"I am not a shy person," she declares. "I like all eyes on me."
Alondra is no less outgoing in class. She is quick to raise her hand for class discussions or offer under-the-breath commentary on the proceedings, making her presence felt.
Teachers at Balboa High consider Alondra one of the brightest and most inspiring students in a school long known as one of the worst in San Francisco. Alondra's English teacher says she is a "teacher's dream" because she is "like a plant that just grows and grows." Indeed, the honor roll student has her aims set high. She hopes to attend Howard University and plans to become an actress.
Even so, Alondra is struggling to graduate this spring. She has had to take summer school and night classes to meet the basic requirements for graduation because the public school system has played hooky with her education.
The conditions at her school are so unpleasant, she says, that it has hindered her ability to learn. In some of her classes, she is not even allowed to take textbooks home to study because there aren't enough for all the students. Other classes lack basic supplies. Rooms are missing ceiling tiles, wallpaper is peeling, window shades are unusable. The gym has rats, and the bathrooms are so vandalized and disgusting that students must be escorted to them by security guards.
But Alondra's biggest complaint is that in her four years at Balboa she has taken multiple classes with long-term substitutes. In Spanish class last year, for example, her regular teacher fled to Mexico in the middle of the school year to evade an arrest warrant, forcing Alondra and her classmates to spend the rest of the year with a rotating cast of substitutes. Though the school searched tirelessly for a replacement teacher, qualified Spanish instructors were hard to come by so late in the year. But the subs could not control the classroom and disregarded lesson plans provided by the administration. Instead, they played popular movies like Rush Hour and Entrapment during class.
At the end of the year, the class was given a final exam, which Alondra failed.
"The only people that passed were native Spanish speakers," Alondra says indignantly. "That's cool, but it's not my fault. I told them that if they wanted to test me on the movies I had watched, that would be fine. But I had to drop that class because I couldn't take a bad grade for something that was not my fault."
To meet the language requirements for graduation, Alondra now takes night classes in Japanese at San Francisco City College.
Alondra, however, has done much more than complain about conditions at Balboa High. Last August she became a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against California's Board of Education, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 100 schoolchildren in 46 public schools.
The suit, Williams vs. California, alleges that "too many California schoolchildren go to schools that shock the conscience. ... Schools lack the bare essentials required of a free and common education."
The ACLU contends that California has allowed a dramatic inequality to develop among schools in the state. The "substandard" conditions at many schools affect primarily poor and minority children, the ACLU says, which violates several clauses of the California Constitution, including the Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause.
Balboa is one of three San Francisco schools cited as examples in the suit, along with schools from most other Bay Area counties and throughout California.
The state, in its written response to the court, calls the ACLU's suit vague and incomprehensible. It sees no discrimination in the way it runs schools and says it already has strict regulations for public schools. The state also says that local districts are responsible for problems at individual schools.
But the ACLU believes California is shirking its responsibilities. "If we have schools, we need to stock the schools," says ACLU attorney Katherine Lhamon. "And I'm not talking about an iMac in every classroom. But how can you call these things schools? You can't call a classroom that has no books a learning place. There has been unbelievable underfunding by the state. This suit is about ensuring that everyone has a minimum opportunity and every essential tool for an education."
For Alondra, the decision to join the lawsuit was more personal. "I'm mad [about the conditions]," she says, "but why pout? The only thing I can do is fight for the kids who are in ninth grade now, so they won't have to go through what I went through."
What Alondra and her classmates go through becomes apparent in following Alondra through her daily classes. It is an education in the realities of life at one of San Francisco's lowest-performing schools.
Alondra strolls into her first-period class at 8:13 a.m. -- two minutes before the bell rings -- and slides into her desk in the second row. Tim Gabutero, her health education teacher, looks at her with surprise.
"I'm on time, Mr. Gabutero!" Alondra boasts.
"I know, I can't believe it," Gabutero says, laughing.
Alondra has been tardy twice already this week because she was late catching the bus to school. Alondra lives with three other people, including a cousin who acts as her legal guardian, and "it's a struggle for the bathroom and the iron," Alondra says. Because of stricter tardy policies this year, her guardian was supposed to come with her to school to sign off on her tardies before she would be allowed back on campus. But her guardian couldn't take time off from work, so Alondra, determined not to miss a full day of school, sneaked through the school gate with her face hidden behind a binder.
The bell rings, and Gabutero tells his students to begin their daily "freewrites." The exercise is part of the school's effort to emphasize reading and writing in all classes because Balboa students score among the lowest on standardized tests in San Francisco; many students cannot read at grade level.
