How one middle school became a good neighbor

(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Fall 1997)

How one middle school became a good neighbor

By Reagan Walker

Dee Wheeler can tell you the names of everyone who lives across the street from Stephens Middle School. And behind it.

"I know Art out back, and Cassie across the street and her dog, Yogi. The kids think I'm crazy the way I talk to that dog," laughs Wheeler, who's been at Stephens Middle School for nearly 30 years, most of that time as a teacher, but for the last two years as assistant principal.

"The Spanish kids call me 'comadre,' like the woman who's always talking over the fence with her neighbor," Wheeler continues. "But these folks are like my neighborhood watch. They'll think nothing of calling me or waving me down in my white Honda if they think there's something I need to know. And that's important, because I think the kids are my responsiblity until they get home."

Mike Bowles can tell you a great deal about the conditions those neighbors and the 1,180 students at Stephens live in every day.

A year after the veteran Long Beach educator became principal of Stephens, he befriended a civil servant at City Hall and ended up studying a summer's worth of demographic research about the Stephens area, which is smack in the middle of the Sante Fe corridor west of the Los Angeles River and south of the 405 freeway.

Bowles looked at everything from the average number of bathrooms in area homes (one) to the number of banks in the community (none.) "I couldn't believe there wasn't a single bank on this whole corridor. It's got 20 percent of the population of Long Beach and 45 percent of the economic impact," said Bowles, describing the working class neighborhood with small streets, small lots and small homes-many converted from old Navy housing.

Bowles also found there were very limited medical and dental services available and no hospital to serve the mostly immigrant families, many headed by a single parent with no mobility and limited English skills.

One mother's story

Sylvia Vigil can tell you what it was like a few years ago to be a parent in the area served by Stephens.

She was raising five children on her own, and her oldest, Javier, began to get involved with gangs while he was a student at Stephens.

Vigil was frustrated with Javier and his misbehavior. She suffered further humiliation when she was called to Stephens one day to deal with a disciplinary matter, only to have her son strike her in the face in the school's hallway.

"It wasn't the school's fault, but because it happened there and I was traumatized, I never wanted to go back," said Vigil.

Javier continued his gang involvement and when he was almost 18, he was killed near his home in a drive-by shooting.

"I wanted to guide him, but I didn't know how. And there was nowhere to go for help," she said. Vigil felt somehow that Stephens had let her down, and she made the decision to send her teenage daughter to a different school.

But Vigil's outlook has changed dramatically in the last few years. She now spends each weekday morning at Stephens, working for "Westside Healthy Start," a state-funded program that provides links to social and health services for the neighborhood around the middle school and its four elementary "feeders."

After completing numerous parenting courses offered by Healthy Start and a district-funded Parent Center, and going on for special training, Vigil now helps other parents avoid some of the mistakes she believes cost her a son. And she said she's doing a better job with her other four children, including three who are still in elementary school.

"They will come to Stephens. I feel so comfortable now I don't have to worry about the kids here," said Vigil. "I can see a difference in this school."

A tale of community transformation

The story of how Stephens Middle School transformed itself from an isolated institution in a troubled neighborhood to a community center that draws people in -- and ultimately gets them more involved in helping children achieve-- is the story of Wheeler, Bowles, Vigil and dozens of other dedicated teachers, social workers, parents, and students.

Confronted with the demographics of the neighborhood and the students themselves, Bowles knew that Stephens would have to reach out in several directions at once -- to community agencies, elementary schools, business and community leaders, the school system's central office, and most importantly, parents.

Roam the hallways of the school for a couple of days and one can see how that mix is redefining a school.

Snapshot: Accommodating parent needs

It's 9:30 a.m. and five Hispanic moms and a Vietnamese couple are toiling in a classroom on the first floor of Stephens to learn how to express time in English. A teacher methodically drills them: "One o'clock; six-thirty; seven-forty-five." She can speak some broken Spanish and has little trouble communicating with the Hispanic learners.

But she has to resort to flash cards and a dictionary to work with the Vietnamese couple. After a time she learns they both work in the afternoon at a factory that makes plastic bags. Despite the formidable language barrier, they seem to be picking up time-telling, perhaps out of sheer eagerness.
Their child, a student at Stephens, approached Bowles one day and said, "My brother and I have decided it's time my parents learn English."

Because English-as-a-second-language classes are now offered at the school in the mornings and evenings, Stephens was able to accommodate them.

Snapshot: A pattern of parent involvement

It's lunchtime and a gaggle of 8th-grade girls called the "Athenas" are gathered in the library using construction paper to frame photographs they took of students at the recent International Fair. The project is a fundraiser for the group, which helps the PTA raise money for various projects at the school.

