. The idea behind this acceptance method is that if HTHNC randomly selects students from the areas surrounding the school, then HTHNC will also represent the areas by gender, ethnicity and economic status. However, at HTHNC the students applying from these areas are not fully representative of the demographics of the surrounding cities. Historically, HTHNC has had an imbalance of more male students than female as well as fewer free/reduced lunch students than the local districts. Additionally, another subgroup of students that is represented at a much lower percentage than the surrounding cities is Latino students, both male and female. This is the main subgroup that I have chosen to focus on for my research.
In the current 2011-12 9th grade class enrolled at HTHNC, there are more Latino students than in any previous class at HTHNC. The overall percentage of Latino students is 21%. The current Class of 2012 students has a Latino student enrollment of 9%. This increase in the 9th grade class is more than double this size and substantial. However, the overall Latino population in the areas served by HTHNC is approximately 42%. This is a figure that I arrived at based on census data for the cities, however, it does not simply look at school-aged children. Of these cities that HTHNC services, Escondido is has a population of 46% Latino. Of this 46%, more than 1/3 of the Latino residents are under the age of 18. For this research, I chose to focus on Escondido as a case study in my efforts to increase diversity in HTHNC.
Why Escondido?
Over the last decade there has been some controversial legislation passed or attempted to be passed. One of these controversies culminated in 2006 with an attempted piece of legislation surrounding housing. The City Council tried to enact an ordinance that would have punished landlords if they rented to illegal immigrants. The legislation required that all landlords check the immigration status before considering an applicant. When asked about the segregation that exists in the city of Escondido, the proponent of the bill, Sam Abed, said that “the problem isn't having too many Hispanics, just that they don't try to assimilate into the community.” This measure went to the courts, and Escondido was told by the federal government to leave the issue alone in 2006 after they struck it down. However, when Sam Abed, the current Mayor, ran for office in 2010, he ran on an anti-immigration and conservative platform. In one of his mailers sent out to voters he had an image of undocumented immigrants running across the border with the tag line: “There is only one candidate we can trust to uphold the rule of law in Escondido.” (Morgan, 2010)
There are other policies as well that have been attempted and struck down in Escondido in the last five years. In 2008, a day-labor ordinance was proposed, but not adopted. This would have involved fines for day laborers, but no punishment for the person attempting to hire a day laborer. There was also a parking ordinance proposed as an attempt to restrict parking in inner city neighborhoods where many Latino families share houses and apartments. (Garrick, 2008) Additionally, in the 123 years that Escondido has been in existence, there has only been one Latino citizen elected to the City Council and that was in 2008. Current Latino Escondido residents are threatening to sue the City if they do not change the way that City Council members are elected. City elections are held as city-wide elections as opposed to elections done by districts within the city. This makes it possible to still leave out an entire portion of the city that is not in the majority. James Finburg, a San Francisco based attorney angling to take on this case states that "Unfortunately, the city of Escondido has been and continues to be unresponsive to the needs of its Latino residents. Rather than addressing the needs of Escondido's Latino community, the City Council has repeatedly pursued policies perceived in Escondido and throughout the rest of San Diego County as illegal." (Garrick, 2011)
Outside of the political scene, the schools are somewhat segregated as well. For this research, I am focusing solely on the middle schools in Escondido since they feed into the high school system. Escondido school system is divided into two districts- the elementary/middle school and the high school districts. The high school district for the first time this past year has given students complete choice in the Escondido High Schools that they attend. However, the middle schools still remain to be based on geographical districts in the city. There are five middle schools in Escondido: Del Dios, Rincon, Bear Valley, Hidden Valley and Mission. Three of these schools, Del Dios, Hidden Valley and Mission, are classified as persistently low-achieving middle schools. These are also the three middle schools with an average of 80% Hispanic students enrolled and 77% Free and Reduced Lunch students. These are not the schools that the majority of our Escondido students feed into at HTHNC. Most of the middle school students feeding into HTHNC come from Bear Valley Middle School and Rincon Middle School. At Bear Valley, the school population is 43% Hispanic with 31% qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Although these numbers are more reflective of the community, HTHNC does not generally receive applications from FRL students attending Bear Valley (Education Data Partnership website).