An easygoing and well-liked teacher, Gabutero says he is often startled and saddened by the things his students write. One student this morning expresses that she is "continuously stressed" from school and her after-school job at a toy store. "I can barely keep my eyes open," she writes.
Another student writes about her experience the night before, when she heard gunshots and found out that a friend from her neighborhood had been shot dead. The student is shocked. "He is so nice. I can't believe someone would want to shoot him."
Other students produce only a few muddled sentences about baseball and girlfriends, censored by apathy or limited English proficiency.
After the freewrites are collected, Gabutero instructs his students to get a book from the stack at the front of the room. Gabutero has two health ed classes, but only 30 books, so students return their texts to a messy pile when the bell rings instead of taking them home.
Book shortages are a common cry among students and some teachers at Balboa. Gabutero says he wishes he could give more homework, but he can't if his students don't have textbooks. For years, English teachers said the only books in the depository were published before their students were even born.
If there aren't enough books, teachers often resort to photocopying portions of books for readings and homework. And because the school's copy machines don't always work, the teachers often pay for the copies at Kinko's out of their own pockets.
But textbook availability has improved dramatically this year, thanks in part to a state grant for underperforming schools.
Once his students have their books, Gabutero instructs the class to open them to the section on sexually transmitted diseases. When the discussion digresses to abortion, students begin raising their hands to swap stories.
"My cousin just had someone punch her in the stomach so she'd have a miscarriage," one girl says.
"Yeah, I know someone who ran into a doorknob to do it," another girl offers. Gabutero shakes his head. "I learn so much from you," he says.
Gabutero, who came to Balboa a year ago, says his students go through a lot at home, and he doesn't think it helps that the school conditions -- drooping window shades and filthy bathrooms -- resemble their dreary personal lives.
Gabutero also teaches physical education and says the gym and sports equipment are especially pathetic. Often, he has only half as much equipment as he does students, so many kids spend their PE class watching others play.
Every day, he leads classes through stretching exercises in Balboa's crumbling gym. White paint peels from the walls, and the scratched wooden floor has seen too many years without refinishing. On the other side of a flimsy partition is another basketball court that isn't used for stretches because the PE teachers don't want their students sitting on the bird feces smeared into the gym floor. Gabutero explains that before the gym's exterior windows were fixed a few years ago, birds flew into the gym and defecated. Though the PE teachers scrubbed the floors, the mess remains, and the school can't afford to clean it up completely. There is still a mice problem, and rodents scurry around behind the wooden slats lined against the gym walls.
"We try to build self-esteem, but then look at these conditions -- rats, pigeon feces," Gabutero says. "The kids go to other schools and everything is brand-new, and they ask me why we don't have the same. What am I supposed to tell them?"
Alondra slips quietly into her second-period art class, taking a seat at the front of the room. Elham Khodabandeloo, the petite art teacher known for her funky fashion sense, instructs her students to do a freewrite on their emotions. "It doesn't have to make sense, it's just how you feel," she tells the class.
On the overhead projector, Khodabandeloo has written examples of feelings that came out during her first-period class: embarrassed, disappointed, angry, lonely, scared, sexy, dirty.
Alondra decides to write about her feelings of anxiety over a weeklong college tour she is going on in a few days as part of a California Bar Association-sponsored trip for low-income students.
The students turn in their freewrites and begin work on portfolios that will hold their artwork. The portfolios are made of thin, vanilla-colored cardboard that Khodabandeloo found in the old art building before it was converted into school district office space this summer.
Khodabandeloo's current room used to be a home economics classroom, and she mourns the closure of the old art building, which was equipped with a darkroom, a kiln, and drafting tables.
Now she makes do without those amenities, in a classroom barely able to hold her 36 students. "How do they expect me to teach a class when there are more students than chairs, and without any money?" she demands. "There's not one seat left. Some students hurry up to come to class to get a seat."
The students sit at cramped tables crowded between unused sinks and counters, coloring and shading their names graffiti-style onto their portfolios with colored pencils. Khodabandeloo reminds the students to conserve the pencils by using the electric sharpener instead of the manual one. "And if you've got short pencils that can't be sharpened by the sharpener, I've got a knife!" she calls out. Almost immediately, a boy approaches Khodabandeloo with a nub of blue pencil. Khodabandeloo pulls out an Exacto knife and begins whittling away at the pencil tip.
Khodabandeloo has learned to be extremely frugal with her meager supplies -- going so far as to ask for students' keys or driver's licenses as collateral if they want to borrow an eraser.
