Tribune Article Highlights How PPS Policies Continue to Dog Jefferson High School

The Tribune article below highlights the distainful, predictible outcomes of PPS policies negatively affecting Jefferson High School:

It is insidious that public blame has befallen Jefferson students for attempting to exercise the same privileges afforded most PPS high school students. The Portland Public Schools board of directors was previously implored to adopt an equitable, district-wide high school campus lunch policy (open, closed or combination) - to no avail. The current policy not only discriminates against high school students with low income and/or minority populations, but is directly responsible for additional (and unnecessary) harm to the reputation of Jefferson High School and its students, victimizing them as unwitting targets of negative media exposure.

Jefferson High School, its students and staff are being sacrificed to pursue "small" academies the Jefferson community has emphatically stated they do not desire. That the principal was directed to abandon his charge to focus on these undesired academies - at the expense of current Jefferson High School students - is yet another demonstration of ongoing disrespect for the Jefferson High School staff and the students and families they serve. Board Resolution 3543 "officially" returned Jefferson to one school yet simultaneously pushed forward specific unsupported, narrowly-focused "small academies" by falsely portraying them as the recommendation of the Design Team and desire of the Jefferson community.

This article is but one example of how PPS policies and practices are serving to actively hinder the efforts of students, staff, parents and volunteers to improve perception, increase enrollment and expand educational opportunities for the students of Jefferson High School.
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The optimism that surrounded the arrival of Leon Dudley as Jefferson’s principal has waned, and he is now the subject of a racial and sexual harassment complaint.

Jefferson changes feel far off
Harassment complaint is latest bump in principal’s rocky start
By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune Dec 14, 2006

The personal secretary to Leon Dudley, the new principal at Jefferson High School, has filed a racial and sexual harassment complaint against him with her union and Portland Public Schools.

Kathy Muir, 57, who is white, has worked at Jefferson for eight years as the secretary to the principal. The grievance, filed Tuesday, is based on several alleged incidents beginning in August, when Dudley arrived on campus from Dallas, Texas, to lead the struggling school. Muir, a member of the Portland Federation of Teachers and Classified Employees, is on paid administrative leave until the complaint is resolved.

The school district doesn’t comment on ongoing personnel issues, said Sarah Carlin Ames, a spokeswoman.

Muir’s complaint isn’t the only indication the situation at Jefferson has been rocky this year. Three and a half months into the school year, a number of teachers and students say the honeymoon’s over, and they have reached a crisis of confidence in their new leader.

Dudley did not respond to several of the Portland Tribune’s phone calls, e-mails and visits over the past couple of weeks to his office seeking comment on issues at the school. He also did not respond to a phone call seeking comment on the grievance.

“I think people were very excited when he started,” said JoAnn Tsohonis, a Jefferson social-studies teacher of nine years. “If we wanted Jefferson to survive as a high school, it looked like he’d be the candidate to do that. As time went on, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.”

Dudley, 56, was hired to lead Jefferson after the district conducted a national search. Although one of the selection committees that reviewed candidates comprised students, teachers, parents and community members, many in the community were leery when they heard the reports of Dudley’s problems in his previous two jobs.

In Dallas, Dudley was accused of using his district-issued credit card to buy the basketball team a $900 steak dinner after a state championship game. In Salem, teachers took a vote of no confidence against him, saying he lacked professionalism, after which he abruptly resigned just before the school year started.

Yet the Jefferson community was largely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially after he made a big splash as school started: shaking hands, rallying volunteers and promising to be in classrooms personally at least 24 hours a week.

Now, the promises have faded, say his critics, who aren’t happy with what’s left.

“He tells us call him ‘Daddy D,’” said senior Faith Brown, one of the school’s 556 students. “I say you’re not my daddy. You’re my principal. I don’t even know his name.”

