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P16
December 2013
University’s ties to school
extend way back
W
hen
Dr. JimRice
was a freshman at Alhambra
High School in 1963, the student body was
mostly white, the teachers – even the one who
taught Spanish – were white, and people moved
into this primarily single-family neighborhood in
Phoenix and stayed.
“Doctors, lawyers, teachers and builders were
born here,” Rice said. “It was the place to be. You
went to Alhambra with the same people you went
to grade school with. Then you grew up and
stayed in the community.”
Five decades later, most everything has changed at
and around Alhambra.
Surrounded by blocks of apartment complexes
that house refugees from Asia and Africa,
Alhambra has 100 refugee students, the largest
population among schools in the Phoenix Union
High School District. New students arrive on
a regular basis, lacking identification cards,
birthdates, English and skills, said Principal
Claudio Coria
. Family stability is a problem, and
students often leave school without warning.
Ten percent of Alhambra’s students are learning
English for the first time. Half of all students come
from homes in which the primary language is
Spanish, but three dozen other languages, from
Arabic and Burmese to Swahili and Vietnamese, are
spoken in the school’s aging hallways.
Alhambra’s demographics are an opportunity and
a challenge, said Rice, a Grand Canyon University
alumnus and a former superintendent in the
Alhambra Elementary School District.
“The greatest change we have made in our
community is we have been introduced to
other cultures from around the world,” he
said. “Multiculturalism is good for a school,
good for the faculty and its students. Our
students don’t see color. ‘Guess who’s coming
to dinner’ is long gone.”
But what many Alhambra students lack is
proficiency in English, reading and writing – making
math, science, social studies and other subjects
arduous, too. That impacts graduation, prospects
for college and employment.
“My job has gone from making doctors and
researchers to trying to create community
contributors, people who won’t be on food stamps,
who will be adding to the economic base and not
taking from it,” said
Jenny Kaiser
, a GCU alumna
and Alhambra math teacher for 25 years.
Coria’s job is to improve that trajectory. A
naturalized citizen from Mexico, he became
principal in 2011. At that time, Alhambra was a
“D” school by Arizona Department of Education
standards, and its sophomores had performed
worse on the AIMS test, which measures student
achievement, than did the average Arizona
10
th
-grader.
“It felt D-ish because kids were falling through the
cracks, and there was nothing in place to help
them,” Kaiser said. “There were so many discipline
problems and absences, and there were low-
performing kids who weren’t in math or reading
classes at all.”
The gap in test scores still exists today, according
to 2013 data, but it is closing, and Alhambra now is
Claudio Coria, Alhambra’s principal since 2011
and a naturalized citizen from Mexico, has set
the bar high for the school, saying, “We can’t be
mediocre.” Photo by Darryl Webb