Last year, she sent a letter home asking parents to chip in $5 a semester per student so she could buy the class plaster, clay, and wire at a wholesale rate. That request was listed among the complaints in the ACLU lawsuit.
"I just wanted to give the students something to be excited about," Khodabandeloo explains. "And it's hard to do it when all you have is paper and pencil. Plus, I was hired to teach sculpture."
Khodabandeloo recognizes that the funding she receives -- about $500 a year for all five classes -- is no different than the money doled out to other schools in the district. But many of her students come from poor families, and they can't afford to bring in their own materials like they do at other schools, she says.
"If they don't have it, they don't have it," Khodabandeloo says. "The community brings up other schools, but our community is unable to do that. So I've written grants and asked for donations. But these kids, there's no one to fight for them. There were no angry parents out there making the school open up the art building when it closed."
Building parent support has been a longtime goal for Balboa High, where only 30 parents showed up at Back to School Night in 1999 (about 200 parents came this year). Unlike schools such as Lowell High in the Parkside District, where Parent-Teacher Associations raise tens of thousands of dollars each year for the school, Balboa has no PTA. "Our parents are tired," says Principal Patricia Gray. "They're working two or three jobs. They just don't have time."
Between second and third periods, Alondra dashes to a bathroom to wash her hands -- a decision that is not made lightly. Balboa is infamous for its putrid restrooms. Its stalls are covered with graffiti, the toilets and floors are caked with scum, and the walls are smeared with crusty, hardened spitballs made from wads of toilet paper.
Principal Gray says the school only has one full-time day janitor. "We don't have the manpower," Gray explains. "But we shouldn't have people cleaning up behind the kids. It's up to the kids to keep it clean."
In an attempt to keep the bathrooms usable, the school keeps them locked most of the day. If a student needs to use the bathroom, a teacher calls a security guard to escort the student.
After her quick trip to the bathroom, Alondra runs to her locker in the basement of a building across campus and grabs her math book, but halfway to her class the bell rings -- she's tardy again. Still, she walks boldly into Room 200 just as her trigonometry teacher begins taking attendance.
Alondra doesn't exactly mind being late to trigonometry -- she has been dreading third period all day. Because of scheduling complications, caused in part by the school's antiquated computer system, Alondra didn't join her math class until the third week of school, and she has no idea what is going on in class, she says. She decides to tell her teacher and traipses to the front of the room, where he is marking attendance.
"Do you think I can pass this class?" Alondra demands. "Seriously."
"You can, if you are willing to work," the teacher responds gently.
Sympathetic to Alondra's confusion, he asks another student to explain the work to her while he goes over the homework with the rest of the class. Alondra sighs and slumps defeatedly in her desk.
Meanwhile, the teacher struggles to review the homework because many students didn't do it, and those who did were confused by square roots. He turns to the chalkboard to explain square roots and how they apply to triangles.
Alondra's math teacher, who is new to Balboa this year and prefers that his name not be used, is both jaded and sympathetic toward his students. He didn't expect the students at Balboa to have such poor math skills, he says, and he didn't expect such a wide range of skills in a single classroom, either.
"I'm not teaching the classical way," he says. "Because you have to put everything in there for them. Some students are capable of doing the average work of a student at Lowell. But some don't care to learn. You have to have more discipline, which starts in grade school. This is a product of all those years of kids in an inner-city school."
His low-level algebra classes are even more difficult to teach. In addition to dealing with more attitude problems, he says, he has to instruct one class using one set of textbooks and another class using a different set because there are not enough of one kind. (Principal Gray says part of the math book shortage can be attributed to the school phasing out one set of textbooks for newer editions.)
But Alondra's teacher says nothing is as frustrating as the class he volunteered to teach for a few weeks during fourth period, his preparation period. The teacher who was supposed to take the class quit after two weeks, when a 4-foot, 80-pound girl threatened to slap the rookie teacher. Before Alondra's teacher volunteered his services, the students sat through an ever-changing cast of substitutes as the school searched frantically for a permanent replacement in a district with an extreme shortage of math teachers.
The class openly rebelled under the substitutes. Students wandered in and out of the classroom, knocked the clock off the wall, and swore at the substitutes. One sub tried to teach the class, but only three students seemed to pay attention. He eventually gave up after the fourth problem because he couldn't figure out the basic algebra equation.
"You guys are falling behind and you're not going to pass this class," the sub warned when the class began acting out.
"It's they fault we falling behind if they can't get no teacher," one student shot back tartly.
