IN THE BEGINNING, South LA-located Santee Education Complex was going to be the new high school model for how LAUSD could operate successfully in lower income communities. The gleaming complex, built on the site of the old Santee Bakery, was the special baby of former district superintendent Roy Romer.
But, during the first weeks after Santee opened its doors in the fall of 2005, regular fights and a couple of near riots broke out. Then, after the campus violence was quelled, the academic problems began. When state testing time rolled around, Santee scored the second lowest of any of the district’s high schools.
Now, as of last week, Santee’s principal Vince Carbino has a new kind of mutiny on his hands. But this time, the rebellion is among the school’s smartest students.
According to unhappy students and their parents the issue is as follows:
Santee is on a track system, which means that for a portion of the student body the new school year started in July. Midway through the school’s eight week summer semester, however, it turned out that Principal Carbino hadn’t acquired the proper text books for a large number of the school’s academic classes. According to faculty members, his solution was to look through Santee’s stash of existing supplies and yank out textbooks he did have and then…
…change the subjects of 40 classes to entirely different subjects—that happened to match the text books Santee already had on hand.
This meant, for instance, that students who had been taking computer science for half the semester, suddenly found themselves taking (and I’m not kidding about this)….cooking.
In other cases, kids were transferred out of one class to whatever classroom had an opening— appropriate for their needs or not. (Conscientious students wondered gloomily how they would be able to catch up in the new classes after having missed fifty percent of the course work.)
Worst of all, in certain students’ minds, was Carbino’s decision to convert twelve AP classes, to non AP subjects—after the students had already done nearly four weeks of AP work. AP History, for example, became “Cinema.” AP English became “Writing Seminar.”
In addition, say students, most of the new non-AP, make-do classes did not fulfill any kind of college requirement, but simply fell in the category of “elective.”
In making this move, Carbino reportedly neither consulted, nor gave notice to either students or faculty. Sixteen year old, Mercedes Carreto, says she learned about the changes in her two AP classes only when she got her mid-semester report card.
“Like instead of AP history, it said Cinema,” says Mercedes. “I want to get into a good college and study to be a dentist, which means I need a lot of AP classes, and good scores on the AP exam,” she says. “How am I supposed to do that when he takes our AP classes away for no reason?”
Teachers say they were similarly blindsided. “I only knew what he’d done when I saw it on the computer one morning as I took attendance,” says AP English teacher Alexandra Avilla.
When the news of the class-switches came out, a group of students, most of them AP kids, decided to go and talk to principal Carbino directly regarding their concerns. And that’s when things really started to go downhill.
According to the students, after they arrived at his office and requested a conference, Carbino not only failed to meet with them, he told them that if they didn’t leave, he’d suspend them and/or call the police.
The upset students came to Anthony Marenco, one of the school’s most popular AP teachers, and told him about the office encounter and the threats. Marenco says he assumed the students might have somehow mishandled the meeting and suggested the kids treat the incident as a learning exercise. Marenco then agreed to help the group approach the principal again —but with consummate diplomacy and conflict resolution in mind.
It didn’t work. This time, Carbino told the teacher he was “causing a disturbance” and had Marenco escorted off school grounds by a campus police officer. “I honestly couldn’t believe it,” says the usually mild-mannered Marenco. “The officer was really apologetic. After he took me to the parking lot, he made a point of shaking my hand.”
The Marenco incident happened on Friday, August 3. “And that was, like, the spark for us to organize,” says 16-year-old Carina Palacios, who hopes to get into UC Irvine like her two sisters. “We felt like, this man doesn’t have respect for anybody.”
******
As it happens, this isn’t the first time that Vince Carbino has had problems at a school. Before Santee, the principal worked at Belvedere Middle School where he reportedly alienated many of that school’s teachers. “He’d go after people and criticize them publicly,” says former Belvedere teacher, Craig Knapp. “His way of handling differences in opinion was that everyone else is wrong and he’s correct.”
At Belvedere, things escalated to the point that Carbino was transferred out after six months, in a deal brokered by Roy Romer with UTLA, the local teacher’s union.
After leaving Belvedere, he came to Santee.
A former cop, Carbino was purportedly brought in to stop the on-campus violence that had been wreaking havoc since the new school opened. He did so, say teachers, primarily by transferring scores of problem students to other schools. For his work, Vince Carbino has been lauded by such city luminaries as City Council Member Jan Perry and civil rights lawyer, Connie Rice. But teachers at Santee allege that, while Carbino’s tough guy approach may have been useful initially in getting the troublemaker students out of the school, when applied as a general style of governance, it frequently crosses the line into “abusive.”