Two PTA moms,Tomasulo and Jeanne Williams, are there to assist. When asked how many members they have in the PTA, a predictable sigh escapes before the answer comes.

"Well, official membership is at about 200, but active membership is about 12 to 15," says Williams. She says they've tried everything from having translators at meetings to providing multiple meeting times. Still, membership is small for a school this size, and it's made up mostly of the white parents of students in the magnet program for gifted students, which serves about 200.

That doesn't bother Bowles. "You can't find one single activity or structure that meets every parent's need for involvement. For some parents, the PTA is what's comfortable. For others, they are too alienated from the school to get involved in that way, so we reach out in other ways."

Williams, though wistful for a more-inclusive PTA, agreed. "And we have seen a pattern forming. The first year, parents might come in to learn English in a Healthy Start class; and the next year they might volunteer at the International Fair; and then they next year they come to the PTA. What's important is they get their foot in the door."

Snapshot: Parents as learning partners

Teacher Ernie Chavez sits with Assistant Principal Tom Huff discussing how to best focus the work of a new program at Stephens called Parents as Learning Partners. The effort is part of a multi-million-dollar grant from the Annenberg Foundation to a select group of schools in Long Beach and Los Angeles County.

Chavez and Huff have ideas they hope to put into action for the 1997-98 school year. They believe parents and teacher teams should meet and discuss each child's progressbefore the first report card is issued. They'd like to end classes early on Friday to make time for more frequent parent conferences. They want to constantly survey parents to keep abreast of their needs. And they plan to upgrade the school's telephone capabilities so homework assignments will be available on voice mail and an autodial system will call home and let parents know when a child is not in school.

"The emphasis is on communication," said Huff. "A lot of teachers have really jumped on these ideas. With only three phone lines in the school, it's difficult for us to make the contacts we need to make on such things as homework and attendance. We want to open up these very basic lines of communication."

Snapshot: Drumming up student activities

It's mid-day and about 20 students are gathered in the school auditorium to rehearse for an evening concert. They've organized a "steel drum line," an unusual instrumental group for a middle school. Their enthusiastic rendition of Nate King Cole tunes quickly revs up the audience of parents and educators who've come to watch them practice.

Bowles and Title 1 coordinator Louise Schiller got the idea for steel drums when they saw a student performance in San Francisco. The school, which gets a block grant of about $70,000 each year for federal Title 1 programs, used a small fraction of those funds to purchase the steel drums two years ago. Bowles suspected the appeal of the steely, rhythmic sound would cut across the divisions in his highly diverse student body, which is about 40 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black, 14 percent Filipino, 11 percent white, 8 percent Asian, 5 percent Pacific Islander, and 1 percent American Indian.

Because so many students are tracked into courses for limited-English speakers, they're often separated by race. That's why Bowles believed strongly in elective courses, such as choir and steel drums, and why he organized numerous after-school programs, including ethnic dance clubs, to bring students together and to highlight the positive aspects of each culture.

The steel drums have complemented those efforts wonderfully, Bowles said. "They appeal to a lot of different students and cut across different ethnic interests, as do the dance clubs and other activities."

They also give kids something constructive to do in the afternoon and evening. "Six years ago, when Mr. Bowles and I came to this school," said Louise Schiller, "there was nothing to do here after school. There was no outreach to the community. That's why there was so much gang activity."

Snapshot: The Area A parent center

It's late afternoon and Sharon Lazo-Nakamoto is showing a parent some new software he can check out to use on a computer he's borrowed from the Area A Parent Center.

Long Beach elementary and middle schools are divided into three groups, or areas. Each one has a parent center that provides computers, books and numerous courses on everything from how to be a better parent of a difficult teenager to "Beautiful You," a one-evening pick-me-up for moms.

"The interesting thing about Beautiful You is not only do the mothers love it, but it gets make-up artists from fancy department stores like Norstrom's into the public schools," said Lazo-Nakamoto.

"And once they come here and see how much they are appreciated, they want to do more. We're talking about taking some of the moms to a fashion show at one of the stores now."

Most of the Parent Center's courses are six to 12 weeks long and are held in the evenings. The Center provides child care so parents don't have to keep up with small children, something parent Sylvia Vigil says made all the difference when she first started taking advantage of such courses.

This school year, Lazo-Nakamoto said, each of the Center's parenting courses will be retooled to include at least one session on academic standards. Long Beach schools have been engaged in a multi-year process of setting new, tough academic standards for all students to meet. The standards are posted on the walls of the center, though in English only.

"We've got to get them translated into Spanish at the least," said Lazo-Nakamoto. "And we are going to do training to show them how to reinforce a math standard at home. A lot of parents are more than willing, they just don't quite know how to incorporate a quick science lesson into cooking."

