Santee High School ... and the War of the Smart Kids

A story from LA that underscores why there needs to be better systems for getting rid of nightmares like this guy.  You can't make this stuff up...

Midway through  the school’s eight week summer semester, however, it turned out that Principal Carbino hadn’t acquired the proper text books for a large number of the  school’s academic classes. According to faculty members, his solution was to look through Santee’s stash of existing supplies and yank out textbooks he  did have and then…
 
…change the subjects of 40 classes to  entirely different subjects—that happened to match the text books Santee already had on hand.

This meant, for instance, that students who had been  taking computer science for half the semester, suddenly found  themselves taking (and I’m not kidding about  this)….cooking.

In other  cases, kids were transferred out of one class to  whatever classroom had an opening— appropriate for their needs or not.  (Conscientious students wondered gloomily how they would be able to catch up  in the new classes after having missed fifty percent of the course work.)
 
Worst of all, in certain students’ minds, was  Carbino’s decision to convert twelve AP classes to non AP subjects—after the students had already done nearly four weeks of AP  work. AP History, for example, became “Cinema.” AP English became “Writing  Seminar.”
 
In addition, say students, most of the new non-AP, make-do, classes did not fulfill any kind of college requirement but  simply fell in the category of “elective.”
 
In making this move, Carbino reportedly  neither consulted, nor gave notice to either students or faculty. Sixteen year old Mercedes Carreto says she learned about the changes in her two AP classes only when she got her mid-semester report card.
 
“Like instead of AP history, it said Cinema,”  says Mercedes. “I want to get into a good college and study to be a dentist,  which means I need a lot of AP classes, and good scores on the AP exam,” she  says. “How am I supposed to do that when he takes our AP classes away for no reason?”
 
Teachers say they were similarly blindsided.  “I only knew what he’d done when I saw it on the computer one morning as I took attendance,” says AP English teacher Alexandra Avilla.
 
When the news of the class-switches came out,  a group of students, most of them AP kids, decided to go and talk to principal Carbino directly regarding their concerns. And that’s when things really started to go downhill.

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Santee High School ….and the War of the Smart Kids
<http://witnessla.com/education/2007/admin/lausds-santee-education-complex-and-the-war-of-the-smart-kids/>
August 13, 2007
by Celeste Fremon

IN THE BEGINNING, South LA-located Santee Education Complex was going to be the new high school model for how LAUSD could operate successfully in lower income communities. The gleaming complex, built on the site of the old Santee Bakery, was the special baby of former district superintendent Roy Romer.