UTLA second-in-command, Linda Guthrie, puts it in harsher terms. With Carbino, says Guthrie, LAUSD also simply transferred their problem to a different school. As for the latest incident, she maintains there’s no reason Carbino couldn’t have gotten the necessary text books. “It’s incompetence,” Guthrie says flatly. “But what makes me the most crazy, is how he’s treated students. When kids come to talk to him about their concerns for their classes, instead of rewarding them for acting responsibly, he threatens to punish them? He’s just being a bully.”
*********************
Last Tuesday around 50 angry parents, teachers and students showed up at a meeting principal Carbino was holding in the school auditorium. Again, the principal reportedly answered few questions and, when the parents pressed, he radioed for four campus police officers and walked out of the room.
Student organizers say they are now determined to get Vince Carbino out of Santee altogether.
“My parents said maybe they should just get me out of Santee and to another school,” says Carina Palacios. “But, I tell them no. Sure, I can leave. But then what happens to the students behind me? We need to take a stand,” she says. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Great post, Celeste. Good job, kids. Well done! Maybe this, coupled with his previous administrative (non)performance, is enough for LAUSD to simply show this gentleman the door altogether. Santee may not want him, but maybe no one else does either.
Government schools. What did you expect?
It seems that Principal Vince Carbino took this job because all of the warden jobs were taken. Luckily for him we will probably have more CA prisons, but until then it seems Santee High School will be where he plies his trade of torture and humiliation, since it is unlikely that LAUSD would do anything about an incompetent principal.
They only appear to fire principals who dare suggest that the Green Dot schools would be better for the students and hold a vote for conversion of LAUSD to Green Dot.
BTW, what is it with those rasied clenched fists, similar to the Black Panthers. Do you think that I would listen to a bunch of kids who have been coached and photographed to be rebellious? The problem is with the principal, but the solution starts with the kids being schooled by people smarter than professional protesters.
Good grief. I’m beginning to act like reg with serial posts. One more thing in contradiction to the picture, good kids don’t revolt.
Oh blow it out your ass Woody. Good kids don’t revolt. You wouldn’t put up with this crap with yopur kids but its OK for these students to get shafted by an ex-cop (probably let go by Bratton whose trying to reform LAPD).
Dance Lemons, Dance!
The photo came about when the kids had just finished a meeting trying to figure out what they were going to do next, organizationally speaking. I asked them to pose in front of the school and when they did so, they struck the pose you see in manner that seemed to be spontaneous. One or two of the kids raised a fist. Then they all did the fist raising thing. It was, if anything, quite tentative (as you can see by the physical attitude in the photo) and, to my knowledge, coached by no one. This was the second of two photos so was slightly stronger in attitude than the first.
I found them to be all to be incredibly nice, smart, and good humored kids.
I only reported today on the issue of the classes. But there’s a lot more. Being the “good kid” at schools like this one is challenging enough without the principal and/or administrators working against you.
For instance, one of the students in the photo (a girl whose grade point is consistently somewhere between a 3.6 and 3.8), an 11th grader, had tried without success to take honors classes her first two years at the school. But somehow the schedulers just kept putting her in regular classes and no amount of trying to rectify it seemed to accomplish a change. Then last year, instead of getting algebra II, which was the class she needed, they slotted her —for no discernible reason—into remedial math. In that case, her parents flipped out convincingly enough that the school did make the change. Now this year, finally she was to get in an AP classes (she tried last year), and the fool principal yanks ’em.
Now keep in mind, this girl is beautiful, smart, polite, articulate and should be a star whom you try to help as much as possible. But not at Santee.
rlc: You wouldn’t put up with this crap with yopur kids
Celeste: In that case, her parents flipped out convincingly enough that the school did make the change.
Now, you’re getting the picture.
Such action isn’t the responsibility of the kids, but of their parents. Have you talked to any of them? Have you asked why they aren’t involved themselves? Are they involved and have they made progress that isn’t being reported?
Bottom line – Children should respect authority and rely upon their parents for help rather than taking things into their own hands. This is feel-goodism and nothing constructive without adults leading the way.
Woody, I have to go off now to stare at the LA Board of Sups (as they meet about MLK), but your objections are unusually whacked. Read the thing. The parents ARE involved, as are the teachers.. for chrissake. I simply focused most on the kids…..since, in the end, it’s about their education and their respective futures. Sheesh.
