HOLLY DRIVE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY SAN DIEGO’S HIDDEN GEM!

By Karen Pearlman

A school with roots in the basement of Faith Chapel of God in Christ southeast San Diego continues to reach some lofty heights in the public education world.

Holly Drive Leadership Academy, an independent charter school started in 1999 for kindergarten through eighth-grade students, is getting ready for construction to begin so where it can open up its own buildings on Elm Street, where it has been sharing campus space with Webster Elementary School since 2010.

The school serves about 150 students in the community, most of whom are considered under-represented and vulnerable – 86 percent are from low-income families that are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. The student population includes 60 percent African-Americans, 28 percent Latinos.

The seven teachers at the school reflect the students’ ethnic backgrounds; most have taught at the school for more than 10 years.

Holly Drive holds at its core producing top students with high morale, positive peer relationships, community partnerships and lifelong inspiration, Holly Drive Principal Alysia Smith says.

Granted a charter by the San Diego County District Board of Education in 2019. Because of COVID-19 challenges faced by schools throughout the county, the school’s charter is approved through 2026.

The school was initially the dream of local church leader Bishop Roy Dixon. Bishop Dixon the former senior pastor at Faith Chapel Church of God in Christ, desperately sought to provide kids in the neighborhood with access to better education and better futures.

It wasn’t too much of a stretch -- education and success have gone hand in hand with Dixon’s strong religious life.

Originally from Georgia, where he was valedictorian of his high school class, Dixon studied liberal arts at the University of Connecticut before moving out west to study business administration at UCLA. Dixon started his own burger chain before turning to a career owning a dozen Taco Bell franchises.

Dixon, now 86, said that when Faith Chapel was built near Lincoln High School in 1985, he heard that the school, which served a predominantly Black and Latino low-income student population, had no true feeder school and that the kids entering Lincoln as freshmen were not well prepared.

“I heard that 70 percent of the students’ reading and math scores were at the (fourth- to fifth-grade) level,” he said. “The students entering ninth grade were reading at that level. That bothered me. How could we help get kids reading at the ninth-grade level, at a minimum?”

So Dixon went back to the church and its parishioners, “and we birthed the school.”

After it moved out from its church digs in the late 1990s, Dixon found a strong leader in Smith, who has been Holly Drive’s principal since 2000. Smith, a San Diego native, graduated from Point Loma High and San Diego State University. Two of her three daughters graduated on top of their classes at Holly Drive and the third is currently a student there.

According to its charter school renewal petition, Holly Drive has made “significant growth” in both English/Language Arts and math on California’s Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which measures students’ progress. And as shared in five previous reviews to the board of education, independent audits show the school’s finances, business operations and instruction program meet and exceed state standards.

Smith said that she has as much drive as ever running the school and leading the 150 students and seven teachers with innovative programs. In addition to state curriculum requirements, Smith believes in more “hands on” teaching opportunities for her students, most of whom are on the verge of poverty.

Field trips to places like Sacramento to see government in action to San Juan Capistrano to visit missions to Disneyland, have been profound for many students over the years, part of Holly Drive’s vision of “a classroom without walls,” Smith said.

The school has partnerships with UCSD; the Museum of Photographic Arts; The Language Door for Spanish; chess masters, dance teachers and sign language instructors; the Horton Grand Hotel; the Elementary Institute of Science; the Carlsbad flower fields; and various local sororities and fraternities.

Alexcias Meeks, who attended Holly Drive from 2009-17, a 2021 graduate of San Diego Metropolitan Regional, Career and Technical High School -- where she was valedictorian at both schools -- is currently studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Meeks said she moved around a lot with her family when she was younger and that when she landed at Holly Drive, the small classroom size and close-knit school community became like a family to her. She said she is still in touch with many of her former classmates and teachers, as well as Smith.

Meeks said it was a Holly Drive field trip to Raytheon, a technological company in San Diego, that spurred her into the engineering field of study.

“I always loved math, but I didn’t know there was a huge career available in STEM or math,” Meeks said. “When we went to Raytheon, I got to talk to some of the engineers there and learned a lot about the engineering world. I went home and researched mechanical engineering and I followed through with that. If it wasn’t for that field trip, I don’t know that I would have known about it.”

The school has fought challenges over the years, including back in 2008 when it was asked by the city of San Diego to get a conditional use permit and with that fix sidewalks and streets. The school later became the poster child for schools with less than 400 students not needing a CUP to operate.

Dixon says that Smith is the reason the school continues to grow and thrive.

“HDLA is Alysia,” he said. “Words just can’t express how good it is to see how that school has kept pace and how she has kept that school going. I am so elated to see it succeed. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, including becoming a bishop, what Alysia has done at the school is right there with all of them. With the teachers she has, these kids have left and gone on to success. Being part of that, it’s just been, Wow!”

Smith didn’t even start out with a plan to be an educator. She aspired to become an attorney.

Growing up in the Ocean View area of San Diego, excelling at track and field and gymnastics at Point Loma High, she graduated from SDSU with a degree in political science, with an emphasis on criminology and a minor in Spanish. She was working in the probation department for the county and at UPS, then taking some classes at National University when she met a woman at a food court who asked her if she was studying to be a teacher.

“She said, ‘If you ever consider it, we are looking for African-American teachers to work,’” Smith said. “She was white, and I said to her, ‘I’m not really a teacher’ but she told me to keep her number if I ever decide to substitute teach.”

She said not long after that she started working as a teacher at the Nubua Academy. She met people working in education, including someone who said John T. Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton. John Walton, who lived in San Diego in the 1990s, cofounded the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which provides learning opportunities for economically challenged families.

Walton, who died in a 2005 plane crash at 58 years old, was a backer of charter schools, and his Walton Family Foundation provided starter grants of up to $250,000 for more than 500 charter schools nationwide. One of those grants went to Holly Drive.

After that, Smith said she never looked back with her leadership role at Holly Drive, long having happily given up her earlier plans for a career as a lawyer.

“We have had lots of mountain top experiences, but the truth of the matter is we have had some valley’s too,” Smith said. “But one thing we are is consistent. Every day we show up. The teachers are in. The staff is invested in the community and want to be a stable part of these kids’ lives.”

Stability was definitely one thing Holly Drive graduate Priscilla Ortiz appreciated about her time at the school. Ortiz graduated in 2015 from Holly Drive, and from High Tech High in 2019. She is currently studying political science and sociology at San Diego State and volunteers as a Spanish language interpreter at Cal Western Law School.

“I went to Holly Drive from sixth to eighth grade, after we moved to San Diego from Puerto Rico,” Ortiz said. “I noticed right away how small the class size was – like 30 in our whole sixthgrade class. Where I had come from had hundreds of kids. I really appreciated the fact that the teachers at Holly Drive were able to give us one-on-one attention and time.

“I also enjoyed that the school is very diverse, I felt at home right away. The school shaped a big part of me.”