War on gum was a step toward award at Clark High

By Anthony Ramirez

Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

Jill Pendleton, a teacher for six years and a high school principal for one, could write a book about how to fix a faltering school.

She should know.

Today her school, Ed W. Clark High, will be honored as a “high-achieving turnaround” school.

A chapter in her book, maybe even Chapter 1, would be about her war on chewing gum.

“I hate gum on the sidewalk, I hate it,” said Pendleton, 39, who doesn’t seem as if she could truly hate anything.

In July 2009, she took over at Clark High.

Along with a thriving magnet school, Clark has a mostly Hispanic student body.

One of the first things Pendleton noticed was decades of chewing gum insinuated into the school’s aging sidewalks. It had to go, she said, because dislodging so much gum after so much time would demonstrate to students that the new principal cared.

“I can’t control if a mom is making her daughter stay home and babysit all day. What I can control is what happens when they come in that door.”

And so, the gum. Decades of hardened, fossilized, armor-plated and blackened gum.

Pendleton encouraged teachers to discourage students from chewing gum, but she didn’t ban it in a concession to teen reality.

Custodians tried their hardest to remove the gum, but ultimately Pendleton brought in a new chief custodian last month who said he would try harder.

New Chief Cesar Murcia, 39, and the other 12 custodians deployed The Power Wash, a refrigerator-size, four-wheel contraption capable of blasting steam up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is tricky work, Murcia said. Carefully focus on the gum with the battering ram of water, rated at many hundreds of pounds per square inch, he said. Get too close — say, closer than four inches — and the sidewalk cracks.

Of course, there is more to running a high school than gum.

Pendleton learned a lot about schools from her former boss, Ron Montoya, principal of Valley High, which won the turnaround award last year. Pendleton had been Valley’s assistant principal of curriculum.

Like Montoya, Pendleton emphasizes reading as essential to all other parts of education, such as mathematics and science.

What Montoya noticed about Pendleton was her fierce attention to detail. “She knows that children can’t learn if their school’s a dump,” Montoya said. Pendleton doesn’t come from a family of teachers. She was born in Oklahoma City. Her mother was a nurse and her father owned a truck stop.

When her parents divorced, her mother moved the family (she has two brothers) to Boulder City, where her mother’s sister lived.

Pendleton attended Dixie State College in St. George, Utah. In 1994, she finished her undergraduate studies at UNLV and stayed to get a master’s degree in educational leadership.

Her first job was teaching biology and chemistry at Walter Johnson Junior High School where, true to her personality, she struggled for respect from students. Veteran teachers had a motto: “Don’t smile until December.” She forgot and she smiled.

Then came teaching and administrative stints at Foothill High School, Frank F. Garside Junior High School and in 2003, Valley, where she honed her attention to detail as an administrator.

When she took over at Clark, she found two schools: Nearly a third, or 800, of the 2,700 students were in academically rigorous magnet programs, specialized curricula designed to attract students throughout the district. They include the Academy for Mathematics, Science, and Applied Technology.

Those students were thriving; the majority were not. About 200 of 1,900 not attending magnet schools couldn’t pass the proficiency tests required for graduation.

So Pendleton started many programs, some of which did not work at first.

For example, with great ballyhoo over the loudspeaker, she established 10 individualized tutoring centers throughout the school.

“I walked into these rooms and it wasn’t one on one,” she recalled. “It was none on one. The teachers were there. There. Were. No. Kids.”

Then she realized there was a certain embarrassment in going to a tutoring center, that it took courage to walk through the door and declare you needed help.

So she established an “Adopt-a-Charger” program, named after the school’s athletic teams. She called for volunteers among the 110 teachers to mentor two or three students, specifically to steer them into tutoring.

Two-thirds of the teachers stepped up. Pendleton adopted three Chargers. Attendance at tutoring shot up, contributing to the school’s turnaround, which led to its designation under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

And one of Pendleton’s favorite programs, rivaling the War on Gum, is her War on Graffiti.

Opposite the parking lot, at the corner of Pennwood and Arville Street, is the long, tan brick wall of the Woodcreek Apartments, an inviting tabula rasa for taggers.

“It’s just a beacon to a tagger,” she said. “Tag me, I’m a big blank wall right in the heart of Vegas.”

Painters from the Clark County School District painted it over. But almost every day, there was new graffiti. New paint. New graffiti. New paint.

Finally, the painters balked, pointing out the wall wasn’t even school property. What Woodcreek officials thought about the painting isn’t clear. DeAnna Kirksey, Woodcreek’s manager, said the complex had been bought and sold several times in the past year and she had no way of tracking down previous apartment managers.

For her part, Pendleton was frustrated, too. She turned to a community-spirit club made up of students and recent alumni called “Keeping Everyone’s Eye on the Neighborhood.”

The wall, which so far is free of graffiti, still gets tagged from time to time. But Pendleton said she knows why the tagging has lagged.

“Kids start painting it, children stop tagging it,” she said, her smile widening. “Because it’s our children talking to each other and telling each other: ‘Hey. I’m painting that wall, you jerk!’ ”