Great post, Celeste. I hope this story finds its way into the newspapers.
I don’t even want to start telling you guys my personal experiences with LAUSD and its sorry incompetent personnel and policies. If you guys hear my stories, everyone here will agree that LAUSD needs to be abolished. There are others districts too, Compton and Lynwood Unified Schools are not far behind on my personal sorry ass totem pole.
Celeste, what do you mean that my comments are unusually whacked? Versus just whacked?
I had forgotten but now remember your reference to the parents, although they were not the focus. I think we need to hear more from the parents than their kids.
Now, when will liberals start to accept the concept of vouchers and allow schools to compete? That would force bad administators out.
Bring it on, poplock! Beats the hell out of reading Woody’s threadbare, repetitive, frayed, tedious, tendentious, whacked, untenable locutions.
Excellent story, Celeste.
Looking foward to your update on the sups & MLK.
Are my comments too logical and realistic for you to accept, LotS?
When are you going to start protesting to allow 15 year-olds the right to vote?
This sort of incompetence with lack of accountability is what happens when government is the sole player in the game, whether regarding schools or the single-payer healthcare system some readers misguidedly advocate. Only places where public schools really work are smaller communities, especially where the parents are reasonably affluent and educated enough to pay attention and get involved, and hence where the parents have a strong voice. Also, where the Teacher’s Union doesn’t have a stranglehold on the system.
Even Catholic schools which charge less per student than what LAUSD reimburses, do a better job. They are what Green Dot is trying to emulate, to a large extent.
All of this is an argument for more Charter schools where the parents have a voice in firing and hiring poor administrators.
Okay, you asked for you….this is the short version.
Lynwood School district lost my school records in the 3rd grade and attempted to clean up the scandal by holding me back a year. When my parents and the school administration found out about the lost records, I was half way through the same grade level. The school convinced my mother that it was too late to place me back into my own age group and appropiate level. From this day on and according to my strict father, I was the now the idiot of the family. A law suit was more appropiate at this time.
Once we moved over to a LAUSD school district and attending a JR. High School, I was placed in ESL classes and later in low level reading classes.
In ESL classes, I sat there and spoke English while the rest of the class spoke Spanish (at this point of my life, I understood Spanish but was not fluent enough to respond). I was not the only student screaming for help. There was another non-Spanish speaking girl in my class. We both wasted half a year talking to each other exclusively and scratching our heads trying to figure out what went wrong. The teacher repeately referred us to the counselor’s office who ignored our pleads for help or the teacher’s adamant recommendations. The counselor continued to ask me the repeated questions, “what year did your family arrived from Mexico” and “how did you learn English so well?” Not until the ESL teacher contacted my parents telephonically with full details, together with my parents verification of the elementary school story, did my parents showed up at the school protesting and demanding change. This is when we were got details on how the school districts gets a nice lump of cash for every student attending “ESL” classes.
Okay, now that ESL is out of the picture, round two with LAUSD.
After the ESL fiasco, they now place me in low level reading class. You know, the dumb and dumm-er illiterate kids. Two hours of bullshitting and reading everyone’s favorite Newspaper. You guessed it, “THE LA TIMES.”
Once the CTBS state exam came around and taken (7th grade), my results returned indicating that I was reading and comprehending college level. After this, the school administrator personally walked over and pulled me out of the “rejected” kids club. (I wont even go into the story of my first juvenile arrest and police brutality case)
Now here comes High School.
In High School I got the same old line of questions about the Mexico issue. Again, I was returned to the “reject” institution of kids techology classes. Not caring about these classes, I failed my first year of English high school, straight “FUU”.
For two periods daily, I sat in these classes only being allowed to get up to pick out a color coded exam on a time limitation. Throughout the entire time, I knew we were being used as a ginnie pig project. I got kicked out of this class for calling the teacher and the teacher assistant “a bunch of bitches.”
As yearly done, I took the CTBS exam again and passing it with college level scores.
My track counselor gave me that empty look, shook her head, and scrathed away at her soon to be bald head. She reviewed my reading and comphrehension scores that showed a score in the top 10% of California students. Then she looked at my GPA – at a proud 1.9.
🙂
Between all of this, I fought, was expelled, suspended, and arrested.
Never took a AP class in my life but took every elective imaginable, wood shop, mental shop, machine shop, art class, auto shop, and even typing class (the girls were all cute!).