Out of all the surrounding cities, Escondido is still the second largest area that HTHNC hopes to pull students from (San Marcos is first). For this year’s current 9th grade class, HTHNC hoped to pull in 81 students from San Marcos. From Escondido, we hoped to pull 58 students. Although HTHNC had a surplus of applicants from Escondido, the Latino students from Escondido were significantly under-enrolled. It seems that only certain groups of families are applying to HTHNC in the first place. I decided that as a result of the large number of school-aged children Latino students, I wanted to see how HTHNC's efforts could be improved to appeal as a school to all groups of students.
Initial Speculations
In order to attempt to make a change and become more representative of the North County community, I had to make a few assumptions about why Latino students from Escondido might be hesitant to apply to HTHNC. After speaking with our former Director, Nikki Hinostro as well as other staff who have looked at ways to increase our diversity, I narrowed down on some of these and have been working off of these assumptions since.
Assumption 1: They don't know about HTHNC.
When initial recruiting efforts began in 2007, the new staff, led by Nikki Hinostro the Director went out in the community to work on recruiting students. They handed out flyers at swap meets, stood in front of Wal-Mart, put advertising on NPR, and tried other similar methods of canvassing and getting out into the community to make students aware of HTHNC. Last year as well, there was a group of Latino students led by two teachers at the school, Geoff Roehm and Andrea Frias, that went out in the community to specifically target Latino communities to make them aware of the charter school in San Marcos. Although it is difficult to assess their complete impact, Nikki Hinostro reported that she didn't think her initial efforts in front of random stores or other venues in the communities had much of an impact. She said that although there isn't data to report how families heard about the school, she “never had a family come up to her at an information night and report that they had heard about the school from a flyer.” (Hinostro, interview 2011) Additionally, I spoke with Katie Weisburg who tried similar recruiting efforts when the High Tech High Schools opened down in the Point Loma campus. She explained that they also stood out front of stores in low income neighborhoods and passed out flyers at Swap Meets. Although her evidence is also anecdotal, she also claimed that “these methods were not as effective as making partnerships in elementary and middle schools with the student body that High Tech High needed.” (Weisburg, interview, 2011)
Through my research, I found a similar approach of canvassing a community with flyers and information in Boston. There are 14 Charter Schools in Boston that decided in 2010 that they wanted to recruit more English Language Learners into their schools. The schools put together a complete marketing blitz which included distributing fliers throughout seven diverse neighborhoods in Boston. Additionally, they set up a toll-free number with information and put together a multi-language website with information. Their goal was to either fill out applications or convince parents to attend their charter school recruitment fair. (Vaznis, 2010) This was reported as successful when the number of applicants and attendees of the information fair increased last year. (Goldstein, 2010) I think that the combined effort of these 14 schools may have been more successful in Boston than in North County San Diego because of the massive amount of manpower and canvassing being done to create awareness. For the HTH schools, it has been a smaller effort of a few teachers or staff.
Assumption 2: Parents don't understand what a charter school is.
In addition to perhaps not being aware of HTHNC, I also speculated that parents might not understand charter schools because these schools can look very different than what school looked like when these parents were enrolled themselves. According to a 2010 national survey, 60% of Americans are confused as to what a charter school is. They often mistake it for a paid private school or think that there are strict academic requirements to get into the schools. (Cavanaugh 2010). In the same above mentioned Boston recruiting drive, one of the spokespersons said that “one of the most basic tasks will be explaining what a charter school is. Charter school advocates say that many parents, regardless of their ability to speak English, have the misconception that charter schools are private, tuition-charging institutions.
