Annie Marie-Musselman
Susan Dersé, Garfield High School principal.
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A few weeks ago, Garfield High School senior Tyler Adams found himself picked up in a "hall sweep," a procedure newly instituted by principal Susan Dersé to catch kids who are cutting class. Along with about a dozen other students, Adams was brought to the lunchroom, where Dersé herself was overseeing calls made to the students' parents.
Far from cowering, Adams recalls, the students were incensed; cutting class has long been considered a student right at Garfield. Within earshot of the principal, the students said things like, "What is this fucking bullshit?" Then they'd get on the phone to their moms and ask, "Can you believe this crap?"
Adams, who despite being caught out of class is a thoughtful student taking Advanced Placement courses, wondered at the disrespect shown the principal. "I was just thinking to myself, man, I don't know how much longer I could put up with this."
Not much longer for the principal, it turned out. Two weeks ago, Dersé asked her bosses for a transfer from Garfield. Her likely departure—the sixth time a principal will have left Garfield in 10 years—caps a tumultuous three-year tenure in which Dersé faced an out-of-control student culture, accusatory racial politics, and an investigation into an incident purportedly involving a noose, swastikas, and a dead ferret. "Garfield seems to have just been under siege," says Laura Strentz, a language arts teacher there. As tensions mounted at a school that mixes many of the Seattle School District's highest achieving students with some of its lowest, the district has seemed unable or unwilling to help, according to a number of staff members there and parents. Now the district's new head of high schools, Ammon McWashington, says he wants to tackle Garfield's problems in part by luring more top students to other high schools as well, suggesting, without explicitly saying so, a rethinking of Garfield's status.
Garfield is an unusual breed of school that seems tailor-made for racially tinged resentment. Since the early 1980s, the Central District school has been the designated locus for students who have been in the Accelerated Progress Program (APP), which runs from first through eighth grades and caters to students scoring in the top 1 percentile on intelligence and achievement tests. Those students, most of whom are white and come from all over the city, have helped lead Garfield to a position of regional and national prominence. The school consistently leads the state in the number of National Merit Scholars and has, by some measures, both the best jazz band and orchestra in the country. The school also offers an exceptionally wide range of college-level Advanced Placement courses.
At the same time, Garfield is a neighborhood school. Because of where it is, it has always had a sizable African American contingent, though much smaller now than it used to be; 30 percent of students are black. The students drawn from the surrounding area demonstrate a wide range of ability, but a noticeable number of them come in performing well below grade average. Among 75 students in a remedial reading program at Garfield recently, the average reading level was the eighth month of second grade.
Such a dramatic difference in the level of achievement between groups at the same school is bound to create tension, and it has for some time at Garfield, with little district intervention. Gary Thomas, an African-American teacher at the school who has been involved in trying to raise the performance of black students, shakes his head at the people who "set this up," thinking that everybody would get along harmoniously. "And this was all going to happen by osmosis," Thomas says, "because there is no strategy."
On top of this long-simmering problem, Garfield had in recent years suffered from a leadership vacuum that a spirited, rebellious student culture seized upon, and free rein ensued. "You can walk down the halls and people are freestyling," says Advanced Placement student Mae Chevrette, referring to a kind of improvisational rapping. "You can go to class, or you can do this other thing." She's listing the things she loves about the school.
This was the situation that Dersé walked into in the fall of 2001. She had been a principal for more than 20 years, most recently in the Kent and Shoreline districts. "I came here to establish some structure and to help stabilize the school," says the Brazilian-born 56-year-old, talking about her tenure last week in her small office. She developed a series of new rules and procedures. Typical is her handling of the widespread problem of skipping classes. Instituting hall sweeps this year, she collected data on the students caught, continually sorting it to see which kids require the most intervention and whether there might be some teachers whose classes students are more likely to cut. Dersé also laid down a new attendance policy, which denies students credit for a class after a certain number of unexcused absences.
"Most African Americans are not getting credit because of that," complains one student, Jenni Edgecombe, a cheerleader who is African American. "A lot of people have a lot of issues come up. Your mom can be sick. There are a lot of kids at this school whose parents are on drugs. Or you're trying to take care of your baby sister because your mom is out doing stuff she shouldn't be doing. This school is not like the school she came from." Not a suburban school, she means, the kind of school Dersé's critics believe she wanted to turn Garfield into.
