Every morning before the school day begins at Perkins K-8, there’s somebody at the main gate to greet every family walking in. Most days it’s the dean of students, Moises Villalpando — his students know him as Mr. V.
“Buenos días, mi niña,” Villalpando says. “Good morning, Mom.” “¿Cómo estás?”
Moms pushing strollers with babies accompany their kids to class. Children not 5 feet tall walk to school holding their little siblings’ hands. Dads lean in for a fist bump with Villalpando. Kids run, without saying a word, to give him a hug.
At Perkins, school staff and volunteers are fighting big battles in part with small gestures like these: a hug, smile or kind word for students — and their parents — who have not received enough of them.
Perkins K-8, a school of roughly 400 students in Barrio Logan, is a confluence of the biggest challenges facing schools nationwide, challenges that predate but have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
One out of every three students here is homeless. Two out of every three students are chronically absent. The vast majority are not meeting grade-level standards.
The story of Perkins is far from unique; those students are some of the more than 12 million U.S. children who attend high-poverty schools. In San Diego County alone, there are 16,600 homeless students and 249,000 low-income students attending public schools, adding to the 187,000 homeless students and 3.6 million low-income students in public schools statewide.
There are Perkins families who have suffered just about every trauma one can think of: domestic violence, divorce, sexual abuse, eviction, sudden and chronic illness, family separation, drug addiction, deportation, incarceration, homicide. Virtually every family at Perkins is living in poverty.
Yet Perkins has become a place where students, parents and staff have said they love to be. It is a safety net for many — an emotional refuge for many students, and a trusted source of community for their families.
That means that instead of immediately handing out discipline, staff ask the children if they’re hungry. Teachers balance lessons for students years apart in their reading progress with protecting their safety. Kids learn to identify their feelings, and manage them in healthy ways. And staff help parents access basic resources, from housing and transportation to food and education.
It’s a lot of work whose success may never show up in test scores. But it’s shown in staff who stay at Perkins for years when they could work elsewhere, in parents who keep sending their kids to Perkins even when it means taking the bus or trolley from neighborhoods far away and in former students who return because they miss their old teachers.
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On a gray April morning, standing outside her small motel room, Tamara held her belly. Eight months pregnant, she worried that she and her daughter Nia — a second-grader at Perkins — were losing their place to stay.
For two months they had been staying at a Chula Vista motel through a welfare program. Before, they had stayed for months at the Father Joe’s Villages homeless shelter a few blocks from Perkins.
Tamara has known poverty and abuse all her life — first at the hands of her grandmother, and later at the hands of traffickers who imprisoned, enslaved and sold her. The San Diego Union-Tribune is not identifying her by her full name for her safety.
At 9, her daughter Nia is still in second grade. Nia missed a lot of school during the pandemic — partly because she didn’t have internet access for online schooling, partly because her mom was being trafficked.
Last fall, battling despair and facing violence from her traffickers, Tamara seized her own freedom. She escaped and fled to San Diego with Nia.
“I definitely wanted the best for Nia,” Tamara said.
Several Perkins parents interviewed by the Union-Tribune shared stories that similarly tell of generational cycles of trauma: They were victims of abuse and poverty as kids, and the effects followed them into adulthood.
Often, their children also suffer as a result.
Perkins students have come to school upset because their parents just got into a fight, or because one just left. For some students, the job of keeping the family together has fallen to them — taking care of a sick parent or raising their siblings. Some students have needed more time to complete assignments because one of their parents had just left or died.
Such traumas, experts say, are the product of several larger, societal forces that have long been at work — from racially segregated housing to the building of freeways and industrial developments that have deprived neighborhoods like Perkins’ of health and resources. It’s why these communities frequently have higher rates of asthma, pollution, homelessness and violence and limited access to stable housing, higher education, child care, gainful employment and more.
These issues disproportionately affect people of color, and Perkins is no exception. More than 90 percent of the school’s families are Latino or Black.
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When misbehaving students are sent to Villalpando, he tries not to jump to discipline. Instead, most of the time he first asks them: “Are you hungry?”
He re two students, a first-grade girl and third-grade boy, who years ago were sent to his office. They each had a plate of chicken nuggets. He stepped away briefly, and when he returned, the girl had stolen the boy’s food and eaten it.
When Villalpando asked what happened, she quickly confessed. She stole it because she knew she wouldn’t get any other food for the rest of the day. Villalpando could take away her recess privilege, she offered.
Instead, he brought both children to the school kitchen so they could get all the chicken nuggets they wanted.
In the past, Perkins was hyper-focused on improving test scores, said Fernando Hernández, who has been the school’s principal for two decades.