The 12th grade math class at HTHNC conducted community surveys around common misconceptions of charter schools. The HTHNC went out in groups of 3 with different hypotheses centered around misconceptions of charter schools. In each study, the students were instructed to have a random sampling size group of 50 or higher. All students used age and gender as further factors and tried to balance age groups as well as gender. The only exception of this was students that were looking to see if particular age groups knew more about charter schools and targeted smaller age ranges. The HTHNC used an online survey as well as in-person surveys in Carlsbad, San Marcos, Escondido and Oceanside. As a result of these surveys, some trends were noticed in regards to misconceptions surrounding charter schools. Some of the relevant results to this research from these surveys are as follows:
- 19% of the adult North County population surveyed thought that charter schools charge tuition
- 66% believed that charter schools are more similar to a private school than a traditional public school (other options were given such as home schooling or write-in options)
- 43% believed that there was an academic requirement to get into charter schools
As a result of these surveys, it seems to be important that misconceptions are addressed among the families interested in attending HTHNC.
Assumption 3: People don't have a reason to trust HTHNC. After examining a lot of the issues and speaking with other High Tech High staff, I think that because people in the community don't know about HTHNC or understand the charter school system entirely, they have no reason to trust people they don't know with their children. At a school that a student is programmed to attend, families know that other people in their community have gone to that school. Whether it is perceived as the best option or not, it is a known entity to parents. I feel that this is the biggest factor limiting the diversity at HTHNC. When the original High Tech High School was founded, there were also issues with the demographics of enrollment. Katie Weisburg, who was an assistant to the Chief Operating Officer, noticed the discrepancies in the free/reduced populations. They were underenrolled as compared to San Diego Schools as a whole. She said that although they tried targeting different neighborhoods with flyers, it wasn't until they started working with organizations already in the communities that people started to trust people from High Tech High. Weisburg decided to partner with San Diego Elementary and Middle Schools in the areas with the student body that HTH was lacking. After making a connection with a counselor on the staff at these schools, parents began to trust the HTH staff as well since they were working with someone familiar. After making this realization and addressing the trust and connections within the community, she saw the community start to warm to the idea of High Tech High for their children. As word of mouth traveled, Weisburg claimed that this created an increase in diversity of applications relatively quickly. These assumptions led me to design my project based around a model that could make students and families aware of charter schools, but more importantly focus on gaining the trust and confidence of Escondido Latino families.
Assumption 4: Transportation
After meeting initially with Dawn Ayles, the counselor at Del Dios Middle School, she suggested that the students may see the distance of a school in a different city as an unrealistic school to attend. In reality, HTHNC is 7 miles away from Del Dios Middle School and accessible by public transportation. However, the transportation does not run frequently that goes directly to the school. Although HTHNC provides public transportation passes to students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, the distance and label of a different city may seem daunting.
The Action
After examining the attempts made so far with marketing efforts and examining the social and political climate of Escondido, I agree that the best way to get students to enroll into HTHNC is to earn the trust of parents and students through a community partnership. As a result, I enlisted the help of two of my 12th grade Government classes to attempt to make this community partnership. This also provided the opportunity to raise awareness about what the school is about. The first step of this partnership was finding two Escondido Middle Schools that would be willing to work with us. Since my focus is mainly on 9th grade students and HTHNC, I decided that I would only focus on partnering with middle school students. The HTHNC 12th grade students also needed to have some buy in to work with students in a way that is relevant to them. For Government class this year, I decided to teach the majority of my Government content through the lens of the education system. The students were asked to find and focus on an issue within the middle schools and to come up with an action plan to affect some change. My 12th grade students found partnerships with two Escondido middle schools over the course of this school year (2011-12).
