Ichiroku says she is "sad to see the MSA program crumble as a result of district politics. In the end, it's the students who suffer the most. It takes many years for any program to be successful, and I feel MSA had finally gotten to the point where we were taken seriously and respected as an important institution at Lawndale."
What went wrong? Sherman, Merritt, Ichiroku and the other staffers who ran the Marine Science Academy program were all graduates of the UCLA Center X program, geared to developing top-notch teachers who can jump into poorly performing urban classrooms. The structure of the Marine Science Academy had been good, arguably great. Sherman says the goal was to create "environmentally aware, socially conscious social activists who go out into the world and become successful in college and beyond."
PHOTO BY JOHN SAKATA
Kimberly Merritt
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The teachers used a philosophy of tough academic love in which they held students to strict expectations.
"You tell students they can achieve that, and that they have to achieve that," Sherman explains. "I knew some of these kids three years ago — we did not think they would get into high school. Now they will go to college. They know after two years of community college they will transfer. It is ingrained in them. They don't have a choice. Three years ago, they did not think like that."
The program incorporated high expectations, relentless encouragement and prodding from the teachers with a softer side: fun extracurricular activities built around a marine science–themed curriculum.
For Ichiroku's seminar class, she "strongly recommended" her seniors apply to five colleges and seek a minimum of six scholarships. Community service and beach cleanups helped build bonds among the students. Blending disciplines, Sherman and Merritt, English teachers by specialization, had their students read The Old Man and the Sea and Moby Dick.
Meanwhile, Sherman checked the grades of all 125 pupils every other week. If a student's grades slipped, he or she heard about it from one of the academy's teachers.
It was a lot of work for Sherman, but she could see the children changing. As high school juniors, students had the option of going on an overnight bus trip along the California coast to UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz and other colleges. Sherman rented the bus, determined which students were academically eligible to participate, signed up chaperones, notified the students' other teachers and school staff, and purchased insurance for the trips out of the MSA's slim budget.
She did this more than 20 times annually, since each grade level of kids went on five field trips, including one overnight. "It was kids who had never been on an airplane," Sherman explains. "It was kids who had never been outside of L.A. They thought UCLA was it." But after what they had learned in the academy, "Some of the kids then looked at the [college entrance] requirements and said, 'That's it?' "
The three academy coordinators say the problems with district officials began when Stephen Nellman, currently the educational services coordinator at Centinela Valley district, requested the removal of several ocean-based science classes from the academy's curriculum in 2009.
Centinela district officials said Nellman and other staff contacted would not be allowed to comment for this article. Merritt and Sherman say they tried but could not get Nellman to explain to them why he was canceling marine biology, oceanography and marine chemistry.
"What possible reason, after five years of running a program, out of nowhere," would marine biology be dropped, asks Sherman, who notes that Nellman had taught marine biology in the academy three years earlier.
"I am consistently shocked by the arbitrary decisions made," Merritt says. "We have asked for research and statistics for what they are doing, and they never give them to us."
The curriculum cuts were so intrusive that Sherman and Merritt decided on a dramatic response, which ultimately backfired: After talking it over with a Lawndale High School administrator, they announced the phasing out of the academy, beginning with halting the recruitment of a freshman class for the upcoming year.
When the teachers notified the students' parents that the academy would cease before the summer of 2009, not surprisingly, the news elicited an intense response from parents.
In reaction, Superintendent Fernandez threw his support behind the program, offering it 50 laptop computers and increased funding, according to Sherman. The teachers' dramatic threat of closing down the academy initially appeared to have worked, and teacher-coordinators Sherman and Merritt agreed to continue the program.
But the divide created between the teachers and the administration during that time was never repaired.
School procedures that had previously been rubber-stamped by the district — such as allowing MSA students to take the same classes together throughout the day, creating a sense of cohesion and support among students, or adding new classes to the MSA curriculum — suddenly became obstacles for the teachers. Planning and running the program presented one new hurdle after another.
Email communications produced by a California Public Records Act request between Merritt and district employees Laurel Fretz and Hatha Parrish, director of federal and state programs, show the tension between district leaders and the teachers.