Brown and other students and teachers say they’re uncomfortable with Dudley’s penchant for walking down the hall, offering hugs and occasionally offering to buy them a backpack or gloves. “He comes up and he’ll hug me,” said Sara Smith, a senior. “I was shocked. I think he’s trying to make friends with everybody but knows people don’t like him.”

The other big frustration teachers and students have involves Dudley’s time spent in the building, since he has been outside of it for roughly a third of the school year so far.

He attended three national conferences and took a personal vacation to visit his wife in Dallas just before Thanksgiving, when the school’s parent-teacher conferences were scheduled.

As a result, students and teachers say Dudley has not been around to enforce the set of strict new rules he made. Students aren’t allowed to wear hats or have electronic devices on campus; the campus is closed at lunchtime; everyone must stay in the cafeteria in the morning until the bell rings; and everyone must wear an ID tag on a lanyard.

But the policies have no teeth, kids say. Marta Repollet’s sixth-period U.S. government class is evidence of it.

On a recent afternoon, Repollet launches into the day’s discussion of George Orwell’s “1984” soon after the bell rings.

Almost no one is paying attention. Two students stuff their iPod headphones in their ears and stare into space; a few girls sit at the back of the room chatting and diving into their lunch from Wendy’s; and a few more stroll in late and take their seats.

Repollet sighs. “Is everyone situated now, since we have to give directions all over again for the five tardies that walked in?” she says over the dull roar. “I need to explain what you need to do. Let me do it. Let me do my job.”

Quincy Blanton, a senior who transferred from Benson Polytechnic High School to play football this year, is one of the only kids who’s sitting quietly with his book open. “The disrespect kids have for the teachers is disgusting,” he said. “It’s depressing to sit here and watch teachers struggle to teach a class.”

Senior Laquay Kennedy, who happens to be the student body president, sits at the back of the room, eating her fast-food lunch.

“The (closed campus) policy is more loose because he’s not here,” she says of Dudley, noting that she’d rather go hungry than eat the school lunch. She and her circle of friends also don’t wear their ID tags, saying the lanyards are “irritating” and that they can keep them in their bag and put them on if they’re told to.

So just how does a student get around the volunteers assigned to patrol the campus doors? “Just get up and leave,” Kennedy says. “(I have) a friend who goes and drives me to the store. As long as you come back before the bell rings.”

Change can take time
The school’s vice principals, Juanita Valder and John Wilhelmi, and the school’s dean, Devon Baker, joined forces to say that instituting change at the school is hard, but they’re doing their best.

“We have every intention of when we have a rule around here, we intend to be consistent in its enforcement,” Wilhelmi said. “This year we’ve taken on several new initiatives as we change our culture here. We want it to be a culture of high academic expectations. … What we’re experiencing is some resistance, and we just need to be consistent and intent on doing so.”

Valder, who is in her fifth year at the school, added that she and the support staff have made “Herculean” efforts to try to enforce the rules. They’ve stood outside to make sure kids aren’t leaving at lunchtime. They’re calling parents to report when kids are tardy in the morning. They’re combing the hallways to make sure kids get to class on time.

Valder, Wilhelmi and Baker also report that suspensions are going down, as they’re doing more peer mediation on campus. Counselors are being more proactive about calling parents when student performance or attendance is down. And teachers are being trained in “bell-to-bell” teaching strategies for how to utilize each minute of the class period.

They’ll start a new tutoring program after the holidays for 100 students, from Title I money. And teachers will also get some help on enforcing the new rules, Wilhelmi said. Things aren’t as chaotic as they might seem to outsiders, he said.

They play holiday music in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and Santa Claus was in the building earlier this week. The whole student body also watched as they presented an award to community volunteer Charles May – or “Uncle May,” as kids know him – for his “dogged persistence checking IDs from 7:15 to 8:30 every morning,” Wilhelmi said. “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.”

