Clovis West High School (9-12)

Clovis Unified School District, Fresno County

• 2006-07 Enrollment: 2,690

• Percent Free/Reduced-price Meals: 18%

• Percent African American Students: 5%

• Schoolwide Growth API (2007): 833

• African American Growth API (2007): 810

(Note: All data are current as of February 1, 2008.)

---

Principal: Ben Drati

Length of time as principal at Clovis West High School: less than one year; deputy principal for 2 ½ years; learning director for 2 ½ years

Former Principal: Jeanne Hatfield, currently Assistant Superintendent for Clovis Unified School District

Length of time as principal at Clovis West High School: 3 years

---

Principal Ben Drati: "We've been talking candidly with African American students here for a long time to help them understand how to navigate through school, through life. For example, my African American students know that African Americans are 10% of the California population and yet they are 46% of the prison population. That's startling data for them. And we talk about why that occurs."

Assistant Superintendent Jeanne Hatfield: "I think putting role models not only in the classrooms, but also in positions of leadership is very important."

Q: What are the greatest challenges faced by African American students at the high school level?

A: JH: I think the greatest challenge is to buck the trends from society that show the correlation between African American students who drop out with those who end up in prison. They also need to realize and take advantage of opportunities—such as advanced placement courses, support labs, SAT [college entrance exam] prep sessions, and scholarships. Often low-income students choose not to be involved in co-curricular activities, such as a cheer program or a science fair, because of the costs, not realizing financial support is available. Sometimes these opportunities may be hard to access because there is not the adult advocacy that students need or possibly because of a social stigma [peer pressure] associated with the activity.

They also need to know their culture and believe in themselves. Principal Ben Drati puts this so beautifully. He moved to the United States from Uganda when he was a child. He says when he was growing up he knew all the presidents in this country had been white, but he also knew that his people were descendents of great kings. He points out that African Americans don't have that history. Their history includes slavery.

A: BD: Being African American myself, I think that the greatest challenge is fully understanding the effects of racism from the past and institutional racism, and how it affects your outlook on education and life. I have students who choose--choose--not to take some subjects such as debate, or choose not to participate in certain activities that could be very instrumental for them, such as piano, because it is not cool to do as an African American. So that just tells me that there's a lack of understanding about what it means to be black. And it is deeply rooted. It is a generational thing that has been rooted in slavery and not understanding the history of Africa.

We have to educate others and re-educate ourselves. Otherwise African Americans are going to walk around fitting the mold of what pop culture thinks it means to be black.

Q: From your perspective, what are the three most important things your school does to support African American student achievement?

A: BD: We've been talking candidly with African American students here for a long time to help them understand how to navigate through school, through life. For example, my African American students know that African Americans are 10% of the California population and yet they are 46% of the prison population. That's startling data for them. And we talk about why that occurs. We have those conversations when students are gathered for formal celebrations, such as African American history month or any gathering for African Americans where you are able to engage the students. The students get in conversations that not only involve the events of next week's rally. The conversations are deep and are about issues concerning African Americans' status in America. When we talk about joking around in class, not sagging your pants, or acting up in class, they can relate the message to the 46% African American prison population in California.

When you are in a suburban school like Clovis West, other ethnic groups may say, "Well, how come they get to have this conversation?" "How come we need to talk about African American history; how come we're not talking about Armenian history?" When questions like that come up, I think we do a pretty good job of making sure that the staff understands that African American students are struggling statewide and have specific needs that are not addressed, that are uncomfortable to talk about in a general setting, and that are necessary to talk about.

We do a good job of getting people from colleges or professionals who come to talk with the students. I think they need to know and they need to see how they can help change the perception and help change how things are.

Also at Clovis West, for a long time, there has been an environment of inclusion. Any time some kind of schoolwide activity takes place, we aggressively try to make sure that the groups participating in the functions are representative of the school population. We're very cognizant of that.

A: JH: We provide role models, which I think is absolutely essential. I think putting role models not only in the classrooms, but also in positions of leadership is very important.

We also provide students with data on what is happening to African American students throughout the state. They are shocked, and it really motivates them.

And then the other piece is celebrate, celebrate, celebrate! We had a Kwanzaa celebration and gave every student who was present a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card. We told them they weren't to buy their favorite CD or DVD or paperback or magazine. It had to go toward a book about their culture. You need to know your culture and celebrate it.

Q: Are there any instructional or curricular priorities that have been most important?

A: JH: It is critical to make sure that our students--all of our students--are taught the standards and have the opportunity to master the skills necessary to be able to demonstrate that they have knowledge in and understanding of the standards.