His own approach began to change about five years ago, when visiting researchers gave him a book about the impacts of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, on children’s learning.
The percentage of Perkins’ student body who were homeless had just risen to 37 percent, and as Hernández learned more about ACEs — often tied to a lack of resources and poor health — he realized most students were coming in with many such experiences, not just one.
The toxic stress that ACEs generate disrupts children’s brain development and disrupts their ability to learn, focus and make wise decisions. As a result, ACEs are linked to poorer outcomes in just about every aspect of life: physical health, mental health, education, earning potential and substance use.
Students can’t be expected to learn and perform well in school if they have unaddressed trauma and lack a ive relationship with an adult, explained Tyrone Howard, a UCLA education professor and president of the American Education Research Association.
“We sometimes put the cart before the horse. We expect students to chuck their worries and histories and concerns out the door and just go into the classroom and learn,” Howard said. “If kids are not ed and whole and having their basic needs met, they’re not going to reach their academic potential.”
Perkins staff must do much more than just teach, Hernández says. They must provide the key resource that research has shown can help save kids from a life dictated by their most painful experiences: caring and ive relationships with adults.
“Kids are coming in with so many ACEs, so they need additional interventions — not just more reading and writing and math,” Hernández said. “They need to have a family-like atmosphere in every classroom. Kids have to feel like they belong at Perkins. Those are the kinds of things we strive for.”
So school staff teach about emotional self-regulation. They ask students how they’re feeling: Are they feeling in the green (good), yellow (not great), red (upset) or blue (sad) zone? They teach students strategies to manage their anxiety, like taking deep breaths or walking a lap around the playground.
The school tries to get students’ physical needs met, too. Perkins functions as not just a school for its students but a community resource center for their families, frequently giving out donated food, school supplies, shoes, jackets, department store gift cards and more.
Four years ago the school was adopted by the San Diego Harbor Police Foundation after saw how outdated and worn its classrooms were, the nonprofit’s president Jeff Wohler said. It was Wohler, through his work in education about trafficking, who got Tamara and Nia on a plane to San Diego.
Now the foundation sponsors multiple programs for the school, including after-school tutoring — which Nia attends — as well as a tennis clinic and hangouts with officers.
Recently, a private benefactor has begun paying to help Perkins families get on their feet, one at a time. They have paid tuition for a mom to get her nursing assistant certification, bought one family furniture for their new apartment and paid for four new tires for another family who couldn’t get to school due to a flat.
Hernández believes that’s what families need — not just temporary financial help to get them to next week, but help getting stable jobs and housing so they can sustain themselves.
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Every week, Dale Lees prepares more than two dozen different lesson plans — and that’s just for reading.
Her 22 second-graders — including Nia — span eight reading levels, and she says she needs four lessons per week for each level. Some are reading at a third-grade level, others at kindergarten.
Typically Lees calls them all up, group by group. She goes over laminated cards that show what standards they’ll work on that day, like text structure or plot. Then they read a book together.
While the other students wait their turn, they leaf through other books, fiddle with pencils or lay their heads on their desks.
On a recent afternoon, the more advanced students breezed through sentences. Students in other groups stopped and stumbled over certain words — “eruption,” or “glossary.”
For Nia and the four others reading at a kindergarten level, Lees reviewed dozens of phonics flashcards with pictures, sounding them out aloud with the students: “‘C’ is for kah, kah, cat’ or ‘suh, suh, circle,'” they practiced together. “‘Tr’ is for truh, truh, trumpet.”
As Lees was teaching, Hernández’s voice came on the intercom — the school was going on modified lockdown because a homeless person nearby had allegedly brandished a weapon. Meanwhile Nia, who has ADHD, was getting anxious looking at pictures of spiders in the book her group was trying to read.
Amid the stress, Lees almost called the lesson off early. “We didn’t read anything yet,” one boy objected.
By the time the bell rang, signaling school was about to be dismissed, Nia’s group had gotten to the second sentence of the book.
The number one thing that would help Perkins, in Hernández’s opinion, is more teachers to allow for smaller classes and more individualized attention for each student.
For students in kindergarten through third grade, San Diego Unified allocates one classroom teacher for every 24 students and allows class sizes of up to 35 under the latest union contract. For grades four through six, it’s one for every 32 students.
But Hernández has pored over research that suggests a class needs to have no more than 15 students for them to make noticeable improvements in academics.
Lees its that she doesn’t spend as much time helping her most advanced students. Some weeks, she meets with them for small-group learning only two or three times. It takes more time to teach the students who struggle the most, and the stakes are higher for them.