Alondra's fourth-period media arts class is a shiny oasis in a desert of shabby, outdated classrooms at Balboa High. During the class, Alondra uses a lab on the first floor arrayed with more than 20 gleaming iMacs and state-of-the-art video equipment. She spends her class time drawing the storyboard for her autobiography, and by the end of the year she will have created and edited a digital video about her life.
Yet even this impressive facility tells a lot about Balboa High. The lab wasn't paid for with school or district funds. Media arts teacher George Lee spent a year reviving an existing grant proposal to the California Department of Education, asking for money to pay for the computer and video equipment, field trips, and extended staff hours. He has also worked overtime to solicit other donations from private media organizations.
Similarly, Balboa's environmental science program, spearheaded by a few teachers in a variety of academic subjects, secured $200,000 in private grants this year so that students could go on a number of camping field trips.
It is a fact of life at Balboa that teachers often must be not just educators but fund-raisers and grant writers, taking valuable energy away from their primary job.
"It really is up to the individual," Lee says. "When you're working in a low-performing school, you need to be really resourceful for your students. If you want something to happen, you have to do it on your own."
Some teachers, like Robert Tynes, are resourceful in different ways. A music teacher, Tynes says he is always on the lookout for discarded buckets so he can convert them into drum sets for his students. Many teachers at the school have refurbished their classrooms on their own, spending their own money and knowingly violating labor union rules by painting over ugly, peeling wallpaper themselves.
Such creative solutions are necessary these days in part because of the growth of "categorical funding" (see "Why Can't Balboa Make the Grade?"), in which state money is dispersed to school districts already earmarked for specific programs, rather than as discretionary funds that allow schools to decide for themselves what their priorities are. Schools must therefore try to fill in the gaps on their own.
Balboa's administrators, too, have dedicated countless extra hours to writing funding proposals for Balboa. Assistant Principal Gilbert Chung spent several hours every Wednesday for six months with staff members writing a one-time grant proposal for schools with poor reading skills. Another assistant principal, Ted Barone, spent more than 30 hours applying for a state "small learning communities" grant to give students more specialized attention at Balboa.
Proudly, Lee says that even though Balboa needs new desks and chairs, it still has the best computer lab in the school district. "My class is really a bright spot, isn't it?" Lee muses. "God, I worked so hard to build that program."
The fifth-period bell rings and Alondra settles into her wooden desk in Room 306, Steven Brady's European literature class.
Brady is undisputedly Balboa's most popular teacher. School Dean Roni Howard says the fact that students beg to get into his classes on European lit is a testament to Brady's magical teaching powers.
Brady has a booming voice and a commanding presence in the classroom. He is firm but understanding. Brady believes he succeeds in engaging his students intellectually because he accommodates the breadth of skill levels in a single class, which ranges from the extremely bright Alondras to special education students.
But the varying skill levels of his students is only one part of the Balboa puzzle, Brady says.
The ACLU lawsuit focuses on school facilities and supplies, but many teachers at Balboa say the school's issues go far deeper. The quality of education is also affected by a host of social issues, including poverty and the students' home life, that find their way onto campus.
"I am asked to be a parent, extended family member, counselor, big brother, and instructor," Brady says of teaching at Balboa. "With these kids, if we could have more teachers with smaller classes, we could do a lot more for them."
Smaller classes has been the mantra of teachers throughout the school because they say teaching at Balboa means juggling a lesson plan with impromptu counseling and disciplining.
But small class sizes are not a reality. Brady's fifth-period class bounces between 30 and 35 students, depending on who shows up for school, and on this morning he has to raise his voice to quiet the unwieldy class.
"I'm waiting ...," Brady calls out. "Still waiting ...."
Once the students settle down, Brady tells them to write a paragraph about their most powerful attribute.
Alondra begins to write thoughtfully. The classroom becomes quiet, if only momentarily.
After a few minutes, Brady asks for volunteers to read their paragraphs aloud. Alondra's hand shoots up. Brady gives her a nod.
"My strongest characteristic is not a characteristic -- it's a fact," Alondra says, reading confidently from her paper. "It's a fact that I am my mother's child, and I have inherited a sense of motivation from her. Whenever I think I can't do something, I think of my mom. I am glad I have inherited motivation from my mom because now I can do anything."
In addition to being Alondra's main source of motivation, Alondra's mother is also a homeless drug addict living on the streets of San Francisco.
At age 11, when Alondra's mother could no longer care for her, Alondra went to live with her second cousin in Bayview/ Hunters Point. Alondra's two younger sisters moved in around the corner with their great-aunt, and her two older brothers moved to Sunnydale, though one is constantly in and out of jail.
