Monday, March 13, 1995
Today, the hottest piece of Viking News is yesterday's (Sunday’s) Ventura County section of the L.A. Times. It seems we were featured in an article that I overlooked in my cursory read yesterday morning. The slant of the article was a comparison between our block schedule and the schedule at a Newbury Park high school, which is a variant of ours.
The picture wasn't very flattering, the gist being that the schedule seems to be working there but here it's a failure. The impression that I received from people who have read the article (or at least said they read it) is that the article raised questions as to whether or not our schedule is suited for our clientele. Well, the clienteles are most definitely different. They have a predominately white, upper-middle-class, college-bound clientele; ours is mostly minority, lower socio-economically, with seemingly fewer collegiate opportunities (though this last aspect, I think, is merely a self-fulfilling and -defeating prophecy). Another point of the article was that our upcoming accreditation is forcing us to reevaluate and change our flawed and failed schedule before we lose our accreditation.
Neither of these is hard fact, nor are some of the statistics cited in the story (the higher fail rate is completely inaccurate, and the higher dropout rate under the block schedule than before, while partially true [if comparing this year to the year before the shift in schedule...by two-tenths of a percentage] is completely contradicted when comparing it to last year [by nearly a full percentage point]). It certainly has placed many here on campus in a tizzy, however; most are feeling on the defensive. There's a copy of the article highlighted and posted in the teacher's lounge (I just gave it a cursory read...it seems somewhat biased against us, but not the hatchet job that the cynical conspiratologists on campus would have one believe). Also posted is our principal's written response for the op/ed page. Not bad in stating our case and the problems with the story (including the fact that the reporter talked to the principal for only ten minutes, talked to three students at lunch, talked to no faculty or staff, then wrote the article), but it has the air of frantic denial written all over it.
The running gag on campus is that it's a good thing this came out yesterday instead of a week from now, with WASC on campus. Of course, I'm doing a little bit of mental addition. If the principal gets the letter in the mail today, then the Times will receive it tomorrow or Wednesday, and the printing of the response will be Friday, Saturday, or Sunday...the day the visitation committee arrives in our fair town. The fallout of letters could be reaching a crescendo next weekend or early next week, just in time for that morning paper to be slipped into the hands of a visiting WASCer.
In comedy, timing is everything.
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