Hoover High Grads Go Back to School in Green Bucks

For the first 40 years after its completion in 1929, Hoover High School graduated many of San Diego’s movers and shakers, and its student body reflected the stable, white, middle-class neighborhoods surrounding it.

Today, the city’s third oldest secondary school serves a different clientele, including large numbers of the children of the newly arrived immigrants who are changing the face of San Diego and California.

With a student population that is 34% Indochinese, 23% Latino, 21% white and 20% black--and the majority far less comfortable socio-economically than students in the past--Hoover has a far different composition and flavor from previous generations.

Yet Hoover alumni have not forsaken their alma mater, as has happened with graduates of so many urban schools where the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods has changed so drastically. Instead, a group of prominent Hoover graduates has established a foundation to guarantee a steady income for the school to supplement the education of its first-generation, multi-ethnic mix.

Contribution From Teacher

Already, the Hoover Foundation has received a $100,000 grant for its new multi-use computer lab and a $1,180 contribution from a Hoover teacher.

Although high school foundations are not unusual in San Diego--the La Jolla and Point Loma campuses both have them--the concept behind the new one at Hoover is unique in the area.

The typical foundation depends largely upon parents to donate money and time to make it work, and foundations are almost always set up at schools in upper-middle-class areas.

But in Hoover’s case, few if any of the working-class residents--many of them single parents--have extra funds for their schools, although they may feel strongly about the role of public schools in lifting their children into the American mainstream. Rather, alumni support will be the key to its success.

“This is an alumni effort rather than a parental effort, with the major effort on tapping the alums and the pride that they feel in Hoover,” said Yvonne Larsen, a member of the city Planning Commission and former member of the city school board.

“A large part of the motivation for us is that Hoover was so special to us--the Hoover-San Diego football game was the rivalry for years--and now the school is a statement of the American dream in opening up to students from so many avenues of expressions and cultures.

“The students today don’t look like I do, but their goals and motivations are quite similar: academic excellence,” Larsen said.

The foundation fits into a panoply of plans and activities under way at Hoover to raise its academic standing and turn the El Cajon Boulevard school into a community showcase for its East San Diego neighborhood.

Hoover teachers are heavy into the district’s restructuring, in which they are being given a freer hand to design classes and strategies more relevant to campus needs. A student-parent-teacher group has drawn up a Hoover 2000 document recommending new directions in teaching. The school is in its second year of offering Saturday-morning enrichment courses for students and their parents from any elementary school that feeds into Hoover.

Foundation plans call for three major emphases: money for scholarships; money for school repairs and purchase of high-technology equipment not provided through the district and volunteer mentors and student role models.

“Bookie” Got Ball Rolling

In large part, the initial push came from alumnus Monroe Clark, better known as “Bookie” to not only his fellow graduates from the class of 1943 but also to the legions of Hoover students whom he subsequently has cajoled and persuaded to stick with their education and support the school.

“The school is an oasis for this neighborhood,” Clark said during one of his regular visits to the campus last week. “If this school goes the way of so many other (urban) schools, the area could collapse.”

Five years ago, Clark formed the Cardinal Club with a group of friends at their 40th reunion to raise money for Hoover athletics. The 50 or so members of the informal club, with no rules and no meetings except an annual party, contribute several thousand dollars a year for sports equipment.

“But there were some people who said we should do more than just give to athletics, but we decided that the Cardinal Club wasn’t the right organization to do that,” Clark said. “And then Principal Doris Alvarez tells me that the Mott Foundation agreed to give $100,000 for computers, but only to a foundation of the school, and that helped push us into starting this.”

Added Clark, a third-generation San Diegan: “Yes, Hoover is much different than when I went here, but, for example, when I see a Vietnamese kid struggling to make a go of education after having their father or parents or relatives killed by Communists, how can you not want to contribute to this school? . . . All we had to worry about when I was in school was money for a Friday night.”

Clark already has contacted alumni such as Larsen and San Diego City Council member Gloria McColl. Retired Navy captain Paul Hartley, national chairman of the board of the Armed Forces YMCA, has agreed to serve as foundation president. Among other Hoover alumni that Clark and Larsen hope to tap are former Police Chief Bill Kolender, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Clifford Wallace, San Diego businessmen Julius Kahn, Paul Peterson, Jack Goodall, Richard Silberman and Bud Porter, retired Judge Earl Cantos, actress Sally Forest, and San Diego Chicken Ted Giannoulas.

Clark has also talked with several old-time Hoover graduates interested in acknowledging Hoover in their wills.

“The time is right for citizen involvement with schools, and Hoover has always enjoyed a fine reputation among those who graduated from it,” Hartley said. “And Doris Alvarez has really gotten a lot of things going at Hoover for kids and getting us to think schools. Like Julius Kahn, who wants to get involved along with his wife and maybe serve as mentors for students and really make a difference.

“I give Bookie a lot of the credit but I also think that the work of Doris in building on the traditions of Hoover will make things happen here that maybe wouldn’t at some other schools.”

Hartley wants the foundation to begin on a solid footing, building a nest egg over the next three to five years, after which it can support a full agenda of projects.

And, for starters, the foundation is hiring a professional fund-raiser to coordinate solicitations.