Opening Banquet

The Renaissance Washington, D.C. Hotel

June 23, 2002

Good evening. It’s a genuine privilege to be here among so many courageous, dedicated educators and true friends of public education. From coast to coast, to help more students succeed and excel, we have converged here tonight to discuss the important notion of the community school. It’s an idea I’ve been telling people about for a while now. And like you, I know it’s the wave of the future.

Thank you to the Coalition and your staff for this wonderful opportunity to get together and share our best ideas. I was eager to accept the Coalition’s offer to speak to you this evening because I find myself at a unique point in my career. I’m retiring from California’s third largest school district in a few weeks, so I’m free to say just about anything I like. Not that I’ve restrained myself too much in the past, but there’s a new sense of freedom when you’re wrapping up ten years as superintendent.

What better chance to tell it like it is, and to reinforce the importance of what you do for our children, our schools, our communities and our nation. As philanthropists, educators, parents and community leaders, you are investing in our nation’s kids. You are helping them survive and thrive in a very competitive world.

If I’ve learned anything during my career, it’s that we as educators cannot do this alone. We face mountains of challenges that require the concerted efforts of entire communities to scale. Fortunately in Long Beach, we’ve found willing partners in our local businesses, youth-serving groups, colleges, universities, parents, volunteers and others who meet us at the base camp ready to go. They are the Sherpas who climb Everest with us. They make a huge difference. It’s impressive to see them in action, especially where, if we tried to go it alone, we would soon falter.

I developed my deepest appreciation of community-based organizations at a much earlier age. I grew up in a tough part of Long Beach where my lifeline after school was the Downtown Y. I don’t know where I would have ended up without the meaningful engagement and good people I found at the Y.

Today the stakes are higher and the trail steeper for our youngsters. It used to be that kids who didn’t succeed in school, or who got into trouble on the streets, could eventually find work in a factory or go into the military. No more. If our nation is going to work as a multicultural test of democracy, we must do whatever it takes to prevent youngsters and their families from drifting away from school and falling through the cracks. Students who disconnect from school are likely to become a huge drain on society and repeat customers of the criminal justice system. Absolutely crucial to their success is the push to provide meaningful after-school activities. We all know that the period from 2 to 6 p.m. is prime time for violent juvenile crime – the hours when unsupervised kids are most likely to be the victims of violent crime.

This is when community schools shine in so many neighborhoods nationwide. They shine by reducing crime and improving academic achievement. They shine because they fill a huge need.

We are fortunate in Long Beach to have a shining example of a community school that’s been visited by researchers from Seattle to New York and many points between. Stevenson Elementary School is located in one of the most ethnically diverse inner-city communities in the nation. Largely Latino, its students face serious challenges related to language and poverty. The school is an adaptation of the successful Children’s Aid Society community school model in New York City. There’s a strong emphasis on parental involvement and applying school standards and curriculum to after-school activities. I credit California State University Long Beach’s Department of Social Work for noticing kids in need and offering to help in a systemic way. A couple of their dedicated social workers saw an opportunity to improve kids’ learning and lives. They took Stevenson under their wings. They helped write grants to secure initial funding. It’s amazing what a determined, tenacious community ally, who knows what kids need, can accomplish.

Several grants later, Stevenson is now providing an amazing array of after-school activities for kids, including tutoring by aspiring teachers who connect the day’s classroom lessons with after-school sessions. The focus is heavily academic. Like all our schools, a community school must first and foremost be a place of learning. The Community School Advisory Board includes four of our teachers. They provide insight and weekly training to after-school college aides on everything from discipline to content standards and lesson themes.

Stevenson doesn’t stop there. The school is a living, breathing, constantly adapting organism. Its flexibility and strength come from some serious funding muscle – sources like the Stuart Foundation and the Irvine Foundation, which has committed to investing $14 million in our schools over seven years. Funds from the California Community Foundation, the City of Long Beach, Catholic Healthcare West and the Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund have helped tremendously. The staff at Stevenson deeply appreciates the consistent, generous and long-term funding that is needed to achieve lasting results.