Now, I would like to take the opportunity to give my greatest thanks to the biggest piece of dog excrement sorry ass school district in the world – LAUSD!!
I dont want to write a novel here …so this is just a brief summary.
Oh yeah, when I was about to get my BA, the University Counselor, you guess it, asked me the same old repeated questions. Where is your elementary school records? What happened to you in jr. high school? What happened to you in high school? He kept saying over and over Jesus, Jesus, Jesus….sounded like i was in church.
When he found out that I passed the CTBS exam in the 7th and 9th grade scoring college, all he could do is talk about Law school……. and all I could do was cry and shake.
Good G_d, poplock! If this is just a thumbnail, you got a book in you. Wish this were the only story I’d ever heard like this one. LAUSD ain’t the only horror-house district in the country. But, I have to admit, yours could well be among the most frightening. I’d ask you how you survived, but I’m guessing that’s Book Two, the sequel to Book One. Un-ff’n-amazing. Man, you gotta be somthing in person. That kind of street smarts mixed with that level of book smarts must mean your an absolute terror to wrangle with. Jesus.
So, Celeste and LotS and others see that government employees have been incompetent and dishonesty and the problem. So, who do they want to correct the situation? Government employees! Wow! How brilliant.
Poplock, what a story.
In my case, the principal of my grammar school went to my parents and told them that he wanted to double-promote me. When they resisted at first, he leveled and told them, “You’re son is in a class of rednecks.” So, I was moved up to the class with people from the right side of the tracks, and we learned three times as much in a semester as the other class did. In my view, the differences in the classes came down to parent involvement. One other tidbit, the schools were still segregated at the time. At least our principal knew all of the parents and did what was best for the kids.
That takes me to my little sister’s experience. After the schools were integrated and black teachers were moved into the school, we found that the degrees that they held from predominately black colleges were not up to the same level as the predominately white schools. That was true back then. Now, this is the absolute truth…my sister came home and asked what “dobees” meant. My parents couldn’t figure it out. My sister said that her teacher told the class that “English do bees my best subject.” You can’t make up things like that. Also, if you talked in class, you had to pay a fine into a jar on her desk, which accounted for why my sister didn’t buy lunch some days. The next week my sister was enrolled in a nice private school, where the teachers were qualified and spoke the king’s English.
I hate to remind people, but liberals have ruined public schools and kept forcing families further out into the suburbs to find quality education–leaving the squalor behind. Very little has changed.
Government isn’t your solution.
Woody, you’re lucky that the rude Three Stooges — Riccie, Reggie, and Lo — don’t know where to find you, or they’d be a posse for sure. I never thought I’d be more on the side of a conservative from the days of segregation — normally, I’m too liberal for the conservatives — but those three give one no choice. On the plus side, we all know what they’ll say before reading them, saving us from the trouble of having to.
Maggie: YUK! YUK! YUK!
Want Vouchers folks? Fine. I mentioned this before but I’ll repeat the terms:
I’ll go along if:
1. the voucher pays 100% of the cost. No additional funds required
2. School has to take all comers. Or if there are only a hundred places – use a lottery or first come-first served.
3. Must comply with ADA and all anti-discrimination acts
4. Must be accountable – i.e show results on tests same as public schools.
So far I know of no takers. Every proposal amounts to a subsidy for upper middle class parent to get their kids into Andover.
Yup, I’m sure Andover is all geared up to take all the upper middle class kids who’d flock to using vouchers, just because they’d know it’s a sure bet to get into Andover. You nailed that one, ric. How can anyone even bother to respond seriously to any of your points? But again, your arguments are always just against choice and/or private enterprise, nothing to do with reality. And I agree, you’re as perfectly suited to being an LAUSD bureaucrat as you think you are.
Mass. Institute of Tech. (MIT) big wig recruits came to my parents house with airplaine tickets in hand requesting $5,000.00 from my pops to pay for my little brother’s yearly tuition. They said that they would pick up the rest of the yearly tab. They needed a Mexican badly.
My dad responded….
“You pay me $5,000.00 for taking my kid.”
The airplane tickets were for my parent’s free MIT university tour. But as you can see, my dad thinks East LA College is as good as MIT…….none of you, not even Maggie, can beat him on this argument.
