Scenes Reveal Hope and Struggle
in Long Beach's Middle Schools

• To the cheers of local residents, principal Shawn Ashley and his teachers stake out a drug dealers' corner across from Franklin Middle School, making it safer for students to walk home at the end of the day.
  
  
• Activists in the Lakewood community mount a political campaign to separate themselves from LBUSD and create an independent school system.
  
  
• Rich Casanove and 20 other middle school social studies teachers spend two weeks of summer vacation deepening their knowledge of world history by studying with distinguished professors from major universities.
  
  
• Killing fields survivor Sovann Tith, director of the United Cambodian Community Center, works to create alternatives for Asian teenagers who may otherwise turn to street gangs for the stability and communication they find missing at home.
  
  
• Former national teacher of the year Beverly Bimes-Michalak criss-crosses the district, helping teachers discover how they can reach low-achieving students by closely examining their own teaching practices.
  
  
• Director Maria Chaves and a team of talented college interns use basketball games, field trips, a chess club and other strategies to lure Stanford's 6th, 7th and 8th graders into an afternoon tutoring and counseling program supported by the Long Beach Community Partnership.
  
  
• Rising ninth grader Natalie Garcia dreams of becoming a lawyer but also writes enthusiastically about her science classes, wondering if she might find the cure for AIDS instead.
  
  
• University and school leaders, searching for ways to make CSULB and LBCC effective partners in school reform, begin to draw up plans for a middle school where new teachers can be trained in a real-life setting.
  
  
• Area superintendent Randy Ward and other African American community leaders organize a districtwide parent support program.
  
  
• Thirteen-year old Monique Drafton and her friends find refuge from drug-infested streets at a Boys and Girls Club program on an inner city middle school campus, while teachers and community workers debate its future.
  
  
• Teams of teachers supported by district "action research" grants meet in study groups, and explore connections between their current teaching practices and LBUSD's new, tougher academic standards.