Election Section

When Rita Kimball became the principal of Washington Elementary School seven years ago, she says, it was an institution in crisis. Morale was low, test scores were down and teachers argued bitterly in staff meetings. 

“It was the most dysfunctional schoo l I’ve ever worked in,” says Kimball, an educator for 30 years in Albuquerque, N.M., and the Bay Area. In her first year, she let six teachers go. 

Since then, she has brought in a core of young and committed instructors. Of 15 teachers currently on staff, only two remain from before her tenure; no new teachers were hired this year.  

At the height of the state’s budget crisis two years ago, however, more than half of Washington’s teachers were slated to lose their jobs because they lacked seniority. 

After district-wide retirements and leaves were tabulated, all but one of the positions were restored.  

Nonetheless, Kimball says, after hiring a new staff, “it was rather a shock to think that we’d lose them all.”  

The crisis brought into sharp focus the investment in the school of those close to it. 

Marlene Cornelius, co-secretary of the school’s PTA, recalls marching to the school district’s headquarters after the layoffs were announced with other parents, students and school staff to demand that Super intendent Michele Lawrence restore the positions. 

Cornelius, a former teacher, says that the sense of community at the school, a boxy two-story structure at 2300 Martin Luther King Jr. Way with sun-drenched classrooms, is unique. Faustus, her third-grade son, asks to be taken to the playground after school and during the summer to be with his classmates. 

“You can’t buy that,” she says. 

Joel Scholefield, a second grade teacher hired by Kimball, agrees, saying that if the cuts had gone through, “everything Rita had done would have been lost.” 

Teachers now draw up lesson plans together and give each other ideas on what does and doesn’t work in the classroom. 

While federal funding for the communications and technology magnet program ran out this fall, the school remains a magnet, incorporating themes such as storytelling, drama and video production into the curriculum of all 310 students. 

Bruce Simon, who is in charge of curriculum at the school, says that one of the challenges Washington faces is teaching a diverse student body. 

Washington’s students are predominantly African American and Hispanic and come mainly from western and southern Berkeley. More than 56 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches; district-wide, the average is 5 0 percent. 

Washington is also the only school in the district using the CARE program, which educates teachers on ways to make minority students more comfortable and successful in school.  

Although funding remains tight throughout the district, Kimball h as confidence that she will not again be faced with the prospect of mass layoffs at Washington. 

“Superintendent Lawrence will make sure it doesn’t happen,” says Kimball.  

Lawrence confirms that the district’s budget is now stable. 

While “everyone has b ought into Rita’s vision 100 percent,” Cornelius says, the reputation of the school among parents deciding where to send their children is lower than it should be, likely because of its troubled past. 

“If people took a better look at what was going on at the school,” Cornelius says, “they’d be happy with what they saw.” 

This is the ninth in a series profiling the Berkeley elementary schools. The reports are written by students of the UC Berkeley Journalism School. 

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