A: BD: I don't think there's anything necessarily specific toward African Americans. Regarding candid conversations, I'm hoping that 6th and 7th grade students will be able to talk about these topics in an elective class setting or forum. They'll have a better understanding of the world and themselves as African Americans and make better decisions throughout junior high and high school about friends to hang out with, and better decide what's cool or not cool. A lot of students are already behind when they come to high school because they've made the wrong decisions during junior high.

Q: What challenges has your school faced, or does it continue to face, in these efforts?

A: JH: Progress is always slow. It can't come fast enough. It's all kids so if one kid isn't making it, that's a failure. It's everyone not only meeting expectations, but also exceeding them. It's also making sure they set their own expectations high enough. That's why role models and good counselors are critical.

A: BD: I just think they're opportunities. For example, if one has the opportunity to hire qualified minorities in schools, they should strongly consider it. That's the same for Latinos, the Hmongs, and any other group that is described when talking about the achievement gap. It's very difficult for a person of a different race to talk about issues that may involve race and education with a group of a different race. For example, like slavery and the use of the "n" word. It's tough for somebody who is not African American to have that conversation with other African Americans. Doing little things like the principal's lip-sync with our folklorico dancers. We compete regionally for a scholarship, and then the top three teams in the region compete at the state level. We took state in that this year.

Q: What resources, whether inside or outside the school, have been most important?

A: BD: I would say involving community members. There's an advisory group of parents that I, or my learning directors, meet with called CWAAPAC [Clovis West African American Parent Advisory Committee] that helps us organize functions and provide speakers. Also there is the AASU [African American Student Union]. Any time we come back from leadership conferences, these kids go into the classroom once a month and talk about African Americans and issues on campus. The AASU is an opportunity for them to bond and talk about issues and do community service projects. Our AASU students go out into the community and do service projects. We call it Reading Buddies. They go to an underserved elementary school and read books with the students. The AASU and CWAAPAC have "Sweet Fridays," where they bring cake and cookies to the staff. And we have a function called "Real Men Cook," in which men from all races cook their best dish on a certain Sunday in February. It's a fundraiser for scholarships. People are charged to come and eat the food, and there's entertainment.

Our teachers do a great job of teaching. They are our strongest resource. They push students to do well--they are unrelenting. We also are trying to get more of our African American students to take advanced placement courses, and we have a strong AVID program. Our co-curricular programs are also a major part of the school because we feel it keeps kids connected to the school. We have basketball, volleyball, choir, debate, forensics, Mock Trial, and folklorico dance.

A: JH: People--absolutely people on the inside. I don't just mean our teachers and administrators. I mean our parents. I mean our wonderful administrative assistant, Monique McCoy, who happens to be African American and who works with our students and parents. She's the adviser to AASU and works with our CWAAPAC parents. CWAAPAC has a holiday celebration, provides scholarships to students, and takes them on college trips and to cultural events. We do day trips or overnight trips that we support financially. And I know the students appreciate it.

Our district sponsored an African American student leadership conference this year, and the cost to attend per student was something like $10 each. Even though that was just to offset costs, it was like, are you kidding? We'll pay for our kids to go. You let students know they're valuable when you go that extra mile, when you put money behind it. We're putting our money behind this because what you're going to has great value, and you have great value. Now, bring back something important. Bring back a pearl. Make it happen.

We have a counselor, Tracey Fowlkes, who is absolutely a phenomenal role model. Tracy makes sure that all the African American students who are seniors get personal copies of scholarships that are out there, and she makes sure that they meet their deadlines. We have counseling bulletins and stuff is available in the counseling center, but you can't take a chance that a kid is going to come into your office and do it. If we're bucking trends, then we've got to put the applications in the hands of the students. Tracey won't take "no" for an answer. I think that lets the students know that they are important, that we care, that we're going to make the extra effort with them.

Q: What role does data disaggregated by student subgroup play in your school's efforts to support student achievement, including among African American students?

A: JH: It shows the staff where the gaps are. When you show the data to students, it motivates them. They have great pride in their heritage, whether they're African American, Hispanic, Hmong, whatever. They will do better if you let them know you want them to, you expect them to, and you will help them.

Data drives our instruction. It drives our reteaching. It drives our intervention. I think you can generalize a little too much sometimes from disaggregated data when you should focus more on the individual student. We emphasize that all this tells you is subgroup information so you can see where the inroads need to be made. Now you can look at the individual student data to tell you what you need to do daily in your classroom.

