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Rebound! Program offers needed help; still have to fix underlying BHS ills 

PCAD is on the Scene! 

In the Fall 2000 the Parents of Children of African Descent came together, not as PCAD, but as a group of concerned parents and grandparents to discuss our children’s progress reports that we had recently received in the mail. It appeared to us that most of our children’s friends had also received progress reports showing that they too were failing. We were not sure what we were going to do. We just felt strongly that something needed to be done. 

Clearly in our hearts and minds we did not believe that our children were failing because they should have been retained in the eighth grade or that they were skipping 15 or more of their classes. As parents we had basically known one another because our kids attended school together in a Berkeley middle school. Many of them played sports together, attended summer enrichment programs together, and participated in discussions about college requirements and entrance exams. 

We wanted to see if our personal concerns were valid, so we took these concerns to the principal of Berkeley High School. We were also concerned that our children would not be prepared to take the newly required state exit exam. We wrote a letter requesting statistics with exact numbers of failing ninth grade students. Upon meeting with the principal and getting data directly from his staff, our sense of urgency was confirmed when we discovered that there was a large number of African American and Latino students who were probably going to fail at least one of their core courses. 

When we asked the principal what was being done to save these struggling students, we were invited to “put something together” and bring it back to him. We also expected him and his staff to address what we as parents felt was a crisis that needed immediate intervention. During the winter break we met to discuss how we envisioned a school where all students were academic achievers. It was at that time that we began to draft the intervention plan that was presented by PCAD to the principal Jan. 4. 

Need was for more  

than an after-school program 

We compared our suggested plan with the high school’s ninth grade after-school intervention program, which was to begin Jan. 8. As parents we wanted more than this program for students, who obviously were having a difficult time being engaged in their classes during regular school hours. We wanted these students to continue onto the 10th grade in the fall of 2001; we wanted them to feel confident that they had the skills to remain on track for graduation; and we wanted them to pass their exit exam. 

Throughout the month of January we shared our draft intervention plan with the Berkeley community. We purposefully designed a website to make our plan accessible, so that members of the community could read it and respond to it with comments and/or suggestions. Recognizing that not all households have a computer and access to the Internet, we reached out to parents and held community meetings. On Jan. 15, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we hosted a Stone Soup Luncheon and presented our draft plan to over seventy community members. 

Many of us believe that a private education may be a supportive environment for academic engagement, but many more of us believe in public education. A number of parents in PCAD are alumni of Berkeley High. We choose instead to keep our children in Berkeley High and help improve education for more than just our own. 

The academic disparity that exists at Berkeley High is well known. We as PCAD want to acknowledge and honor all the work that has gone into addressing this disparity. The amount of time and research contributed by the Diversity Project has empowered us as parents to develop this intervention plan and move it forward.  

Furthermore, we are well aware of some of the work that Ms. Issel has contributed. She has publicly announced her desire to develop strategies to address the achievement gap in Berkeley. However, we have to accept the fact that she is a school board member who has voted against the PCAD proposal. She even refused to support paying the teachers in the Rebound! Program for their work this past month. Her actions, not her words, are on the record. 

Our efforts, we feel, are generated from the place of being parents. We felt from the beginning that we need input from the educators, school administrators and community members. It has been and will continue to be our priority to work collaboratively with those individuals and entities that feel as strongly as we do about the achievement gap, in order that we may build a broad band of support for all of our children. 

PCAD’s Intervention Plan  

& The Rebound! Program 

PCAD’s total intervention program “Rebound!” has been getting a lot of attention. Although we are very proud of this program, we do wish to remind everyone that it is just one component of our overall intervention plan. 

We view the high failure rate among students of color as a symptom of a much larger underlying problem. We believe that the intervention programs already in existence at BHS are effective if accessed and applied to “this symptom” and then, only for a short term. One could even view this approach to solving failure as suppressive, meaning that improvement only occurs while the programs are being utilized. Unless the underlying problems are addressed, when students discontinue utilizing these programs, the symptoms of failure reappear.  

The Rebound! Program was developed to offer relief to a crisis. We wanted these struggling ninth grade students to have a stable, hope-filled experience, while preparing them to rejoin their classmates in the 10th grade. We know that our Rebound! students will continue to need the support of some of the other Berkeley High School intervention programs. But, Rebound! was to be a demonstration to the students, to the parents, to the Berkeley High School administration, the school district, and the community of Berkeley that by giving some stability and hope to a chaotic situation, people would begin to believe that the impossible is possible.  

PCAD believes that by taking a leadership role and encouraging parents to become involved with their children’s education, we are better able to address the underlying causes that are interfering with our children’s academic performance.  

We want to begin helping our students to achieve by doing things differently. We want long term, permanent “cures.” We believe that by addressing some of the underlying causes of students not performing well in school, we can help them get to a point where they can eventually become independent of any intervention program. 

We understand that there are wonderfully staffed intervention programs at Berkeley High. Because some of these programs are being underutilized, there is a wealth of resources available to our students. It only makes sense to connect these programs to those students who are in need of additional support. As Mary Friedman of the Berkeley Education Foundation says, “…it is time to refine and maximize all resources at the high school so that they work for kids.”