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Principal Frank Lynch arrived at Berkeley High School in August, to facilities burned down from arson and a provisional school accreditation.  

Before the new principal has been allowed to get his bearing with the current problems, he’ll be faced with more change.  

This upcoming semester he’ll be working under an interim superintendent, with a parental mandate to fix the gap in achievement between white students and students of color at Berkeley High.  

In the meantime, construction on school buildings will bring noise, dust, and loss of power and water. 

Lynch said he hadn’t realized the extent of the troubles that beset Berkeley High when he took the position. “In the first couple of days I was like, Oh my gosh," he said.  

But after four months in school Lynch has had more time to assess Berkeley High from the inside. 

“It’s an interesting place,” he said.  

While seeming to face a perpetual string of crisis situations, the new principal has continued implementing plans to improve the atmosphere at Berkeley High. 

An immediate issue facing Lynch is parents’ demand to do a wide scale intervention for 250 Berkeley High ninth-graders, many of them African-American and Latino, at risk of failing a class. The parent group – Parents of Children of African Descent – are bringing the gross disparity in grades between white students and students of color at Berkeley High to the attention of the community. 

“The diversity of the school is its strength and weakness,” said Lynch. 

He agreed that the student achievement gap as the single most important issue facing the school. "Everything else is tinkering around the edges,” he said. “Whatever we do it has to be focused on student achievement.” 

To Lynch, all components of creating a functional school are inextricably linked to that end result – achievement.  

Security is a case in point. Lynch said that security, and the perception of a safe school, is necessary for students to benefit from education.  

“If kids don’t feel safe here,” he said. “They can’t perform the way they need to be performing.” Related to questions of security is the fact that students who feel afraid “don’t come,” said Lynch, creating empty seats and a day’s educational loss. 

But rather than getting trouble-making kids off-campus, Lynch believes the school should be better about keeping them on campus and supervised.  

“I would say the biggest problem is attendance,” he said, adding that attendance and security function in tandem. Students perpetrating the most egregious discipline offenses, fighting or setting fires, are often students that aren’t in the classroom, but should be. 

Lynch said that although students may arrive on the school grounds, they don’t always make that crucial step though the door of the classroom.  

“They’re truant in the sense that they’re not in class,” he said. “They’re hanging around.” 

This next semester Lynch hopes to enforce attendance policies more aggressively by changing the system of parent notification. Currently a voice dialing system automatically calls parents when their students are absent, and a letter is sent home.  

But, said Lynch, “It doesn’t take kids long to figure out (the system).” Messages left on answering machines get erased by students before parents can hear them. Letters may just disappear. Lynch said for any parental contact to happen, “it has to be a human.” 

“I want an old fashioned truant officer who will go around, pick kids up and go to their home,” he said. “You need someone who can make the home contact.” In the mean time he hopes a personal phone call, at home or at work, will serve the purpose. 

While returning to the basics to solve attendance problems, Lynch is bringing new concepts to Berkeley High to try and change the structure of the school. One proposal is block scheduling for two of the five days per school week. 

Instead of going to eight classes, students would attend four classes one day, for double periods, and then would take the remaining classes the following day. Lynch said that the more substantial instruction time would allow teachers to create longer projects without needing to assemble and disassemble them within one class period. An additional benefit, he said, is the increased face time between students and teachers which allows them to get to know each other better. The block scheduling proposal will be voted on by the teachers, and students are invited to provide input. 

Like the new surveillance cameras to be placed on campus, and the construction set to begin this semester, many changes coming to Berkeley High have long been in the works.  

One of the projects Lynch endorses involves creating small schools within the larger high school. Berkeley High has already received a grant to begin planning various possibilities for smaller schools. The only existing small school, Communications Arts and Sciences, is so popular that students must compete to grab one of the 60 slots available per year. 

But no matter how popular any one concept is, one of Lynch’s tenets is to reaffirm the diversity that exists in the Berkeley High community, by providing may different learning environments. “I want to provide options,” he said. “I don’t honestly believe in a community as diverse as this that everybody wants to go in the same direction.”