A: BD: We have a program called EduSoft in which each teacher has access to their students' test information from the previous year. We're in the process of fine-tuning our professional learning communities, in which teachers organize in groups based on subject to look at student learning. We're also planning to do advisories, where teachers take about 20 or 30 minutes on a weekly basis to talk with students about their life and goals and stress management. Next year will be the first year we fully implement it. But we are always looking at the next thing to do to improve. The other piece we're going to look into is called RTI [Response to Intervention]. It's a districtwide initiative to recognize students who are struggling and have a systematic process for intervention for each school site.

Q: What role do the "a-g" requirements play at your high school, and how does your school support African American students meeting those requirements?

A: BD: Most of our classes satisfy the "a-g" requirements. We push students. The Freshman Academy is a strong program we have. All students who are struggling or failing or have D's have the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with the teacher and look at goals and talk about school. Research shows that it is important to take care of your freshmen when they transition from 8th grade to 9th grade. We also have Link Crew members [upperclassmen] who serve as advisors. Each advisor helps a group of freshmen transition through high school. We have two counselors strictly for freshmen. Senate Bill 1802, which provides funding for counselors, has been a tremendous help. 1802 counselors work one-on-one with students that are not doing well. The students end up thinking it's too hard to not do their homework.

Q: Is career-technical education important at your school?

A: JH: We have pretty extensive ROP [Regional Occupational Program] classes at our campus. We offer everything from theater design to educational careers to business to health careers and athletic training. We have a Small Learning Communities grant so next year we're adding some pathways in law and public service, entertainment and performance, and health. We also have auto mechanics and have received a multimillion-dollar grant to build a state-of-the-art lab. We're networking with a community college on that. It's not an ROP class, but a career-tech pathway. Students who complete the auto class receive a certificate that currently is offered only at community colleges or tech or trade schools.

A: BD: One of our district's high school campuses is based on career technology, called CART [Center for Advanced Research and Technology]. This school deals strictly with career tech. When students go through sophomore counseling, they decide if they want to go to CART. They can achieve their "a-g" requirements through project-based lessons, such as forensics or computer technology. Juniors and seniors can take a lot of their classes (half a day) through CART.

Q: Is community college readiness a priority at your high school?

A: BD: We work hand-in-hand with the community college representatives. They're often here just recruiting students or coming by to test them.

Q: How does your school use the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) to inform teaching and student learning?

A: JH: Our CAHSEE pass rate is extremely high. If a student doesn't come to a lab after school and it's a CAHSEE lab and the student hasn't passed, a phone call goes home then at that moment. So it's an immediate connection, and we've seen great improvement with that.

We go into our senior year with about 25 kids at the start of the year who haven't passed. By the time we get the May results, we're down to probably four or five kids. At the most, we may have one African American student who may not have passed. If a student is targeted at risk for CAHSEE, we try to front-load it by putting them in support labs as a freshmen. When we get the results in their 10th grade year, then we determine if the intervention worked. If not, we target the group who didn't pass in their junior and senior years. But STAR really drives our curriculum. The standards are higher, so if you push students toward STAR, then CAHSEE is going to come. In the class for students who have not passed CAHSEE, we teach to the standards but we also infuse a lot of CAHSEE intervention. Teachers know each child's subskill weaknesses and what to do for each child.

A: BD: We have intervention classes that are geared to help students that have not passed the CAHSEE, and the class has been highly efficient in the past four years.

Q: How does your high school support student engagement, whether through electives, guidance counseling, or other resources; and how does your high school support struggling students to keep them from dropping out?

A: BD: If you have an inclusive environment, you're cognizant of the reasons why students drop out. A student knows when they're welcome or not. If they don't feel welcome on campus or they don't feel that this is their school, then it can be easy to become unmotivated. So our job is to make sure that we see all students. We make sure kids feel safe on campus, and if they feel threatened, they can go see one of our four student relations liaisons at our discipline office. A lot of times the student relations liaisons interface with the students on a consistent basis so if students have problems, they know where to go to get conflict resolution. We look at qualitative and quantitative data to provide us with data about the atmosphere on campus. When students are participating in co-curricular programs or school activities, and when the discipline data suggest that there are not too many discipline violations, that is how we know if we are doing well or not doing well.

A: JH: More than 85% of our student population is involved in some co-curricular activity. We disaggregate that data as well. Our African American students are very involved; they are an important part of the fiber and fabric of our campus. At Clovis Unified, we are fortunate because we are structured so that each high school has only one intermediate school that feeds into it and seven elementary schools that all feed into the one intermediate school. So we know our kids. A study was just done about the relationship between the co-curricular activities of our juniors and their GPA [grade point average]. The correlation between very high GPA and student involvement and the correlation between very low GPA and noninvolvement are huge. We tracked it down to the students' elementary schools. We found that students from our smallest and most diverse elementary school in an extremely impoverished neighborhood were the least likely to be involved in the intermediate and high school co-curricular activities. We've done several things to remedy that. For instance, when we realized the elementary school did not have a lot of students involved in a Little Hoopsters basketball program, we provided scholarships for every student at the school who wanted to do it. The high school athletic director and coaches through their booster clubs raised the money for uniforms. Then they looked at where the need was in other elementary schools and provided scholarships there too. So with this district structure, you can take care of your own. You can start looking at what the trends are in elementary school and buck those trends.

