That’s Eliot the school.

Eliot Middle School, most recently an Arts Magnet.

It’s the school in Altadena just around the corner and down the street from my house, the only house I ever owned.

It represents Altadena as its tower stands proud and you can see it from across the valley as you look toward the mountains.

The tower is iconic. It shows how far civilization has climbed the foothills. It says that Altadena is here, still here.

When the Eaton fire swept nearly half of Altadena, it took the Aldi Market and the Dollar Store across the street from the school. The school suffered damage and the auditorium burned down, but miraculously the tower still stands tall and visible. It represents Altadena, Altadena Strong.

Altadena is unincorporated. Its schools are part of the Pasadena Unified School District, and its services are provided by Los Angeles County.

PUSD, the District, announced it would tear down Eliot and sell the land to developers for a strip mall. The public is aroused. There is a movement to recall the Superintendent.

Hey! This is Altadena! We’re not step children!

We live here! We’re re-building, coming back.

There’s a problem here, a big problem, a major problem, and it has a history. I know some of it because I moved here in 1970.

I was born in Hollywood, 1941, grew up in Monterey Park, and Pasadena was always the other side of the valley. We looked toward the mountains, and with a telescope you could see the Eliot Tower.

I have lived through crises before. We are now in the greatest crisis of my lifetime, facing a conflation of the Civil War and a World War and the Death of Democracy. Eliot is part of the Big Picture.

Backstory is in order.

When we moved to Altadena in 1970, to be near Shirley’s parents in Pasadena, nearer than Riverside to the great cultural heart of L.A., and the Ballet Studio where Shirley was studying the Royal Academy of Dancing, I got a teaching job with PUSD, fifth grade at Longfellow Elementary. There was a lot I didn’t know.

They told us Pasadena was the first school district west of the Rockies under court order to integrate. That prompted White Flight. It was, I think, the reason we could afford to buy the house in Altadena.

We were also told that Pasadena in the halcyon days of the last century was the Lighthouse School District in the nation. They’ve slipped from prominence and hope to recover, but are currently mired in the common problems of the common man.

Forced integration led to the rise of numerous private schools in a community where there were already too many.

Loss of enrollment meant loss of funding meant loss of teachers, larger classes, school closures.

Some schools sat empty, some were rented to private schools often teaching the same students, some were repurposed, and some were razed, the land sold to developers who altered the landscape.

Pasadena was known to pay its teachers the lowest salary among the surrounding districts, and some teachers left for greener pastures. Those who remained could not move, or stayed by choice. “I’m part of the community, and I want to teach my community’s children.”

Some of the PUSD teachers were visionaries and altruists, teaching the children as people, sharing and enriching their lives. That was my kind of teacher.

Some teachers were Old School, taught by rote, memorizing letters and numbers, taking tests, getting grades, learning little. Their room was next to mine.

The District was slow to understand its own priorities. Like Administrators everywhere (a government without a plan, but the concept of a plan, to be revealed in two weeks), they dragged their feet in the rush to catch up with events.

I blame myself for not doing more (though I did quite a lot) to make sure they saw things the way I did. I blame them for the missed opportunities.

Sometime I’ll write at length, greater than the blog entries or my various publications in print or should be.

For now, I’ll try to shed some light.

A school is part of its community. I grew up when everyone went to school, and education was a universal right.

Now school is a business. It takes in money and provides a product and a service. The current government and its agent the Supreme Court have broken the rules and laws, and allow states, cities, families, to choose their brand and flavor, or keep the kids home. The result is a qualified chaos.

The public schools are now in competition with all the private variations. To keep their students, and lure back the strays, they need to convince the public that they can do a better job.

That requires salesmanship. It also requires that the product actually is better.

Communication is key.

Examples of what I did are instructive. I offer them, not for self aggrandizement, but to show that even one individual can make a difference, and, by extrapolation, individuals united can win the day.

I always included the parents. I sent a positive letter home with each student, detailing our plans for the year, what we would cover, encouraging parents to keep in touch, work with their children, observe their progress, let me know if there are special circumstances I should know about, that sort of thing. Many teachers already do this.

