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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.