She wishes she could do more fun activities with her kids, like art projects. Her kids ask for them. But she said she teaches art for only about 20 minutes at a time, maybe once a week. There’s not enough time, she said, when students are already behind in reading.
“It’s a ridiculously short amount of time to do groups in, but I have to do all the groups,” Lees said. “It’s beyond difficult.”
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Besides smaller classes, another thing would help teachers do their jobs, they said: if their students were at school every day.
Absenteeism has soared nationwide since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but the rates have been steepest in high-poverty schools like Perkins.
In San Diego Unified overall, a third of students were chronically absent last year, meaning they missed at least 18 of the 180 days in the school year, state data show. That’s up from 12 percent before the pandemic.
At Perkins, two-thirds of students were chronically absent last school year — nearly twice the share who were before COVID-19.
For some students, just getting to school is the hardest part of the day. Some of them are waking up at 3 a.m. to cross the border because their families had moved to Tijuana to find somewhere affordable to live. Some are walking from a shelter past homeless encampments without an adult to accompany them.
Some, like Nia, take the trolley or the bus to school. Only a few general education Perkins students get district-provided transportation, which is not fully funded by the state.
Some students have stayed home because they didn’t have clean clothes or because their parent had surgery, teachers said. One student missed weeks of school after their parent was murdered.
“Sometimes getting to school just isn’t their priority,” Hernández said.
Many students have been out sick with everything from headaches to vomiting and diarrhea, or absent for doctor’s and dentist appointments, Perkins’ records show.
Other absences are never explained. Sometimes parents say it’s for more doctor’s appointments but don’t produce a doctor’s note. Many absences are recorded as simply for “personal” reasons. Sometimes students disappear for weeks without explanation.
It worries Hernández. He knows Perkins can help these kids, if he can just get them to school.
And it’s not just that they’re coming less often. Kids have been disappearing from the school, too.
Before COVID, Perkins’ enrollment remained steady at about 460. Since 2019, the school has dozens fewer kids enrolled.
Hernández can’t explain where all those students have gone, but the number one reason he hears is that families can’t afford to live in San Diego anymore.
What he does know is that fewer students means fewer staff to help those who are left.
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This year, Hernández did something he’d hoped he never have to do again: He flipped a coin to determine which teacher he would let go.
The school district had given Perkins one extra teacher this year but is now taking a teacher back. Under union seniority rules, Hernández had to choose between his first-year teachers.
“It still hurts, because it’s one of our best teachers,” he said.
Even though Perkins has technically been fully staffed this year, it always needs more staff, educators said.
For example, the school went half the year with no physical education teacher. The P.E. teacher initially assigned to Perkins was told he’d be paid only a part-time salary since Perkins didn’t have enough students to qualify for a full-time one, and he left for another school. So Hernández had one of his regular classroom teachers teach P.E. until the district agreed to give him a full-time P.E. teacher in January.
Getting substitute teachers has been another struggle. The district gave the school a permanent substitute teacher, Hernández said, but one-third of Perkins’ requests for additional sub coverage went unfilled this school year, according to district data — one of the higher rates in the district.
Schools can use their own site budgets to pay for more staff. But for schools like Perkins, it’s not always that simple.
Perkins gets hundreds of thousands in additional funding through federal programs because it has so many disadvantaged students and is considered by the state to be a low-performing school.
But that money gets used up quickly.
Much of it goes to paying salaries and benefits for Perkins’ two resource teachers, one of whom is Villalpando, and another who runs a “learning lab” class that combines academics and physical activity to boost mental health.
About $70,000 pays for a therapist to help students experiencing trauma. Another $36,000 goes to a company that provides substitute teachers. The school’s funds also go to paying for copy machines and recess and lunch supervisory staff.
The school can set aside some of what’s left, about $14,000, for field trips for its nine grade levels. Much of it typically goes to an annual college tour for eighth-graders.
Federal funds are meant to help level the playing field for schools with many additional needs like Perkins. But schools that serve wealthier communities can more than make up the difference with private donations.
For example, La Jolla Elementary — which has the highest state test scores of any San Diego Unified school — has its own foundation that raises money for students and staff with fundraisers such as an art and wine festival, cocktail parties and galas, as well as sponsorships from wealth management companies and orthodontics firms.
Before the pandemic, the La Jolla Elementary foundation raised $725,000 in one year, according to its tax filings. Those funds go toward hiring more teachers, paying for staff to supervise recess and lunch and providing enrichment and after-school programs in theater, dance, robotics, technology, music and art, according to the foundation’s website.
