(Vol. 3, No. 2 - Fall 1999)

Challenging Teachers and
Students at Long Beach Prep

Two years ago LBUSD began diverting failing 8th graders into a special academy, with the promise that after a year, most would be ready to succeed in high school. If it ever hopes to meet that goal, Long Beach Prep faces a formidable professional development challenge.

by Anne C. Lewis

Shamieka was full of tears her first few days at Long Beach Preparatory Academy, back in the fall of 1998. "I didn't want to be here," she recalls. By the end of the school year, the bouncy, outgoing, 14-year-old was proud to be making good grades. And like so many Prep students, she was reluctant to trade the Academy's small, supportive environment for an anonymous existence in one of Long Beach's overstuffed high schools.

Long Beach Prep - a cluster of plain-Jane portables currently bivouacked in the Signal Hill community - is a place of tears, joy, frustration, triumph and a small band of teachers who must constantly hone their skills to deal with students whose lives are dominated by failure.

Prep experienced a shaky first year. District leaders admit that many of the staff initially selected to teach in the "second chance" school were not well-prepared to meet the academic and emotional needs of a student body composed entirely of kids who made two or more F's in eighth grade. It is a different kind of school two years later, largely through the efforts of the school's second principal, Toni Issa-Lahera, who never gives up on a student but is quite picky about her staff

Aware that it takes a special teacher to be successful at Prep, Issa-Lahera has retained a core of teachers who started when the school opened. The rest of the staff has been selected based on a profile taken from Prep's most successful teachers. She looked for these qualities when hiring, she says: perseverance; an ability to make the curriculum relevant to students with a history of low achievement; a natural rapport with streetwise kids; and a commitment to working as a team.

Prep needs a special kind of teacher and a special kind of professional development, says Issa-Lahera. "Even if I can't teach everyone to be a great teacher, I can give every kid access to a good curriculum." Prep teachers' professional lives are consumed this year with planning together, covering the same curriculum, and providing regular feedback to each other and to the principal.

Prep Requires Unique Professional Development

Issa-Lahera and the school's full-time staff developer, Heather Magner, take the lead in providing professional development for the staff. Magner and Issa-Lahera were grade-level partner teachers at Alvarado Elementary School, but both wanted to work with an older age group. They took on a tough assignment at Prep. Magner, however, sees right through the bravado and disengagement of Prep's students. She anticipated that the students would not be readers. She found that they could decode words and pronounce them, but their depth of understanding was very limited. "They can read every word," she says, "but it is gibberish to them."

As a teacher and staff development coach last year, Magner started enticing students by relating the curriculum to "something close to them" and building from there. They wrote rap lyrics and learned to tackle the elements of memoir. When one of her student's brothers was killed in a drive-by shooting, the students read the novel Drive By, then graduated to The Hobbit, "where they found literature characters like themselves." Magner even used strategies from poker to show them the similarity between the card game and the thinking that needs to go into "writing a research paper on whales."

Keeping Learning "in the Groove"

This school year began with shared reading across the school of the novel Holes, about a teenager who is mistakenly identified as a thief and is sent to a reform camp. Teachers used the book constantly in their conversations with students, and the school's morning television broadcast, "Groove," tied into the book with its word-of-the-day and questions from students about the plot. "We have kids who aren't tardy anymore because they don't want to miss the Groove's discussion about Holes," says Issa-Lahara.

A lot of the teaching at Prep, says Magner, is counseling because of the many personal issues students bring to school. The school has attracted staff members who understand this need. Vice principal Jay Camerino is the oldest of five boys in his family, three of whom became gang members. "I have a lot of energy for these kids," he says, "because I don't want their talent to be wasted."

Technology coordinator Chad Hutchins had done ministry work with middle school students before becoming a full-time teacher. He almost dropped out of high school after being told he would not succeed in college, but he says this negative experience "steeled him" rather than discouraging him.

He has difficult days at Prep, but also times when he sees a student "who has faked it all the way through school" actually begin to enjoy learning. Prep's focus on certain skills, its broad range of support services for students, and its professional development that "makes sure we are all on the same page" should become a model for the middle schools, Camerino believes. He thinks Prep might be less necessary if classes were smaller in regular middle schools (currently about 37-38 per class) and if schools intervened early enough with the personal support services that students like those at Prep need. Most importantly, Camerino says, the kids who ended up at Prep needed more teachers earlier in their school careers who believed they had the potential to achieve.

