Compton Schools Pass Critical Test

“Girls! Inspection!” Mark Deese shouted Tuesday afternoon, knocking on the women’s restroom door at Enterprise Middle School in Compton. “We’re here to check on things.”

With that, the restroom emptied, and an 18-member inspection team of state officials and American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, many of them men in suits, filed in. They liked what they saw.

Compton’s struggling school district survived a high-profile test Tuesday when four of its schools received passing grades during such detailed, unannounced inspections of their textbooks, hallways and, especially, their restrooms.

In doing so, the heavily scrutinized district, which was taken over by the state in 1993, avoided potential legal and labor trouble.

After four schools flunked similar inspections in September, ACLU lawyers, who monitor a court consent decree that governs the Compton schools, had threatened to ask that a state judge hold the district in contempt of court if there were not substantial improvement by December. And the state had suggested it might fire the district’s more than 60 maintenance workers and replace them with private contractors if the schools did not pass Tuesday.

“We are genuinely pleased to see the improvements in the schools,” said Robert M. Myers, a private attorney who represents the ACLU in Compton. He said the ACLU would not follow through on its threat.

“Everybody is inching forward,” said a considerably more circumspect Larry Norton, the court-appointed special master who oversees the consent decree.

For Deese, the state consultant (and door-knocker) who led the inspections, Enterprise was a highlight. The middle school had flunked a similar inspection in October, with state officials citing unspeakable restrooms and unchecked litter. On Tuesday, the school earned an A on the 15-point system developed by the state and the ACLU as part of the consent decree.

Despite that encouragement, the results of Tuesday’s check were decidedly mixed. The mood of the inspectors ranged from angst over dangerous maintenance problems at Washington Elementary and Centennial High School, which got low Cs, to wonder at the pristine, garden-like campus of Vanguard Learning Center, where the well-tended fountains and rosebushes earned the school an A.

“It’s not good enough, but we have had progress,” said the state-appointed district administrator, Randolph E. Ward, who withdrew his threat to privatize maintenance services after Tuesday’s inspection.

Eighteen inspectors, including state finance and education officials, a county education department administrator and the district’s own facilities managers, traveled around the district in a yellow school bus. The district’s 38 schools knew in advance that an inspection had been scheduled for the day, but the four campuses to be visited were not announced.

In spite of the improvements, the inspection confronted several sobering realities of school life in Compton.

Water pressure is unreliable. Lightbulbs and overhead fixtures are missing in many hallways. A biology class at Centennial High does not have enough books.

Graffiti is a constant presence. Taggers had covered much of the Centennial campus Monday night. Ward, the state administrator, stained his hand on fresh black paint that had been put over a graffiti-covered bench only minutes before the inspection.

Of the four schools, inspectors seemed most disappointed by Washington Elementary, which nearly received a D. Broken glass and animal feces were found in a corner of the schoolyard. Termite damage discovered in March 1998 has not been fixed. A cracked window from April 1999 has not been repaired. Inspectors discovered restrooms that, according to school staff, have been closed and unrepaired since an earthquake in the early 1970s.

But the day ended sweetly amid the roses at Vanguard.

“I don’t see many schools in the rest of the state in that good shape,” said Jim Bush, an assistant director with the California Department of Education. “There has been real progress here.”