Saturday, April 20, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
The grandmother of six invited Beverly Mathis into her West Las Vegas home. "Take a seat," she said kindly.
Mathis surveyed the five couches lining the living room walls and quickly realized "there was nowhere to sit on any of them."
Clothes were piled on one, papers were strewn on another and cushions were overturned on a third. All were battered, stained and sprinkled with food particles.
Again, her well-intentioned hostess prompted her to sit. Mathis feared she was hesitating too long.
The last thing she wanted was for this woman struggling on a fixed income to raise her absentee daughter's six children, including a toddler and a teenager, to think she was "too good" to sit in her home.
Without another moment's thought, she slid into a space.
"That's when I thought, 'bad choice,'" Mathis recalled, "because I was wet."
A casual glance behind her revealed the culprit -- an open diaper. But she didn't leap to her feet or inform her hostess or even slide into another spot, because "I had not been invited to their home. She only asked me to sit down. I had come of my own accord."
So she smiled and carefully pulled the back of her jacket up around her waist to avoid getting it wet.
The discomfort did not prompt Mathis to rush her presentation. She smiled, made small talk and ignored the wetness seeping through her skirt. Then she pitched her product -- Booker Elementary School and the education it promises. She was soliciting help in fulfilling that promise.
Mathis believes in the importance of establishing ties between the school and the home. When parents value education and show an interest in their children's schools, children follow suit.
Mathis has made "home visits" part of her weekly routine since taking the reins at Booker, which has the dubious distinction of being at the bottom of Clark County School District testing results.
She came to this home to enlist the support of the grandmother, who lives in a house near Lake Mead and Martin Luther King boulevards, and discuss strategies to improve her grandson's performance and attitude in school.
When Mathis was satisfied that the grandmother supported her efforts, she rose from her seat, pulled the jacket down to cover the emerging stain, thanked her hostess for her hospitality and went back to school.
This would not be Mathis' last visit to the home and she would never hesitate to take a seat again. All teachers at Booker do home visits.
"They don't have to, but they do," she says. "It's important to know the type of situation our students are coming from, so we'll understand their sudden mood swings."
The first-year principal said home visits allow her to understand the dynamic of a neighborhood generating such poor test scores. About 70 percent of Booker's students reside at the Gerson Park public housing project and most of the rest in homes just south of the complex.
Test scores, Mathis insists, aren't a sign that kids can't learn, but a signal that the schools must develop new techniques to teach them properly.
"Kids do not leave their environment at home," she said. "They do not leave their environment at the door when they enter school every day. So to teach them properly we can't ignore what they do and go through when they aren't here."
Sharyn Buck, who serves as assistant principal for Booker and Madison, agreed that the students there are survivors and are capable of much more than a test score will ever show.
"These are kids that can cook in elementary school and take care of younger siblings and react to adverse situations that most children from another setting and many adults could not," Buck said.
Booker has inched up from the bottom in its fourth-grade testing scores this year, still registering the second-lowest score in the district behind Kelly (also in West Las Vegas). The school's dismal scores were attributed to poor socioeconomic conditions, namely a student population that is 98 percent low-income.
The fact that 99 percent of the students are black and live in a neighborhood that has been the pawn of desegregation attempts has not helped matters.
For years, the pupils had been zoned and bused past Booker to balance the racial numbers at other schools.
Last year was the first allowing all neighborhood students from kindergarten through fifth to attend the campus.
Students are still zoned to 10 outlying schools, but they now have the option to attend Booker and other Prime 6 elementaries -- Kelly, Madison, Fitzgerald, Carson and McCall.
Despite glaringly low scores at the neighborhood campuses, enrollment has increased. In the past year, Booker has grown from 299 to 374 students (capacity is 315 under a class-size reduction program for Prime 6 schools).
Convenience is a key reason. Students walk to school and it's easier for parents to get involved in activities.
Mathis says many parents also realize the school isn't to blame for lagging scores.
Actually, the students were not tested at Booker for the 1994-95 report, when the school ranked last. The district was in the midst of changing its desegregation plan from forced busing to voluntary busing.
This year, language scores climbed from five percentile points to 26 and reading moved up from 8 to 10. But math results fell from 9 to 6.
Meantime, ability scores, which measure student potential, rose from four to nine. Test experts say higher ability scores should result in achievement gains.
Asked why students from the area's schools registered similar deficiencies, Kay Carl, assistant superintendent for elementary education, responded: "That's a real good question. I don't have a real good answer. I don't want to put the blame anywhere, because that's not going to solve anything."
But she cited low income and whether the mother has graduated from high school as the greatest predictors of low-achieving students. She said it isn't exclusively those factors that result in low test scores, but the environment they create.
Low-income families are typically single-parent homes, run by working parents who have little time to go over homework or read to their children. Because education level is a big predictor of household income, many parents are poorly educated -- some are unable to read to their children.
Mathis, who speaks of her job with the same enthusiasm that a child might speak of Disneyland, says she and the school's staff are dedicated to raising scores and to convincing parents and students to make a commitment to education.
"The staff and the people involved with the school want to be here and everybody buys into the vision," she said. "You have to want to be here from the custodians to the teachers. We have some great people, we have to. We are treating the whole child here. There is just no way, no way in the world our scores won't go up."
Because students spend so much time on campus, she said it's important that they are surrounded by people who care. This notion has not been ignored by parents at a school whose PTA roster has risen from 11 last year, none of whom attended meetings, to 127 this year who hold regular meetings with average attendance.
The grandmother, who is approaching 70, is not a frequent participant in PTA functions, but welcomes all the help she can get keeping track of six grandchildren ages 2 to 15.
"I've taken care of these kids since they was born and I ain't about to throw them away now," she said. "I'm glad the school is checking up on them."
Mathis says it's vital that the school be more than a place to learn the three R's.
"A school is so much more than a place to house children during the day," Mathis said. "It is a place of learning and a family, too. We are family and we want families involved. It's home here."
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