I have files and boxes of parent responses. They were happy to have their voices heard, and became part of a collaborative process. We kept in touch with phone calls, letters, back to school night, Open House, parent conferences. I sent student work home to show their progress. (Yes, we set high standards, worked toward them, and went from first draft essay to second drafts with corrections and student conferencing, then a final finished third draft (sometimes a fourth…). I worked with every student individually, stayed in at lunch and after school for extra time with the students, and when I had a conference period, I was able to give individual time beyond the classroom (rather than just grading papers which I did at home, staying up late, getting little sleep.))

It paid off. The parents were pleased, even amazed, and became part of a coalition of collaborative support.

It could not have worked better if I had deviously planned a strategy. I just did what seemed the right thing to do.

So I sent samples of student work to the Downtown Administration, the Superintendent, the Heads of Curriculum, every member of the School Board. I was proud of my students and shared their success. The Important People wrote back lavish letters of praise and came to visit the class.

This was not self-promotion, but promotion of student success, and it worked like a charm. The Downtown People were part of my coalition of success. I included the newspapers, and they printed articles and included pictures of the students, and our coalition grew.

We started a Chess Club at lunch time, then created a Chess Tournament and invited all the surrounding communities to participate. The newspapers ate it up, articles and endearing pictures of the young children of all backgrounds planning their next move on the chess board.

We produced a literary magazine with work from all grades at our school. The local Library printed copies, circulated them as part of the library collection, extra copies to the children, their families, the Downtown Administration, the School Board, and the newspapers.

Communication was open, positive, collaborative. Parents volunteered to tutor, to chaperone field trips, to bring treats on holidays. School was fun, for everybody, and progress was astronomical.

Parents told their friends, who were considering private schools, about the wonderful things happening at a public school, and the friends enrolled their children.

We did more wonderful things than I can take the time and space to relate here, like the play I wrote at student request performed to a packed house, or the school library I created because the school needed it, or the way my students worked with their younger peers, or…

When I moved to teaching English at high school, often re-encountering students I had earlier in the fifth grade, the school started me out with the proficiency classes because I was the new teacher at that level and nobody wanted the proficiency classes. Students who failed the proficiency exam would not graduate, and the school could lose its accreditation.

I figured out right away that it was the system that was failing, not the students. A memorized formula and counted words was not a proficient use of language. We broke the “rules,” found common ground with lots of individual attention, and all my students passed, they graduated, accreditation was assured and the school (and the District) was “saved.”

I apologize for my own failures. I failed to publicize sufficiently the great success of my students. I’m basically a shy and unassuming person, socially awkward, and would rather the spotlight were moved away from me.

I should have used the media more. I should have more publicly promoted my fellow teachers, so many of whom were better than I was in many ways, in organizing small groups in the classroom, in organizing field trips.

I should have developed the discipline to control myself from going in all directions at once. Yes, I did give up chess at an early age. Yes, I did not pursue tennis as a professional career. I did not pursue a career as a baritone in opera, or as an actor on stage and screen, or a mover and shaker in the academic realm (I choked on the rhetoric), or a political force in the larger world (my world was the classroom).

The point is (did you think I would ever get to it?) that if one person, me, could do as much as I did (what I’ve written here only scratches the surface), all of us (I’m talking teachers here) together can not only change the world, we can save it.

Which is why Eliot should not be torn down.

Get our own house in order, let the public know our successes, and they will return in droves, bringing the attendance money back to open schools, not close them.

We have in greater Pasadena a newspaper delivered free. I’m in favor of the free press and local news coverage. We (the PUSD) do not adequately use the tools available. That newspaper is a Pay to Play venue. There are pages and pages of rows and rows of photographs of graduates from private schools, or the members of a charitable organization posing at their recognition celebration. They pay to get their name and picture in the paper. The last pages have a token reference to successes in the public schools.

I used to laugh (more than a chuckle) when a private school proudly proclaims, “Graduate x_____has applied to UCLA!”

My students, from a regular public high school, have gone to every campus of the University of California, UCLA, Berkeley, UCR, all of them. They have gone to the Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Stanford, all of them. And with scholarships. My students were flown to Washington D.C. to represent “The Youth of America.”

And I was just one teacher in a regular public school.

So, PUSD, promote the success of your students.

And don’t tear down Eliot.