Cover Story
Longtime Eastside volunteer John Jacobs of Palo Alto, a retired public-school math teacher, helps eighth-graders Vaughn Raines, center, and Alex Hernandez, right, with their algebra homework during an hour-and-a-half-long tutorial. V Ì Õi`ÊvÀ Ê«ÀiÛ ÕÃÊ«>}i®
— a San Francisco couple with a young daughter who took him on as a seventh-grader — wanted to get to know him personally. They met for lunches and visits and, the following year, invited Thornton to an event at their home to speak about his Eastside experiences with prospective donors to the school. “It went well actually,” he said. “I had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and did more of it. It’s a great experience because you learn how to interact with people of different backgrounds, understand their experiences and understand the whole experience of networking.” The San Francisco family kept on sponsoring him every year through high school, Thornton said, and the relationship continues today.
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s word about Eastside has spread, admission inevitably has grown more selec-
tive. First and foremost, says Bischof, the school is looking for first-generation college-bound students from low-income families. “Within that subset, we’re looking for students who want to be here.” Students must commit to an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. school day — plus homework — and an academic calendar that runs year-round, including summer school or other summer activities deemed worthy. Bischof personally interviews every applicant. “They’re really looking for that spark in kids,” said John Jacobs, a retired public school teacher now in his seventh year of volunteering at Eastside. “Not necessarily the smartest ones, but kids they feel they can keep on a college track. They have a lot of kids — maybe even a majority of sixth-graders — who are not working at grade level when they come in.” Academics at Eastside combine rigor with an elaborate support structure. “There are no shortcuts,” Span-
ish teacher Shaneka Julian said. But “confidence-building — defining students as intellectuals and scholars — is a huge part of the culture,” said Marianne Chowning-Dray, who taught calculus at Gunn High School for nine years before joining the Eastside faculty in 2005. “It’s assumed that everyone will participate, everyone can do this, that all students can achieve at a high level. We don’t take no for an answer,” Chowning-Dray said. That culture felt strange to Thornton when he first arrived as a student. “Normally students
Spanish teacher Shaneka Julian, who was born and raised in East Palo Alto and graduated from Stanford, talks with students in a Nov. 27 Spanish class. Julian teaches first- through third-year Spanish to non-native speakers, who go on to another teacher for fourth-year Spanish.
fear seeking help or talking to the teacher because they don’t want to seem stupid or dumb for asking questions or not knowing something, but at Eastside we expected ourselves to ask these questions, we expected to meet the teacher outside of the class. “They give you their email address; they give you their number. They do like sleeping, so they prefer that you contact them earlier, but if you contact them even at 10 p.m. and they’re still awake they’ll definitely help you out.” Eastside relies on volunteers to staff an intensive middle-school
reading program, in which students begin their day with an hour and a half of intensive reading and writing. Volunteers like John Jacobs make it possible to break the students into small groups of four. “Each morning we read a chapter out loud,” Jacobs explained. “We monitor the reading, we do vocabulary and comprehensive exercises and the kids do a writing response every day.” Vice-Principal Kim oversees “Friday Night Homework,” a routine that helps ensure no assignment is left undone. Students
with incomplete work in any give week are required to stay on campus Friday evening until it is finished. Since Eastside’s early days, Kim has tracked which students are missing which assignments. Now it can be done by computer. “Friday afternoons we run a report of all missing assignments of all students,” she explained. “I do a lot of rounding up and calling parents to tell them not to pick up their student at 5 because they have to stay and complete assignments.” She considers the Friday night
Connecting to East Palo Alto through a school Avoiding her home community previously, mom is now a believer by Chris Kenrick
T
hough they’d lived in East Palo Alto nearly two decades, Mimi and Darryl Pearson were skeptical about sending their children to any school in the city. The couple moved into a house with Darryl’s grandmother in East Palo Alto in the early 1990s. But mindful of the city’s high murder rate at that time, they worked, shopped and built their lives elsewhere. When daughters Domonique and Diamond reached school age, they found a private Christian school in Redwood City and, when that closed, enrolled the girls at Redeemer Lutheran School in Redwood City. Only when the older daughter, Domonique, approached eighthgrade graduation did the Pearsons look at Eastside College Preparatory School — and liked what they saw, starting with Alison Mellberg, the friendly receptionist in the front office. Mimi Pearson was “thoroughly impressed” when she attended an Eastside event at which graduates who’d gone on to Ivy League colleges came back to speak. “Blacks graduating from Har-
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vard? That really boosted me up. And I thought, ‘My daughters can do this too. They don’t have to become a statistic,’” she said. “If a child has the ability to work hard, they can make it happen.” Domonique graduated from Eastside in June after spending all four of her high school years there. With scholarship offers at several schools including Gonzaga University, Syracuse University and Texas Christian, she settled on St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, because it seemed small and friendly and the Pearsons have relatives in the area. “My husband and I didn’t have the experience of college, so we’re living it through our daughters,” said Pearson, who works as an assistant in a doctor’s office. Her husband works in the Kaiser Hospital environmental-services department. “The colleges (Domonique) applied to and got into are just beyond me — like, we had to choose? Who gets to choose which college to go to because you got into so many?” The Eastside teachers’ belief in the students makes it possible
Eastside parent Mimi Pearson sits with her daughter, sophomore Diamond Pearson, in Diamond’s dormitory room. Pearson’s older daughter Domonique graduated from Eastside in June and is a freshman at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Tex.
for them to believe in themselves, she said. “They make learning fun — even with all the hard work, all the late hours, all the papers you have to write. And my daughter connected with a different group of people — she had black friends that were smart, which we hadn’t seen before.” Pearson’s second daughter, Diamond, is a sophomore at Eastside, and Pearson now heads the school’s parents association. Recent parent fundrais-
ing events have included a car wash and barbecue in October and, in November, sale of more than 5,000 homemade tamales. “Thanks to Eastside I’ve gotten involved in East Palo Alto and I love it,” Pearson said. “I brag on it now. Before, I used to drop the ‘East’ when I said I was from East Palo Alto. Sad to say, I probably missed out.” N Staff Writer Chris Kenrick can be emailed at ckenrick@ paweekly.com.