Page 3 of 6
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.
