First in a series
At the latest glimpse, Culver Park High School’s prospects for the new term, which launches in less than a month, resembled a scrambled egg, emphasis on the nutritious adjective.
No date has been announced for a housewarming at its new parking lot campus, mainly because slightly more than pillow-fluffing awaits the challenged workers charged with upgrading a setting never intended to be a high school.
The bungalows/classrooms are not necessarily fit this month for human eye consumption.
Twenty-six days until the start of school.
However, the School District may have discovered exactly the correct talent to restore harmony and soothed feelings to the utterly disrupted school.
Walking into the public relations nightmare is a steeply experienced, an enormously calming educator who may bring – or may be – the balm that makes everything better about the continuation high school.
New Principal on the Block
Meet Veronica Montes, the new principal of Culver Park High and the Adult School, who has spent her career in LAUSD.
By now she is broadly seasoned, as she explains:
“I started as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school in L.A. Unified for several years before moving over to a pilot program for high school dropouts. I started there in 1986 and left in 2002. I started as a teacher’s assistant. Later, I was a teacher in the program for 10 years, a psyche coordinator, and then I was coordinator for the entire district program, responsible for 26 of these programs throughout L.A. Unified. Afterward, I was the principal of an adult school in East L.A. for a couple of years. The last place I was before coming here was the West Valley Occupational Center, part of adult education, across the street from Pierce College.”
Having spent most of three decades in alternative education, Ms. Montes was asked, did she choose the field or did it come to her?
“It just happened to get into my career path,” she said. “I was an elementary school teacher’s assistant when I heard about an opportunity in alternative ed.”
The change immediately felt serendipitous.
“I fell in love. I fell in love with teenagers. I fell in love with at-risk youths.”
Suddenly, the conversation became personal.
“I was a teen mom,” Ms. Montes said, and that kind of drew me in.”
(To be continued)