The first school that the students worked in was Del Dios Middle School in Escondido. According to the California Department of Education, Del Dios has a demographic of 81% Latino students and 67% Free and Reduced Lunch students. Counselor Dawn Ayles informed us as well that they are in their 2nd year of Program Improvement and have had five principals over the last four years. Some teachers welcomed the HTHNC students while some were not sure what the high school students could do to help out. Over the course of the 2011-12 school year, 49 HTHNC 12th grade students spent a total of 15 weeks in the classrooms at Del Dios Middle School. The HTHNC students were divided among eight different 8th grade classrooms and one 7th grade classroom at Del Dios. Some ways in which they developed relationships included HTHNC students pushing into the classrooms at Del Dios and working with struggling students. Other students were asked to lead mini-lessons on different, often impromptu, topics.
Through this connection with Del Dios, we were also able to bring a group of 16 students to HTHNC to shadow some of these 12th graders for one day during Exhibition week in December. After this day of shadowing, we debriefed with the Del Dios students to talk about their experience. One of their counselors as well as an assistant principal spent the day at HTHNC with the students. A few weeks later these students were then guided through the application process with their counselor and me. 13 of the students from Del Dios applied for acceptance into next year’s 9th grade class.
Additionally, 47 HTHNC 12th grade students had a similar mentorship set up at Rincon Middle School in Escondido. Rincon Middle school has a population of 54% Latino and 54% Free and Reduced Lunch. They are also very open to the idea of project-based learning and welcomed the HTHNC students in. The Principal informed me that his staff has attended PBL workshops put on by the High Tech High system. The principal, Jon Centofranchi stated his goal for the HTHNC students was to “make a one-on-one connection with a middle school student each day that they were in the classrooms.”
Findings: Data Collection
During the debrief of the shadow day with the Del Dios students, we asked them to write what struck them about the day, five of their responses centered around a feeling of safety.
- One student, Alex, wrote that, “It feels safe here. There are more fights at my school, but no one says they see fights at this school [HTHNC].” The counselor informed me that Alex is a student who often finds excuses to stay in at lunch in the counseling office so he can use the bathroom during the school day without the fear of being bullied in the bathroom. It was no surprise that this was what stood out to him the most.
- Another student, Ivonna, wrote that, “Everyone seems like they are friends with everyone. Even the teachers are friends with the students.” According to the counselor, she is a student who is very social, but has had difficulty in some of her classes channeling her social energy into a positive relationship with her teachers. Although no other students wrote down that they were struck by the student-teacher relationship, her comment led to a discussion in which other students agreed that they saw a very different relationship between the students and the support they received from the teachers.
- A third student, Henry, who was one of our 7th grade shadows, wrote, “I am going to ask my mom to let me apply here for 8th grade. I was going to wait until high school, but I think she will let me come for 8th.” Since the shadow day at HTHNC, Henry has been expelled from Del Dios. He was a frequent target for bullying, and his counselor informed me that he threatened to build a bomb for all the kids that wouldn’t leave him alone. This caused him to be expelled and relocated into another middle school in the district. His excitement on the shadow day was palpable. He talked the entire way back to Del Dios from HTHNC about the things he saw students building for Exhibition. His school counselor has since lost touch with Henry and shared that she was hopeful that he still found a way to apply to High Tech Middle North County for the following year.
As this theme of feeling safe in a classroom was brought up and discussed, I decided to ask my 12th graders for their observations of Del Dios middle school. The 12th grade students work with the middle school students for only one class period each week.
They were asked:
1. Have you seen evidence of any bullying in the classroom or in the passing period to class? 42% wrote that they had seen some evidence of bullying in the classrooms they were assigned to.
2. Would you classify the relationship between the students and teachers as positive, negative or neutral? 50% observed that the relationship between the teachers and students was usually negative.
The survey then asked to give evidence of the negative or positive behavior that they saw. Students that saw positive relationships wrote:
“The teacher explained things again if the students asked questions.”
“Mr. Ngo has good projects and the kids love him.”
“The teacher jokes with the kids.”
Students that saw mostly negative relationships wrote:
“The teacher gets defensive when a student asks a question.”