Snapshot: Westside Healthy Start

It's mid-morning and a young teenage girl sits in the Westside Healthy Start office on Stephens' first floor, talking to coordinator Anita Bussing. She shows Bussing a picture she's just drawn of a huge shark rising from the sea to threaten a young man standing on a small island.

"Is your brother sick again?" Bussing asks. The girl shyly nods her head. Bussing gives her a few words of comfort and then calls her mother. Within a few minutes, she's convinced the mother to take the girl's brother, who's suffering from kidney disease, to the emergency room. Bussing has been working on this case for a while and thinks she's close to nailing down a kidney transplant for the young man.

Westside Healthy Start was the first program to emerge from Bowles' summer of research on community needs, and it's the cornerstone of the school's efforts to build stronger community ties.

The far-reaching program provides everything from English classes to referrals to legal aid, mental health, and social services. Healthy Start recently stepped up medical assistance in the area by getting a clinic established on the campus of Webster Elementary.

The medical program is administered through Stephens but also serves Webster and three other elementary schools in the area with an annual budget of about $100,000. This year the funding structure will change, with billable services charged to the state's medical assistance system, which may leave the program scrambling to fill in some gaps.

But scrambling is what Bussing does best. She's a master at connecting resource to need, and in developing new avenues to reach the community. "Whatever the parents and kids need, my job is to make the match," said Bussing.

"Anita has helped me find a lot of things for the kids," said Dee Wheeler, who taught the school's on-campus-suspension class for eight years before becoming assistant principal. "There's always a reason why a child is misbehaving. Each one that came into my class, I tried to find out what that reason was. And often, it was something I needed Anita's help with."

Bussing doesn't do the job alone. She has social workers and social work interns from local colleges. And she also has Sylvia Vigil, who started out as a student in many of the parenting classes and then became a paid community liaison for the program.

"She's a leader in the community now," said Bussing. "The white girls with the big degrees will go away. But if the money runs out, we've left this place a different place because of people like Sylvia."

Vigil says Healthy Start is "like giving us a tray of gold." After the tragic death of her first son, she said she wanted to learn everything she could about being a better parent and she has through courses at Healthy Start and the Parent Center.

Today, Vigil has become a model for parental involvement in schools. When she's not working at Stephens, she's acting as a recreational aide on the playground at Webster Elementary, where her three youngest children attend. "Since I've been doing that and my children see me there at school, they have improved," she said. "My son's attitude has changed and his grades have gone up. I get so excited I just want to tell everyone. It's like having a big cake you want to share."

Bowles said one of the best fringe benefits of Healthy Start is the close working relationship Stephens now has with its feeder elementary schools. "It's one of the first real articulation efforts that worked for us. We know a lot about the kids and their parents by the time they come to us because of the communication between schools," he said.

He admits the connection between Stephens and the high schools that eventually accept Stephens' students is not nearly as strong. The Annenberg grant was supposed to help, but recently a brand new high school was built on the west side and many students will go there instead of Polytechnic-the high school included in the Annenberg project. "We have a lot of work to do establishing connections with the new high school," Bowles said.

Turning a neighborhood corner

But he believes it can be done because Stephens has turned a symbolic corner in its neighborhood, a corner that few schools ever manage to find their way around.

Evidence of that came one day a couple of years ago when a mother who had been a part of a support group in Healty Start rushed to Stephens one morning. Her husband had been shot and killed in a barroom brawl the night before. Soon, other family members and friends in the neighborhood began pouring in. Social workers started crisis counseling.

"I looked in and there were 18 people in the room. A tragedy had occurred and they had come here, much like people used to go to a church," said Bowles. "I knew then that this institution had changed."

Transitions at Stephens Middle School

Editor's note: This story about the strong relationship between Stephens Middle School and its community was researched in June 1997, a few months before the school system announced that Stephens principal John "Mike" Bowles would become LBUSD's director of employee relations.

Several other individuals mentioned in the story have also changed roles. Assistant principal Tom Huff has traded places with Nancy Elliot, formerly at Hughes Middle School. Kathy Keeter, who taught in the computer lab last year, will replace Title I coordinator Louise Schiller, who retired. Sharon Lazo-Kakamoto, Stephens' parent center facilitator, has been promoted to an Area C support position, and a replacement will be hired soon.

Mike Troyer, Stephens' new principal, says he is committed to maintaining Stephens' strong community links. "This staff is more positive and upbeat than any I've ever worked with," he reports. "They are can-do and child-centered, and they really want to be a strong part of this community."

"They've reached their hands out of the boxcar door to pull me on board," says the former Hoover Middle School assistant principal.

Troyer adds that he's still learning about all the work Bowles and his faculty have done. "I'll know more about the itinerary of this train soon!"

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