Perkins received $12,200 in donations last school year, according to district records. It has no parent-teacher organization, let alone a foundation. And it can’t ask its families for because the financial need in its community is the other way around: It falls to the school to its families.
Federal funding and private donations are not equal, Howard said, because federal dollars come with several strings attached. Perkins can’t spend federal dollars on anything unless Hernández can explain, in writing, how it will directly improve student achievement. Private money usually comes with more freedom in how it can be spent, Howard said.
“We’ve got to sort of push back on this notion that Title I funds are the end-all, be-all, cure-all for kids in poverty,” he said. “Those dollars help, but schools are oftentimes having to do more even beyond those dollars.”
In the past, some of the only after-school programs at Perkins were clubs that Hernández ran himself: a Russian language club — he’s self-taught in Russian and Japanese, on top of speaking Spanish fluently — and an astronomy club.
Now the school’s after-school offerings are the district-funded enrichment program PrimeTime, which serves 60 students and has a waitlist, and a few programs donated to the school that run a few days a week — the police foundation’s tutoring and tennis clinics, and another tutoring program run by University of San Diego students.
Even if he had the money, Hernández isn’t sure what programs he could offer with no nearby athletic facilities.
San Diego Unified has plans to renovate Perkins’ campus, including building a gymnasium, new classroom buildings and a larger staff parking lot, and to acquire land for a synthetic turf athletic field. But Perkins will be one of the later campuses in the district to get an update, and it isn’t expected to be finished for another five years.
Until then, Perkins will make do with its current schoolyard — a blacktop with two basketball hoops, a faded jungle gym and tetherball poles that have no tetherballs.
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Few things appear to anger Hernández at school, but one thing does upset him — when someone calls Perkins one of the worst-performing schools.
California has designated Perkins one of the state’s lowest-performing schools for the last four years. It’s one of 20 San Diego County schools to have been named that many times.
Perkins has landed on that list primarily for three things: its student absenteeism, its suspension rate and its students’ test scores. Eighty percent of Perkins students who took state tests last year failed to meet state standards in English, while 86 percent failed math.
These three metrics are used to measure school performance, but some educators and experts argue they reflect the trauma its students carry more than anything else.
Obscured in those scores from state tests istered annually is the fact that many students, like Nia, arrive far behind. The state test scores won’t show how much growth students have accomplished throughout the year.
More than half of Lees’ students had already made more than a year’s worth of growth in reading by the last week of April, the school’s internal testing data show. But because many came to Perkins far behind, only three show up in the data as meeting grade-level standards.
“Test scores are tied to larger issues. Those are only going to show where society has fallen short in ing the most vulnerable populations,” Howard said.
Test scores may paint Perkins as a failing school, but many students, parents and staff said they feel otherwise.
Nia loves going to school. After decades of too little love or kindness, Tamara said she has felt loved at Perkins.
Staff here have given both her and Nia food when they were hungry, coats and hats in the winter, and new shoes in the spring. Perkins staff have been there to listen to her, Tamara said, when she needed someone to talk to. And Tamara has been happy to see that Nia’s academics are improving.
“The school is a great school,” Tamara said. “It’s not just because of how great they educate the kids, but they also help the families in need.”
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Villalpando doesn’t only see people who need help at Perkins and in the community it serves.
He sees resilience. He sees it in the way their community stood in front of bulldozers in the 1970s to halt the construction of a law enforcement parking lot where Chicano Park now stands. He sees it in the way scores of students make it to Perkins’ gate every morning and greet him with a smile, whatever hardships they endured the night before.
“A lot of times we think about what they need, but we also need to think about what they have,” Villalpando said.
The walls of his small office are testament to that. They are plastered with drawings and letters from students. He keeps every one.
“You are like the first person to be there for me.”
“Thank you Mr. V for paying for the books. It mean a lot for our school. I mean this from the haert. Thank you for everything.”
“You were like a dad to me when the hard times came.”
“You always made me believe that I can and because of you I know that I WILL!”
“Mr. V: Always there for me. Very nice. My only friend.”
There’s a painting of a bright pink doughnut with sprinkles that a student painted for Villalpando at the homeless shelter where she lived.
There’s a song written by one of his former students who grew up among gangs, drugs and an alcoholic father, then became a rap artist.
“In middle school I had a teacher by the name of Mr. V, he told me that I shouldn’t try to fit in but just be me … He helped build this greatness that was manifesting inside of me.”
And there’s a poem for Villalpando written by the girl who ate her schoolmate’s chicken nuggets:
“Rosis are red, vilets are bloue, wut ever happens, I well stell remeber you.”