“[He] doesn’t care if the students get it or not. He’s mostly doing math review for the STAR test, but when they don’t get it he yells at them for not trying.”
“I heard the teacher tell a group of girls to shut up. They were being rude, but she was rude right back to them by telling them that.”
This feeling of safety and or teacher student relationships was one that I had not examined before. I started thinking that this feeling of safety was also linked to the positive relationship students have with teachers at their school and the safe classrooms the teachers create.
After this shadowing day, the next step was getting those students who were interested to apply to the lottery. We had three information sessions as well, which I attended. Out of the connections we made, 11 students have applied for the High School from Del Dios and attended an information session with their parents. Eight of these students are free/reduced lunch students. Last year only four new students from all of Escondido schools qualified for free or reduced lunch. Although the numbers are small this doubles the amount of applicants that qualified for free or reduced lunch this year. Furthermore, of these 8, 7 of them are Hispanic. High Tech High North County’s desired amount of new students from Escondido is 28 students (14%). There are 3 other middle schools in Escondido, and traditionally 2 of those schools are where the majority of our applications are from. This year, 5 of the students from Del Dios were offered admittance into HTHNC from the first round of the application. 3 of the 5 admitted students were free and reduced lunch students. After the initial round of acceptances, there will be another round of acceptance letters that go out. Hopefully, in that second round some of the other students from will be also be admitted.
At Rincon Middle School, we did not do a shadow day with the Rincon students. We let them know individually that the deadlines for applications were coming up, but the timing wasn’t good for the school to bring students for a day of shadowing. Surprisingly, zero students applied for admittance to HTHNC from Rincon Middle School. Part of this could be that the Rincon students did not see HTHNC in person so it was still unknown to them. Also, I think it might have something to do with the different environment at Rincon. In the same survey that the HTHNC students who went to Rincon answered, the responses were quite different.
1. Have you seen evidence of any bullying in the classroom or in the passing period to class? 6% of the HTHNC students said they had seen evidence of bullying at Rincon
2. Would you classify the relationship between the students and teachers as positive, negative or neutral? 96% of the HTHNC students saw a positive relationship between the students and teachers, and the remaining 4% wrote down neutral.
The survey then asked to give evidence of the behavior that they saw. Students that saw positive relationships wrote:
“The teacher waits at the door for the students when they come into class.”
“The students work in groups in the math class, and the teacher is a little strict but lets them talk to try to figure out the problems.”
“The teacher reads with the kids when they do SSR.”
“The PE teachers look they are having fun during PE class.”
The HTHNC students did not provide evidence for the neutral observations of teacher student relationships.
Discussion
This process has highlighted the issue of trust that I explored early on in this process. However, I also learned from the middle school students that feeling safe in a school was on the forefront of students’ minds. For the students coming from middle school, they aren’t as concerned about the types of courses offered or perhaps even the structure of the teaching. They want a place where they feel safe and where they know they can develop a positive relationship with their teachers. Since it is rare that middle school students seek out a different high school than the one prescribed by their school districts, having students take ownership of where they wanted to go to high school was a big deal.
As briefly mentioned above, the feeling on campus at Rincon was different for the students than the feeling on campus at Del Dios. If a student feels relatively safe and has a positive relationship with their teachers they might not feel compelled to look to make a change. At Rincon, if students were to apply to HTHNC it would most likely need to come from the parents. Parents with contented children may not look for an alternative to the course their student is already on. At Del Dios, however, the 11 students that applied mostly all applied at school and then went home and told their parents about the required information night that they needed to attend. One student who was accepted brought an older brother and had not told his parents that he had applied until after he was accepted. At the beginning of my research, I asked myself why aren’t more Latino students and students who qualify for free and reduced lunch applying to HTHNC? What I learned from our experience in our two schools is that they are more likely to apply if the students themselves are looking for a safe school, and the parents often come into the equation after the student takes the initiative to apply.