Splitting up the family was an act of desperation six years ago. Alondra and her family were evicted when she was 9, and the family lived for two years in a car and a homeless shelter. When the situation didn't improve, the kids moved in with relatives.
Alondra says she doesn't remember when her mother started taking drugs, and she still doesn't know why. But she says her mother has always been the most kind, generous, and motivated person she knows.
"She always tries," Alondra says. "Other people don't try. Like my dad. He didn't try, but she always did. She would come around, and it could be her last dollar or her very last piece of bread, and she would give it to us. Sometimes she's too giving and people take advantage of her.
"I try and dedicate everything good I do to my momma," Alondra continues. "I want people to see that she did something right by me."
Even with a more stable living arrangement in recent years, unpredictable circumstances have interrupted Alondra's dogged pursuit of an education. During her sophomore year, her cousin lost her job, and Alondra had to stay home from school for a month to take care of her younger cousins.
"I had to be the one to take the kids to school and pick them up and make dinner," Alondra recalls. "I had a friend take the homework for me, but there was only so much I could do. It was nobody's fault."
Having missed a month of school, Alondra ended up with a D in biology, which she made up through night classes.
She says the extra hours of classes have been "strenuous," but she pursues a high school diploma with blind determination. Her mother, father, and two older brothers all dropped out of high school, so should she graduate in June, she will be the first in the family with a high school diploma. "That means something to me," Alondra says. "My sisters need an example. I'm going to graduate. I am going to be that icon."
Alondra doesn't usually talk about her difficult home life at school, where she is known for her positivity and optimism. She says it's easy to be upbeat at school, where classes fill her head with Greek mythology or media arts, not "that mess outside."
"I don't have any home problems when I'm at school," Alondra says. "School is my sanctuary."
Most of Balboa's staff found out that their school had been included in a lawsuit by reading about it in the newspaper right before the school year began. Once the staff returned to Balboa in the fall, misinformation spread through the halls like a bad rumor. Many teachers mistakenly thought Balboa was getting sued; everyone was on the defensive.
Principal Gray says at first she felt "intimidated" by the suit because of the amount of energy it would take up, but now she thinks it's "OK."
"We've got nothing to hide," she says. "There are some things that we have done right, and some things we have not done well enough."
She is troubled with what she perceives to be inaccuracies in some of the ACLU's allegations regarding Balboa and has offered a written rebuttal to the school district.
She says that contrary to the ACLU's argument, Balboa has enough money for textbooks, though there are a variety of reasons for shortages, ranging from teachers not ordering books on time, teachers choosing to use unavailable books, texts simply not arriving once they've been ordered, and students losing books. In fact, a popular joke among teachers is that Balboa "hemorrhages" textbooks.
Gray says she has worked hard to staff Balboa with qualified teachers, but sometimes unexpected circumstances -- like teachers evading arrest warrants -- come up. Gray uses emergency credentialed teachers -- student teachers with little or no classroom experience -- when she has to, and not all of them are unqualified. She says some have worked out so well she has gladly hired them once they earned permanent credentials.
Gray acknowledges that certain departments such as physical education, art, and music are underfunded, but there is only so much she can do. Gray adds that the school can afford to provide a bit more to these departments -- though not enough, teachers argue -- but some of the inexperienced teachers sometimes forget to fill out paperwork for supplies. Though she has tried to be vocal about some of her deteriorating facilities, Gray is equally hamstrung when it comes to the decrepit gym, bleachers, and football field because they are not funding priorities for the district.
The teachers, too, are conflicted about the lawsuit. Some hope the case will bring more attention to educational inequity, while others find the lawsuit misguided.
"There are definitely problems with the facilities, which you can tell just by looking at them," says social studies teacher Matt Alexander. "We can't get our shades fixed, there are only six phone lines, and we need more computers. All these things are really annoying, but they're not our biggest problem. Educational quality is our problem. This is a big, anonymous school, and then you bring in kids with a lot of challenges and it's a recipe for failure, no matter how talented the staff is."
Brady, Alondra's fifth-period teacher, says he heartily supports the ACLU lawsuit, but for someone on the front line of public education, his main concern is to keep teaching, despite the conditions.
"Clearly, if we have bathrooms that don't work and are foul, we are not serving our students," Brady says. "And if we have holes in our floor and chalkboards and shades that don't go up and down, and if I don't have the level of cleanliness that I'd like, that'll affect the way I teach. But there are a lot of really good people here trying to make do with it. Patricia Gray doesn't get the money to work with. And she can't gripe about it, and she won't. Because what can she do? It's like fighting a war without enough guns."
