Marsha Sutton: Gompers’ protest over district’s latest scheme

“HELP US STOP SAN DIEGO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT FROM TAKING AWAY GOMPERS PROPERTY!”

The headline screamed out at me from my computer screen. Gompers Charter, the Little School That Could, needs help once more.

Against all odds, this neighborhood charter school in southeast San Diego - in partnership with the University of California, San Diego - has taken over where the San Diego Unified School District left off. And that fact apparently infuriates some school board members, particularly board president Shelia Jackson, who represents the Gompers sub-district on the board.

Gompers became a charter school in 2005 after years of chronic failure and indifference by San Diego Unified. In a move that garnered national attention, proponents rallied together and managed to persuade a reluctant school board to approve a Gompers charter unanimously.

What made this charter unique is that it transformed itself from a shell of a school battered by neglect and constrained by union-dominated policies and people, to a neighborhood charter school serving neighborhood kids’ needs with the full support and involvement of parents and the community.

Today, under the leadership of charismatic Gompers principal Vince Riveroll and an enthusiastic staff, achievement has improved, detentions and suspensions have declined, and belief in future success has replaced hopelessness and apathy.

A crumbling educational environment has been converted into a middle school that offers promising outcomes at last.

After four years of steady middle school success, Gompers and its board of directors petitioned the school board earlier this year to approve a Gompers charter high school. A unanimous school board once again voted to support the petition, so Gompers will expand this fall and open a high school that will eventually serve students in grades 9-12.

You’d think, given the unanimity of the charter vote, that all five school board members would be supportive of the school, right? Wrong.

Just after approving the high school charter, it became clear that Jackson had plans to construct a bus turn-around in the area where Gompers has its heart set on building athletic fields for its kids.

Obliterating athletic fields so integral to high school success is a back-door entry to derailed dreams and is yet another blow in a long series of attacks against the school. Even after she heard how strongly the school and community opposed the turn-around, Jackson persisted.

The desperate message from Riveroll lays out the problem:

“The San Diego Unified School District is placing buildings on Gompers sports fields starting in July 2009. We must stop this from happening! The San Diego Unified School District is placing a bus station on Gompers property. We must stop this from happening!”

As Riveroll and his board of directors see it, the destruction of the fields in order to provide a bus turn-around for a nearby magnet school that imports 70 to 80 percent of its students from outside the Gompers area is “unfair treatment” of neighborhood kids - especially when there are other viable options for the magnet school’s buses.

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“The district is taking away the Gompers field of dreams and giving it to Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School,” Riveroll says.

Jackson has managed to do this virtually unilaterally, and privately. She has not brought the matter before the full school board, perhaps because not all members support her efforts to thwart Gompers’ progress.

Calling her plans “terrible acts,” Riveroll says the neighborhood children deserve better treatment by their elected officials and points out that the destruction of the Gompers fields is opposed by parents, students, staff and the community.

Graciously, he and his board are calling upon the school district to provide improvements for the area so that athletic fields and facilities can be shared by both schools - “a win-win solution,” as Riveroll calls it.

Yeah, right. Like that will ever happen. For four years, Gompers has tried to play nice while at every turn smashing into walls set up by scheming opponents.

It is an outrage that the school district is not bending over backwards to support an effort to turn around a previously failing school and give low-income kids in southeast San Diego some hope at last.

If board members would be kind enough to simply ignore the school, that would be a relief and would be preferable to the continuous, energy-sapping roadblocks Gompers repeatedly faces.

For once, these kids have adults in their school who believe in their potential, who will fight for their right to a decent education, who will stand up for them when adult political maneuvering gets in the way of student learning.

Yet politics and personal grudges threaten to take away everything that Gompers has been able to provide in its four short years as a charter school. And what does this say to the children who watch these adult battles mystified at educators who refuse to acknowledge the school’s progress and their own hard work? Success is rewarded with … what? A slap in the face?

Time’s running short and panic is setting in, as the bulldozers could show up at Gompers as early as Wednesday.

Riveroll and the Gompers board are asking for help from the public. They are requesting letters written to school board members and SDUSD Supt. Terry Grier to express opposition to the destruction of the Gompers field space.

Letters are good. Getting the matter on the open agenda for board and public discussion is better. And most radically, staging a peaceful sit-down or other non-violent protest in front of bulldozers is even better.

Imagine the scene - dozens of protesters seated or lying down in front of SDUSD construction equipment. Or Tiananmen Square revisited — since a public spectacle seems to be the only thing that might stop the sabotage.

Gompers is a symbol of education reform at its best, with decent, hard-working people trying their damnedest to give formerly forgotten kids their lives back, and it just baffles me how anyone who calls herself an education advocate can do anything less than cheer them on.

Marsha Sutton is a freelance education writer who covers education issues in San Diego County. She can be reached at: SuttComm@san.rr.com.

Tags: SDNN

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 8:05 am and is filed under Columns, Education, Politics & Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.