Ultimately, I didn’t think about what parents want and students want as being different things. From our relationship the students built, we learned they thought about safety. I still think that parents look for people or a place that is known to them or that they can trust. Parents entrust a school to work with their children for 6-8 hours five days a week. It is not a simple decision for parents or students to take a risk with a new school that they haven’t learned to trust yet. North County, and specifically Escondido, is a city that struggles with racial and economic tension. It doesn’t surprise me that an unknown entity such as HTHNC has had a tough time convincing certain groups of students to apply. Trust is not established from simply handing out a flyer to a student or a parent at a store in which they are shopping. This technique could certainly pique someone’s interest, but it takes an entirely different level of understanding of a school to entrust a child to them.
Overall, new Latino students applied to HTHNC that might not have if they had not seen the inside of our school. If my research were strictly about numbers, I could measure this project as a small success. But I think that the bigger success that came out of this was the connection and presence HTHNC established in two new schools in Escondido. For both the HTHNC students and the Escondido middle school students, the relationship was mutually beneficial. The 12th grade students seemed genuinely excited for our weekly visits, and the Del Dios students were curious and warmed up to the HTHNC students in the classrooms as they began to approach them for help with their schoolwork. The HTHNC students that went to Rincon were able to help out the teachers that were interested in integrating some aspects of project-based learning. These connections at the schools will hopefully set off a chain reaction in which the few students coming from these schools to HTHNC will open the door for many more students in the future to consider applying to our school.
Throughout this process, I felt that it was important for both the HTHNC students and the Escondido students to know that the project was one that was authentic. I did not want the HTHNC students to feel that I was using them to be recruiters for our school. I also didn’t want the Escondido students to feel like we were coming in to sell them something. As a result of this, I had to work with the counselor at Del Dios and the Principal at Rincon very closely to make sure that the end result for both students was a positive and mutually beneficial relationship. If they ended up applying to HTHNC it was through an authentic relationship and real exposure to the school. It was essential for all three of us to have conversations before introducing the students to each other so that we could plan what the best way to establish positive one-on-one student relationships. By having weekly check-ins we were able to improve on what we planned as well. I felt like it was a balancing act the entire time though to make sure that my main emphasis was on establishing positive relationships built on trust.
Another thing that I needed throughout this project was patience. As a leader at my school, I have been working on slowing down and involving other people when I have an idea that I think will work. When we originally went to Del Dios I wanted to talk about HTHNC to the students early on. I thought we could plant a seed early and then continue to revisit it. This would get Del Dios students interested in our school. However, I had to remind myself that I was working in someone else’s community. We were really guests at both Del Dios and Rincon, and as guests, I had to put our agenda on hold until the students developed authentic relationships with each other. The shadow day did not happen until halfway through the year. It wasn’t my suggestion to have a shadow day at HTHNC although I wanted to bring the Del Dios students on to our campus. Once the counselor suggested it, I jumped on the idea. It worked for the Del Dios students and the administration at their school because it was originally their idea, and I agreed to set everything up.
Again, if you look at just the numbers, the increase in applications from free/reduced lunch applicants and Latino applicants was not overwhelmingly high. However, the 11 students that applied from Del Dios Middle School, did so because they had a glimpse into HTHNC. For them, HTHNC went from being an unknown and strangely named school, to actual people that attend the school. They felt the energy leading into a school-wide exhibition. HTHNC students with names and connections to Del Dios and Rincon students made this charter school become a reality for some of these students. There was a lot of unpacking and effort put into to making a relationship with those 11 applicants. With positive experiences at HTHNC for these students, word of mouth will travel in their community and more diverse students from Escondido will hopefully continue to apply. Next year, HTHNC will have an established relationship with these Escondido middle schools to continue to build trust in a community that has built up walls. With these continuing relationships, HTHNC will hopefully grow into a representative school for North County and a truly integrated public school.
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