I genuinely sympathize, Poplock. My dad was a lot more like yours than it may seem. A blue-collar first-gen immigrant, and a traditional, fairly simple mom. I never thought of even applying to the Ivy League until a school advisor pointed out that with my GPA (being in the top 1% of the class), and other stuff like teacher comments, I’d be a good shot at financial aid. So against my parents’ lack of encouragement (“The state univ. is good enough for all the other kids, why do you think you need something special?”), I got into several schools on my wish list, and a scholarship which made it actually cheaper than the state school. (I had to work and take out loans, too.) Only when my parents had other parents ask, “Gee, how’d she get in there?” and comment on how expensive the school was, did they start to make it seem like their idea because they wanted to give me the very best. Which only antagonized my sisters, who believe their P R., when they ended up at state schools. (And did VERY well career-wise.) I felt obliged to attend law school because it’s what my parents wanted to keep up their boasts — but only later, realized law was never what I’d wanted.
So, this is a typical immigrant story. People who have never experienced what a top education offers, see things only from a financial perspective, in terms of, any college can get you a decent job, so what’s with the fancy names?
Seeing how desperate middle and upper-middle class parents are to get their kids into the kinds of schools I did and your MIT, how much money they spend for private schools and tutors, extra- curricular activities and honors to pad the resume, it seems cruel that some of us got stuck with parents who fought our opportunities, which we earned despite them, tooth and nail. (But ironically, some of these kids rebel against the pressure and under-achieve.)
But we have to understand they were just too ignorant to know. (And probably had secret worries that their kids would end up being smarter than them, who knows.) We need to forgive, and just focus on letting other kids be the most they can be.
You should write your story, I’m sure it’s something a lot of people can identify with.
Yikes, Poplock. I just got home and read your condensed version of your personal academic story. Thanks for giving us a small look in. I think Listener and Maggie right. You might truly consider writing about these things at some point, if you haven’t already. There are so many fascinating levels going on at once….
You certainly have a lot of strength (as well as intelligence).
Poplock, I think if you had been in a small, largely middle- class public school system like I was back East, the teachers and counsellers could have offset the parental attitudes, as they did for me. Shows that even when parental support is not all it should be — the case with many immigrant parents — kids can still be encouraged to succeed and realize a potential they didn’t know they had. Plus, they could advocate with the administration over dumb errors like losing transcripts, grades and tests.
That was one of the things the kids in previous thread mentioned, but it becomes harder when there are so many such kids in the system. They do need to focus on getting these teacher/ deans of students more involved as counsellers.
A P. S. to my experience I’d put out of my head: it wasn’t until high school, when the guidance counsellers were trying to rectify my grades and IQ scores with IQ scores from my first years in elementary school, that they “realized” that I couldn’t speak English well, having been home with foreign parents, and really just started learning in kindergarten.
It must be very common to just put down a person who doesn’t speak English, and comes from some inscrutable little country with a language no one understands, as just dumb. I was shocked to find no one had ever noted lack of English proficiency to “explain” the test scores!
[…] Santee High School ….and the War of the Smart Kids […]
Maggie I was being facetious. The fact is the hucksters who try to sell the voucher plan are using Andover (and Groton or Hotchkiss) as the models and then the bait and switch. Fact is there are not enough private schools to take everyone and what you would get would be something like the “Vocational School” scam of the seventies where fly-by-night operators signed up gullible students, taught them nada, and then took the fed guaranteed dough.
And BTW suburban parents know this. That’s why they always vote these schemes down. Think they’ll support any plan that siphons money away from their kid’s schools?
(and don’t lecture me on Catholic Schools. Albert Shanker looked at them in the past and compared with public schools. Guess what? utcomes were the same)
And one other thing. What would happen when the first “Madrassa” School opened? Or “Aztlan” school? Or “Christian Identity” school? Want to give them money? How about a school that teaches “Ebonics”? See where this goes?
[…] students at a very bad Los Angeles high school are complaining that dozens of classes were changed to entirely different subjects four weeks into the eight-week term. Santee’s Computer Science […]
Celeste,
I hope you look into some of the situations & circumstances I just outlined on the KPCC website regarding this man. There is a huge story behind this nut!
And for the record, folks—he was never a cop, regardless of his claims.
[…] winner is Vince Carbino, Principal of South LA area Santee High School. He gets the award for the following. Santee is on a track system, which means that for a portion of the student body the new school […]
Kudos to Linda Guthrie of UTLA for speaking the truth about Carbino. The man is a bully and hates teachers. UTLA President Duffy bragged about getting him transferred from Belvedere… but all he really did was perpetuate the dance of the lemons.
thank god his gone