Stevenson accomplishes so much with these funds. It seems like school never lets out, or at least it’s hard to tell when it does. This inner-city campus is alive, well into the evening. Hundreds of kids and parents come and go well beyond the regular day. From 8 a.m. to

8 p.m., you’ll see parents volunteering, or taking sewing, computer, math or English classes. Parent involvement is incredible – the highest at any school in the area. The busy parent center has its own dedicated classroom. It’s the hub of the community, thanks largely to our lead community agency, the Y. The parent center is called the Stevenson YMCA Community School. We’ve never seen one bungalow classroom get heavier, more productive use.

If Stevenson cannot directly provide a service that parents need, they’ll either help them find it, or they’ll bring it to them. For instance, two of our local hospitals, St. Mary’s and Long Beach Memorial, send specialists who help parents with health insurance forms and accessing health care.

As for the kids, if they’re not getting extra help with math after school, they’re gathering for their Harry Potter Club, or the hiking club (which includes trips to our local San Gabriel Mountains), or the basketball club, with supplies and training provided courtesy of those generous funders.

After about five years as a community school, Stevenson has proved itself to be a highly successful model. Its students have shown strong academic growth over time. According to the state, it ranks among the top 10 percent of similar schools in California when you take into account the socioeconomic, linguistic and other challenges facing the student population. The investment in this community school is really paying off for kids.

Even more impressive are the personal stories of growth and accomplishment that can never be measured by a standardized test. Stories like Gustavo’s. This young dad of a preschooler and kindergartner had never participated in any of the school’s activities before joining their Parent Leadership Institute. The institute is a six-month program with parents getting together biweekly for three hours to learn leadership skills, like how to advocate for your child at school, how to resolve conflicts, and how to access community resources. Childcare is provided. The hours make it possible for working parents to attend. In addition to the class, parents break up into teams to organize local community service projects. They, too, are givers, not just receivers.

Gustavo’s team was organizing a community cleanup for their group project. His team attended a meeting organized by the community’s local city council representative. Gustavo spoke up for the first time about issues of cleanliness in his neighborhood. As a result of his comments, the city councilwoman sent out people from her office to accompany Gustavo for walk-throughs of his neighborhood.

Before this experience, Gustavo said, he had always been shy about public speaking. Today the neighborhood is cleaner. He and his wife assist other Parent Leadership Institute participants with their projects. Gustavo helps other parents find out who they need to speak to and what they should say, and he helps push them to complete their projects on time. Their neighborhood is improving because they know they can get results. For the first time, they know they can make a difference.

Then there’s LaVeon, a fifth grader at the school. She’s physically disabled and sometimes has difficulty walking because of a problem with her legs. She can’t participate in physical education and recreation as much as other students. It’s been a source of frustration for her, and a blow to her self esteem. When she first began attending the YMCA After School Program she wouldn’t participate in recreational activities at all. With expert staff supporting her and providing activities suited to her ability, soon she was joining other students in the fun, playing games like Poison or March Attack – variations of tag that help kids develop their marching, running and pivoting abilities. Unlike basketball, where La Veon couldn’t keep up, these alternatives give her the occasional moments of rest that make all the difference. The other kids have accepted her completely, and no longer make fun of her. While she can’t participate in every activity, she’s much more likely to try out a new activity than before. She feels better about herself, and performs better in class as well as on the playground.

Stevenson enjoys these successes today because the people who started the community school back in 1997 did their homework. They took the time to involve more than 100 parents in focus groups that were held in English, Spanish and Khmer, or Cambodian. From those focus groups, they developed several key themes and quality-of-life issues that the school still addresses today: a parent center that the community could call its own; sports; fine arts and leisure activities; social activities to build home, school and community relationships; academic support and career development for youngsters; family education with parent-child learning opportunities; parent education with career development; and the important topic of safety. Now, their advisory board of parents, school staff, agency and university staff meet monthly to oversee all aspects of their community school.

