From the Barrio to the Beach

By Rey Hernandez

From the Barrio to the Beach is a novel about two public schools that are separated by a short fifteen mile stretch of Interstate 5. In his novel Rey Hernandez shares an incredible and revealing look at the challenges educators face as they strive to close the disparity in academic performance between two distinct groups of students. He provides a unique glimpse into his professional and personal life and gives the reader a detailed account of the challenges his family faced while providing caretaker duties for his parents who later in life suffered from terminal illnesses. If you have strong opinions about education, immigration, health care or religion and spirituality this book has something that will be of interest to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644242292

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From the Barrio to the Beach

Rey Hernandez

Copyright © 2018 Rey Hernandez

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2018

ISBN 978-1-64424-228-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64462-240-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64424-229-2 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

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28

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31

32

33

Dedicated to the Memory of

Earl Faison

Rest in Peace

Prologue

About the Book Cover and Center Spread

The art on the front and back cover is the work of Southern California artist, Marco Almera. I selected these two artistic creations in order to describe the two communities that had a major influence on my personal life as well as my life as an educator. Pictured on the front cover is a work entitled Golden Barrel. I spent close to forty years teaching and coaching in La Jolla, California where the beach plays a prominent role in the students’ life. The back cover depicts a work entitled Industrial Christ. I grew up in Barrio Logan a neighborhood that also borders the Pacific Ocean, but unlike La Jolla, there is no access to the beach. It is a community that contains many industrial areas that surround the residences located there. Barrio Logan is the epicenter of San Diego’s Mexican-American culture and the Catholic Church plays an important role in the life of many of its residents. Almera’s art career emerged from the Southern California surf, skate and rock ‘n’ roll subculture of the late 80’s. He has spent his career working independently; creating t-shirt designs, album covers, rock music posters, advertising, commercial graphics and commissioned paintings.

The center spread depicts a mural that was painted by master muralist Victor Ochoa and members he recruited from the Barrio Renovation Team. It is entitled Varrio Logan and is one of many murals painted on the pillars under the east end of the Coronado Bay Bridge in Chicano Park. The National Park Service named the park a National Historical Landmark in 2017. Ochoa has painted over 100 murals, many of them located in San Diego. He is considered one of the pioneers of San Diego’s Chicano art movement. The land where the mural is located was originally designated for the construction of a California Highway Patrol Station in 1970, but the residents desired to have a local park developed on the site instead. Ochoa played a major role in the community’s efforts to have the land developed for park purposes. Today the murals serve as a testament to the perseverance and determination of the Barrio Logan community. Instead of having lifeless concreate pillars standing over a patrol station, Ochoa and the other muralists who labored on this project were able to bring the pillars to life. The dedication and passion that Ochoa and his fellow muralists have exhibited over the years provides both visitors and community residents with an opportunity to learn about the history and rich cultural heritage of Barrio Logan.

1

Looking for Work

The telephone rang early in the morning as I prepared to go to Helix High School to substitute for a Spanish teacher. A teaching assignment at Helix was perfect for me since I was already working there as a volunteer walk-on football coach, and I had hopes of someday finding a full-time teaching position there. Waiting for an early morning call from a school district was the norm for many young teachers who had just completed their teacher credentialing requirements and were seeking employment wherever they could find it. Helix was a great school, and it would have been the perfect place for me to start my teaching career, but I would soon find out that God had other plans for me.

The call that morning came from the San Diego Unified School District. This was 1979, and by that time, San Diego had grown quite a bit. It was closing in on 900,000 city residents and was the eighth largest city in the United States. The metropolitan area residents numbered close to 1.8 million. I had applied for a teaching job in numerous school districts in the area, and Helix High happened to be in the Grossmont District, a school district that had an excellent reputation for academics and teacher salaries. It didn’t hurt any that the football program had started to make its mark as one of the best up-and-coming programs in the county, and coaching there was a dream come true for me.

Prior to the inception of automated assignment systems, it wasn’t uncommon for substitute teachers and assignment clerks to get to know each other. This was a benefit when it came to finding daily work. I don’t remember what the clerk’s name was, but I wish I did because he is one person I would like to thank for helping me secure the first and only teaching contract I would ever sign in my life. He told me that he had a Spanish and English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching position for me at Muirlands Junior High School. I thanked him and told him I had already accepted a job at Helix. Turning down work wasn’t really detrimental to your employment prospects as the clerks knew that most young teachers would accept offers any place they could find them. I started to hang up the phone when I heard him say something that was barely audible. I put the receiver back to my ear, and he told me that I might want to reconsider because this vacancy was for a position that had no permanent teacher. I accepted the offer and quickly called our principal at Helix High.

Dr. Bob King is one of the finest administrators I ever had the opportunity to work for. Fortunately for me, he was one of those principals who came to work early in the morning and was there to greet his employees as they arrived at school. When I spoke with Dr. King, I was embarrassed to ask him if it would be okay for me to work at another school that day. I explained the situation, and he told me to go immediately and not worry about the assignment at Helix. He reminded me that securing a teaching contract at such a young age could prove to be an uncertain and prolonged endeavor and that anytime this opportunity presented itself, it was important to act on it. As the years passed and I saw how many of my friends were struggling to find permanent employment, I realized just how difficult this truly was.

