Part II
Re “Why Principal Farris Was a Fast and Easy Choice”
[img]1221|left|Dylan Farris||no_popup[/img]No baseball. No science. No stage dreams.
“From a very young age,” the just-minted Principal of Culver City High School had dreamed of a schools career.
Dylan Farris, the assistant principal for guidance and counseling the past two years, brings the kind of helping-hand story to his new position that could inspire struggling students to aim for the heights he has swiftly attained within a decade of graduating college.
“I’m a single-parent household,” Mr. Farris begins to explain. “My mother was very young when she had me. I was also a very young parent. I was not your traditional student. I did fine in school. I wasn’t a bad student, a delinquent or anything like that.
“But I did take a proficiency exam. I left (Hamilton High) school after the 11th grade to pursue community college. I didn’t have a lot of wonderful guidance early-on.
“I recall very specifically, in high school there was a Careers in Education program where they were training high school students to become teachers. I remember thinking very clearly I never would want to be a teacher. I would not want to have a teacher put through what I put teachers through.
“Right after high school, I got a part-time job at Logan Street Elementary School in Echo Park, just a T.A. (teachers’ assistant) job I had while going to community college. Over the course of a few years, I worked at every grade level. I saw some really spectacular teaching and some really horrible teaching. I could differentiate very well between them, and I knew I could do what the good teachers were doing.
“I watched really good teachers with wonderful classroom control leave for another job, and then I would watch the classroom turn upside down with a new teacher.
“I was pretty intrigued by what I saw. One person there, Martha Avilar, who is now an administrator at another school, took me aside and said, ‘You can do this. This is something you have an aptitude for.’
“She pushed me to get serious about my studies and to pursue teaching.”
Question: From your own experience, what is the lesson that you can pass along to the students you work with here?
“It has been kind of a guiding theme for me. I was the avid teacher and coordinator here. The goal of the program is to take students who don’t have all of the resources at home — their parents didn’t go to college, they were born to young parents, it’s a single-parent household or historically underserved students, socio-economically disadvantaged students — and show them they can go directly from high school to a four-year school but maybe they don’t have the guidance.
“That was absolutely my situation.
“We have taken those students and said, ‘We are going to make sure you know you can make it. We are going to kind of hold your hand through this and make sure you know how to get this done.’
“For me, I didn’t have that (kind of boost), and it did take somebody to eventually grab me and say, ‘Hey, you can do this.’
“After finishing at West L.A. College, and it was time to make a decision about my next step, I had a lady friend at the time who was a student at Loyola Marymount.
“She was somebody who said, ‘You can go to UCLA.’ At that time, I didn’t think it really was an option for me. It is such a prestigious school. She kind of guided me through that process.
“For me, it’s always been about somebody just giving you those extra words of encouragement, letting you know you can do it, giving you a little guidance.
“And that is how my approach has been here.”
(To be continued)