To the uninitiated, things like sewing and cooking classes might seem far removed from raising achievement. But there’s more to these classes than meets the eye. The hidden value is that these and other classes find ways to connect with parents, engage them and draw them into their children’s education. The idea is to help parents and kids fulfill basic needs. The need to belong. The need for meaningful engagement, and to build upon one’s strengths. The need for health care. The need to feel safe. The need for hope. These are the prerequisites to boosting achievement in school and in life. If we ignore these basic needs, then kids and families suffer a grim reality, and some will try to escape that harsh reality by whatever means possible. Alcohol. Drugs. Gangs. Crime.

In many ways, Stevenson represents what we strive for as a caring community and school system. As a school district, we collaborate more than ever, out of sheer necessity, with community-based organizations, businesses and higher education, to solve real problems of real families – many of whom are just struggling to put food on the table and to survive. Many of our schools are doing quite well, meeting or exceeding academic growth targets set by the state. I attribute much of each school’s success to a concerted community effort, which has improved everything from teacher quality, to curriculum and school safety. When we work with our community partners, everything is on the table. We have just one uncompromising demand. Everyone puts kids first. Kids’ achievement, personal growth and wellbeing override all else.

As our community school’s principal will attest, being the hub of the community is not without its challenges, especially when it comes to facilities. Stevenson is already a multi-track, year-round school serving more than 900 students. The campus certainly has its share of portable classrooms, leaving only a modest patch of asphalt as a playground.

It can be a juggling act accommodating all of the after-school activities, but the great thing about being a community school is that Stevenson is not limited by its campus boundaries. When you’re partnering with organizations like the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific and the local Museum of Art, your world becomes much wider than that patch of asphalt. Other partners include the Long Beach Public Library, Long Beach Parks and Recreation, First United Presbyterian Church and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. To their credit, the staff at the school works with the community to solve facilities challenges. The evening aerobics classes for parents became so popular that the school had to move the sessions across the street to the “little brown church,” as everyone calls it. So now on certain evenings, you’ll see about 40 of our parents of diverse backgrounds taking aerobics classes at the little brown church, perspiring to the sounds of salsa music, which the parents say has a good beat for exercising.

This kind of flexibility – the ability to customize your community school based on your neighborhood’s specific needs – requires the solid support of the larger school system. The director of our community school said it best: “You must have the school system on your side.” The ultimate success of the community school movement rests as much upon the school as the community. Our success, frankly, will depend largely on whether more of our school leaders are willing to relinquish some of their control. When I retire from the school district this August, I will teach at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, where I hope to convince the next generation of urban school superintendents and principals that occasionally relinquishing some control can be a good thing. Granted, that’s a tough argument to make in this era of school accountability and test scores. But in our experience, community schools and higher achievement go hand-in-hand. Given the right time, right place, and dedicated, determined people, a community school can work wonders.

I acknowledge that when our top administrators visit Stevenson, they still ask about the school’s encouraging test scores. But we also know that the kids at Stevenson are learning a larger lesson. Our community school teaches, by example, the value of community service. If our kids see people of all shapes, colors and sizes working together to make their world a better place, trust me, the concept rubs off on them. As a kid at the Y, it rubbed off on me. I’ve never forgotten it. It made an indelible impression on me. Today’s youngsters deserve no less.

Together, we can help to raise a generation of skilled, achieving, knowledgeable and caring youngsters. We can open their eyes to a much wider world of opportunity by bringing it to them in our community schools. We can make it happen, even for kids who have never set foot outside their immediate neighborhood. That is why I traveled 3,000 miles to be here this evening: because what you do is so important to our children, our schools, our communities and our nation.

Thank you, and have a great conference.