Retreat planned for teachers
Another person focused on the positive goings-on at Jefferson is Cynthia Harris, the charismatic new administrator who was recruited from her job in California to oversee the schools in the Jefferson cluster as well as Southwest Portland’s Wilson High School cluster.

“The community wants to know what’s going on at Jefferson,” she said. “We know we’re in a fishbowl. We know we want to improve.”

Harris said she knows that Jefferson teachers might be unhappy now, but she hopes to remedy it by focusing on how they can all achieve the big picture. “I think a lot of people who’ve been there a while are tired,” she said, “tired because the process doesn’t work.”

Harris hopes that this weekend’s staff retreat – one of three she’s planned for the school year – will be the start of the healing process so that they can move forward with a clean slate, she said. On the agenda: “successes, obstacles, relationships.”

The Columbia Gorge retreat will be funded by part of the $30,000 Portland Schools Foundation grant Harris sought and received to do outreach and build partnerships in the Jefferson cluster.

She’s also planned community workshops and breakfasts, organized a new group of student ambassadors, and hopes to get more parents and alumni involved in volunteering and fundraising through a new site council.

“My view and mission for Jefferson is creating a global, successful student, and about all of us coming together to lift this student up,” said Harris, who previously worked as principal of Nystrom Magnet Elementary School, an inner-city school in the Bay Area.

Both Harris and Superintendent Vicki Phillips came to Dudley’s defense regarding his absences. Phillips said he has been gone on official business, to recruit minority candidates to lead the Young Men’s Leadership Academy, slated to open at Jefferson next year in addition to a new Young Women’s Academy and the existing Academy of Arts and Technology and Academy of Science and Technology.

In hindsight, Phillips said, those events should have been better coordinated so he could be free to spend more time on campus.

Asked if she still has faith in Dudley’s ability to do the job at Jefferson, Phillips replied: “I’m very confident in the array of leadership, between he and Cynthia … and the small-school directors (of the young men’s and women’s academy). I think the school and leadership there is going to continue to have challenges.”

She added: “There’s great work going on. I want to have awesomeness across every level.”

Parents see some changes
Despite all of the issues at Jefferson this year, some parents say they have noticed many improvements at the school.

“I’ve received more phone calls from teachers this year than I have in four years,” said Keith Lampton, whose daughter, Brittany, is a senior who will go to school to study nursing next year. Teachers call every week or two to report his daughter’s progress and notify him of any missing assignments, he said.

Lampton and others are pleased to see the new policies in place – and think kids should be held accountable to abide by them. “There’s nothing you could do in 30 minutes that would require you to go off-campus,” said Stephen Knewitz, whose live-in niece, Justina Thomas, is a senior at Jefferson.

While Knewitz has been unhappy with many aspects of the school, he said his niece’s teachers and counselors have helped her excel and continually make the honor roll each year. He has also made sure she stayed involved in sports and school clubs and spent enough time on homework each night.

“Jeff’s a tough spot, a tough place, but the cream always rises to the top,” Knewitz said. “If you have above-average parenting, you have some goals for yourself, you can rise above the Jeff experience if you want to.”

For some teachers, however, the district-mandated changes every few years have been too much to bear.

“It was hard to me to leave, but having a new boss every four years was tough,” said Steve Nims, a former teacher at Jefferson who now teaches at Madison High School. “That was finally the tipping point of why I decided to move on.”

It was especially hard, Nims says, because he loved the kids at Jefferson so much he got a tattoo of the school’s mascot, the Democrat, on his arm. Now he’s reminded every day of the challenges the teachers and students have there.

One current student, senior Mercedes Whitecalf, held nothing back recently when she was assigned in her English class to write about Jefferson.

“The truth about Jeff is we are no longer a nice school,” she wrote. “We bring each other down, we disrespect our teachers, the staff, the rules, our school. We have no respect for ourselves or others, there’s no love for ourselves. We are our (own) worse enemy. To me Jeff is a bomb about to explode. We need big change, we need a miracle.”

jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com