Despite Mishaps, Santa Monica Schools Get Good Report

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

May 10 -- Once again, the City came through with a helping hand for Santa Monica schools, when Monday night’s long-anticipated State of Our Schools community report was threatened by a power failure at the main library auditorium.

Seeing that the lights were out, City Manager P. Lamont Ewell ducked out a little before the 6:30 meeting to make a few phone calls and try to find out what was going on.

And in an example of the generous volunteer support that event sponsors say keeps local schools ahead of the pack, Mayor Bob Holbrook jumped into the sound booth, where he kept the mikes working as District administrators, teachers and students told their stories to an audience of some 100 school and community leaders.

“The success of our community depends on the success of our schools,” said Shari Davis, co-chair of Community for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS), which, with the Santa Monica-Malibu PTA hosted the presentation.

Davis thanked the City and the community for the more than $20 million local schools receive each year through parcel taxes, fundraising and a $6 million annual grant CEPS negotiated with the City two years ago.

Not all California schools are so lucky. RAND Corporation scientists compared the state’s schools with schools across the nation and gave them a failing report card, Senior Social Scientist Brian Stecher told the group.

Measured by funding per pupil, class size, facilities and national test scores, California schools get a C-, a D, a D+ and an F respectively. (Individual schools are not graded.)

“I was really shocked by the grades California got,” Daryl Fairweather, a senior at Santa Monica High School told the audience. “California can’t get into one of its own colleges,” she said as the audience laughed.

Daryl and five of her peers shared their bright futures at high-end universities with an appreciative audience, fairly equally divided between USC and UCLA fans, judging from the jeers when the kids mentioned the rival schools.

But administrators stressed that they’re just as interested in reaching traditionally low- achieving students.

Interim Superintendent Michael Matthews said he is just as proud of what the district’s doing for minority and low-income students as he is of the district’s award winning music programs or the SAMOHI science team that recently won third place in the National Science Bowl.

“It’s a long ways away, but we’re proud of the work that we’ve done,” Matthews said of the district’s efforts to eliminate the achievement gap between white and minority students.

“If it can’t be done in Santa Monica, if can’t be done anywhere,” Matthews said.

Three star teachers from SAMOHI gave the audience a sense of how the district’s goal of “outstanding achievement for all” translates into classroom practice.

Popular history and Freshman seminar teacher Michael Felix told the tale of how Martin Luther King Jr. reached out to Chicago gang members, appealing to their sense of self-respect and dignity.

“That’s what I try to do in my class every day,” Felix said. He said he teaches his students “what does it look like to be a compassionate person in the community.”

While teaching Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, language teacher Jose Lopez sets a living example for his students. He shared his background as an immigrant whose family came from Mexico to work in the fields of Delano.

And Steve Rupprecht traveled around the world with a backpack for 12 years before becoming a math teacher at SAMOHI.

“This to me is a far greater adventure,” Rupprecht said.

When his students ask him when they’ll ever use what he’s teaching in real life, Rupprecht tells them math is “not job training, it’s thought training.”

The teachers and students were well received, and amazingly, given all the last minute adjustments, the presentations stayed on schedule.

Despite temperamental microphones, despite a video and a barbershop quartet that failed to materialize, despite RAND report graphs presented with hand gestures and exhortations to imagine the axes, the audience consensus was that the evening was a great success.

It ended with treats and schmoozing for all in the darkened courtyard foyer, where no one seemed in any hurry to leave.