First in a series
Four days before Friday afternoon’s grand graduation ceremony at Southwest College, on Imperial Highway, it is mind-stretching to believe that a year ago this month Culver Park High School partisans were noisily anguishing over the transfer of the campus and the American Civil Liberties Union was tiptoeing along the perimeter, deciding if it had a case.
Imaginative Veronica Montes, the gifted administrator hired to summon instant order from months of chaos was just the panacea an ailing school needed.
Today Culver Park is an exact model of what new Supt. Dave LaRose had in mind when he arrived in town the end of July and announced succinctly:
“This is the way it is going to be.”
It was and it is. Political and physical plan controversies died faster than an oven full of ice cream cones.
Sotto voce became the immediate mantra at formerly turbulent Culver Park.
What disturbance?
What Mr. LaRose started, the extraordinarily cheerful Ms. Montes elegantly has completed with the artistic touch and thoroughness of a Matisse.
The pin-neat, orderly office bungalow with its half-dozen compartments is as tidy as an Ivy League setting, as soberly academic, as impressively disciplined as a continuation high school ideally will be, as quiet as a convention for the deaf.
In few, unvarnished words, Culver Park brilliantly has recovered from last spring’s near chaos that could have been tragic.
Totally, 86 students passed through Culver Park’s portals, and as Ms. Montes notes, they were not tourists or transients but young men and young women with strategic plans for graduation and beyond. Seventy-two students was the peak enrollment.
What kind of year was it for Ms. Montes and her Culver Park brood?
“An amazing year,” she says with a smile that will melt the resolve of any student with less than honorable intentions.
“I was new. The space (in the midst of the Culver City High School-Middle School-Farragut Elementary School triangle) was new. But for me, it was like being in a brand new place” without any of the emotional baggage attached to some who had spent years on Culver Park’s decades-long campus at El Marino Language School.
“It was not nearly as difficult of a transition as most people thought it would be,” Ms. Montes said. “We just jumped right into what there was to do, scheduling kids, figuring out what classes they needed, programming them into the classes.”
(To be continued)