Despite Improvements, Problems Persist

Although Long Beach Prep has clearly strengthened its program over the last two years, the long-term viability of Prep's "second chance" model is still in question. The attempt to somehow compensate in a single year for everything students missed during eight years of schooling is laudable. But some observers question whether it is really do-able.

In an August report - based on visits during the 1998-99 school year - evaluators paid by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation wrote that "we were impressed by the caring, supportive atmosphere we found at Prep," but noted that even with all the support many students left Prep before the end of the year.

They also reported that some students found Prep's classes unchallenging and a repeat of the previous year. "Unfortunately, we had to agree," the evaluators wrote. "Many of their classes were boring - watching videos, coloring diagrams of plant cells, round robin reading that lost most of the class, crossword puzzles of vocabulary words - a lot of busy work.... The student work we saw was largely in the form of worksheets and art projects, and of medium to low quality, although the recorded grades were quite high. The lack of rigorous instruction at the Academy continues to trouble us."

The evaluators also noted that many Prep's first graduates dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. "Clearly, students are finding re-entry into regular high school extremely difficult." They attributed the problem, in part, to a lack of special support in the high schools and to a false sense of security among Prep graduates about their level of preparation for high school work.

Their findings, the evaluators said, reflected not so much on the heroic efforts of the Prep staff as on the need to strengthen teaching and student support services in the district's regular middle schools, including programs to engage more parents in their children's learning. They cited the success of the Long Beach Education Partnership's youth development centers (housed in a few schools) as evidence that well-designed support programs can be "effective in raising student achievement...."

When principal Toni Issa-Lahera was interviewed by the evaluators last spring, she acknowledged that the many problems Prep's students bring with them make achievement difficult, but made it clear she would not be satisfied to focus only on socio-emotional issues. "We have to get better academically," she said. "Lots better. I have to find the simultaneous tool to be able to help with behavior and all that other stuff and still be moving them towards (academic achievement)."

Is it realistic to expect that Prep can develop a cadre of "superteachers" capable of doing it all? Given the high concentration of students with serious emotional and educational problems, perhaps Prep is being asked to do an impossible job, says one district leader who asked not to be named. "No matter how carefully they select the teachers or how much professional development they offer, the challenge is huge. Maybe those resources could be better invested in the regular system."

Getting Back to the Basics

But Issa-Lahera is not ready to give up. This year the school has pared down its curriculum, focusing only on reading, writing and math - the "gateway" skills that students must have to survive when they pass through Prep's doors for the last time.

Issa-Lahera and Magner worked throughout the summer revamping the curriculum, matching it to standards, and making sure the right materials were on hand. Issa-Lahera took charge of the language arts area; vice principal Jay Camerino took over the math area. They arranged week-long summer workshops for teachers, followed by another week of team-oriented professional development covering learning styles and essential elements of the curriculum.

Every Wednesday the faculty meets to plan lessons together for the following week, based on demonstration lessons created by the administrators and the staff developer. Issa-Lahera is also working on developing "the perfect staff meeting," fostering camaraderie and "fun" around serious business. All staff members submit weekly comments to the principal on Friday, describing their classroom process, the content they're teaching, and their thoughts about certain students.

Issa-Lahera writes e-mail replies over the weekend. She says the regular feedback gives her greater insight into the teachers' work and sparks new professional development ideas. For example, the teachers are well aware that their students are "big talkers," so they have tried out the Socratic Seminar - a structured dialogue among students and teachers built around challenging questions.

Issa-Lahera is optimistic that a stronger faculty, better professional development, and the school's decision to clear the deck of all but the most critical academic needs of students will pay off. "The stronger the kids can be in the basic subjects, the greater their chances of succeeding in high school," she says. "That has to be our first priority."

If Prep's teachers need a morale boost, they might find one in the comments of John McVay, a history teacher at Hill Middle School, who helped score the work of Prep's students on last spring's districtwide writing assessment.

"I kind of went in with a little bit of a stereotype," McVay says. "Here are the kids who have been shuffled over to this place because they haven't succeeded in middle school. So I wondered what I would see in their writing, and frankly, I was expecting a pretty low level of performance. But I saw some competent writing by writers who knew what they had to say. I saw a lot of potential."


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