So off I went to Muirlands Junior High School in La Jolla, California. La Jolla is a very affluent community in San Diego, located along the Pacific Ocean, with some of the highest-priced homes in the country. Many of San Diego’s most influential and successful citizens reside there. It is famous for its beaches, surfing, and its educational institutions. It is home to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the Salk Institute, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Scripps Research Institute. Muirlands Junior High School and La Jolla High School were then and are to this day two of the highest-achieving secondary schools in the San Diego Unified School District. The junior high school converted to a middle school in the 1990s.

In 1979, Muirlands had a very culturally diverse student body that consisted of a large number of white students who resided in the La Jolla community or nearby, and a large number of black and Hispanic students who were bussed from Southeast San Diego. Many of these students came from the Barrio Logan area, where I grew up. This diverse student body was an outgrowth of a 1967 class-action lawsuit filed against the San Diego Unified School District, claiming that its schools were segregated. Ten years later in 1977 a superior court judge ruled in Carlin v. Board of Education that twenty-three campuses in the district were racially isolated, but unlike other big cities, the school district was permitted to integrate its schools through voluntary busing and magnet schools. This program was called the Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program, or the VEEP program.

2

1954

Destiny is defined as the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person in their future. God gave all humans a free will, and I believe that our choices in life are what will forge our path to our ultimate destinations. The decisions made by others will play a major role in how an individual’s path to the future unfolds, but it is one’s year of birth that will have the greatest impact on a person’s destiny. I was born in 1954 and graduated from high school in 1973. At this time in our nation’s history, the Vietnam War was winding down, but the military draft was still in place. The last call to draft was on December 7, 1972, and the authority to induct expired in June of the following year. The random selection lottery drawing for men my age was held on March 8, 1973. Some potential draftees were still being called for physicals, and we were told that if our lottery number was 30 or less, there was a good chance of being inducted. Those drawing 95 or less would form a pool of men who would be classified by local selective service boards but not undergo physical examinations. I registered for the draft and was prepared to serve if called. My destiny was now in the hands of a government official who would pull 366 plastic capsules out of a large glass container, each one having the birthdates of all men born in 1954. I remember going to school that day in March, but I don’t recall being nervous or apprehensive. When I went home that evening, I bought a newspaper and read that November 14 was paired with the number 143. I was classified H-1 and remained in a holding category. My destiny was now on a path that would take me to La Jolla this autumn morning.

The year 1954 was also the year the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The ruling required public school systems nationwide to integrate their campuses, but accomplishing this mandate became a Sisyphean challenge that has frustrated public school educators for decades. A quarter-century after the decision was handed down, I was now stepping onto a campus that had been declared racially isolated and was in the process of bringing together a group of teenagers whose cultural identities were forged by ancestors who came from many different continents. My teacher credentialing courses addressed this aspect of my job responsibilities, and I knew this task would require that I not look at their physical differences but rather at their cultural similarities to get them to see that they had many common interests.

Ironically the community of La Jolla at one time had a large number of black residents. The La Jolla Light Newspaper in February of 2017 published a four-part series on the lives and times of the African Americans that at one point in the 1950s comprised 10 percent of the population living in the neighborhood that surrounded the high school. This area is known as The Village, and it was here that the black residents owned property. Some of them managed businesses, and many of them were employed as domestic workers. La Jolla High School and La Jolla Elementary were not segregated, and any child who lived in La Jolla was allowed to attend both schools. Over time, it became more expensive for these families to buy homes, and the demographics of the community started to change. This lack of affordable housing played a major role in the exodus of black residents and gave rise to the racial isolation that existed when the San Diego Unified School District was directed to integrate the schools in 1977.

The desegregation of racially isolated schools across the nation has been slow. Although it took ten years of litigation to set the process in motion in San Diego, La Jolla was not plagued with the massive resistance and violence that has plagued many communities across the country since the time the Supreme Court handed down its decision. White flight did not materialize, but the integration of the students was still a challenging task. When I accepted the teaching assignment at Muirlands, the school district’s voluntary bussing program was in its infancy. The desegregation of racially isolated schools was being accomplished, but the cultural differences that now existed in these learning communities needed to be addressed before any meaningful integration could take place. In order to bring a group of ethnically diverse students together, a teacher first has to develop and maintain psychological classroom safety for all of them. In order to accomplish this, a teacher has to first identify their individual profiles and influences. Discovering what your students think of each other is what helps create an inclusive learning environment where all stakeholders will make a collaborative effort to advance their common interests while at the same time building personal relationships.

Many thoughts went through my mind as I drove to Muirlands that morning, but I would have to wait until I was in the classroom to find out what specific challenges awaited me. I didn’t have an assigned parking space, so when I arrived, I looked for street parking as close to the school as possible. I was able to find a spot on Nautilus Street right across the school in front of a home that I later found out was inhabited by Mrs. Galloway. She was an older woman who was perhaps in her mideighties or possibly older. She was very sharp and kept a close eye on all that was going on in front of the school. It wasn’t long before she saw me parking there on a daily basis, so she came out one morning to talk to me. My conversations with her helped give me some insight into the cultural shock that is a natural consequence of integrating a school that had for years been populated by mostly white students.

Mrs. Galloway always spoke to me in a respectful manner, and she seemed to be happy to find out I was a new teacher. She would on occasion ask me about what was happening on campus, but as far as I could tell, she was not filled with any hate for the minority children who were now a significant part of the student body. She did, however, express to me her concern about the influx of darkies who were now attending the school. The proper way to respond to such a comment is not something that is taught to you in a teaching credentialing program. As I look back on my teaching career, a great many of the situations a teacher will