Before students drop out, they've got to go through a lot of hoops, so we have a very low dropout rate. The advisories we are starting will provide another adult on campus to connect with. Schools need many adult advocates for kids who have a personal connection, relationship, or responsibility to provide a safety net under those kids.

There are alternative placements or alternative settings where students can go, but we pride ourselves that our school is the school of choice for our students. Our kids want a diploma from our high school because it means something. Our API is the highest in the valley, and our kids are proud of that. We've even been recognized by Newsweek.

Q: What support and leadership does your district provide to your high school's efforts to prepare African American students during school and also for life after high school?

A: BD: The district has high expectations for principals. As principal, I'm going to know the name of every single child who has not passed the high school exit exam. And I am going to try everything I can to make sure that those kids are passing. I'm going to exhaust every effort to make sure that the ship is moving forward through shared leadership with the staff. We are also going to exhaust efforts in making sure we push each student's potential. We believe that if we work together, we can achieve.

Financially, the district has always supported us. Our students would never go without proper materials. The district also makes sure that we are on the cutting edge of understanding what's out there in education, taking us to conferences, helping us get grants, and supporting us to make sure that leadership is trained.

We are a nonunion district because the teachers chose not to have a union. So it's easy to call a meeting with my teachers after school to resolve a problem.

A: JH: I think our district had great vision just in the way they structured it when it started in 1960 [each high school fed by one intermediate school, fed by seven elementary schools]. It is a built-in system to be able to identify your students and develop relationships. That really individualizes and personalizes the experience for kids as they go through our system. We've had very few superintendents. Our first superintendent was here for 30 years.

Specifically regarding African American students, our district sponsored the African American Success Conference this year. We look at our focused groups of students and try to do as many things as we can to support them. You have to believe and recognize and understand and know that there are issues that are specific to cultures, and to say they are not is doing those students a disservice. It's really critical that you bring in people from the community who can speak to those issues and can validate the kids' experiences. When it's a powerful woman they see on TV and she's saying, "As an African American woman, I went through this, this, and this," then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh yeah!" It gives students an awareness, and maybe an appreciation, that it's not as bad now as it used to be, for one thing. We've had students come up after listening to such a speaker and say, "I want to go to this college. I'm going to get online tonight and look this up." It creates a buzz, and that buzz is really critical.

Each year, we also do a self-study about how we work with all groups of students. And once every few years, the district will come to our site and validate our self-study. The district also does all kinds of training. Ben and I just went to a training about breaking down barriers and stereotypes of all groups. The district is going to send several people to become trainers so that we can look at ways to better relate to students. We also have Intercultural Diversity Advisory Councils (IDACs) that operate on both a site and district level.

Q: What would you hope California policymakers, educators, and the public would understand about the academic achievement of the state's African American students?

A: JH: First of all, we need to set the standards and expectations high. We need to be able to provide role models who motivate students. All educators need a heart for kids. We need enough money to hire teachers who are good for kids, and budget cuts don't help us. Education needs to be a priority in this state. And if you want to buck societal trends, then put some money where we're going to make a difference. Let us hire good, talented educators instead of having to put teachers on layoff notices.

A: BD: My hope is that they can look at their system and ask the question: "Why are students struggling?" Not rely on their own opinion, but actually ask the question "why."

If they dig deep enough, they will find the answer and resolve it. They will find that it is connected to a deeper issue in society, which involves race, economic disparity, differences in belief systems, and many other variables that we in education choose not to tackle. For African Americans, there are some things that occurred in the past that affect African Americans today, and are connected to the gap in achievement between European Americans and African Americans.

Q: Is there anything else that we have not talked about that is important for us to know about your school or your students?

A: BD: I appreciate Jack O'Connell's State of Education address several months back about the achievement gap. He has faced the situation as it is, which involves race. I know it was an unpopular discussion to have, but it needs to happen. I'm glad we have a man in office who is bold enough to have this kind of conversation.

---

This article is a transcript of an interview conducted by EdSource staff in May 2008.
The opinions in this interview are those of the principal, and not necessarily those of EdSource, its staff, its funders, or its Board.