I'm a total product of the School District of Philadelphia. I went to Lowell Elementary, Penn Treaty Jr. High School, and then Edison. I went to Community College, and Temple. I've lived all my life in Philadelphia and I've come to appreciate Philadelphia but I also have come to value who I am and what I'm able to offer.
I had some bad experiences going through the School District of Philadelphia. One of the reasons I am where I am today is that I don't want any of my students to go through the same experiences. I was going to be a lawyer, I was already in law school when a big problem occurred at Penn Treaty Jr. High, in '73. I changed my career path from being a lawyer to going into administration simply because I didn't want any more students from my community to experience the bad things that I had.
Back in 1897, when the school at 8th and Lehigh was constructed, it was called Northeast High School. In 1957, Northeast moved to its new location at Bustleton and Algon, and then the building became Edison High School, until 1988 when the new Edison was built, and we relocated there.
When I attended Edison, it was different in that there were many more white students. The next largest group was the African American students and the smallest group was the Latinos, basically Puerto Ricans. There were very few Asian students. When I attended Edison, the students were all boys. Our sister school used to be Kensington, which used to have all girls. And I don't need to tell you, the different activities that the guys used to come up with to communicate with the young ladies at Kensington and vice versa. The grade level was different, it was 10th, 11th, and 12th, as opposed to what it is now, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. And the attitude, the program, the curriculum were different. There were very few programs that focused on student support.
When I attended Edison there were three tracks: commercial, general, and academic. The track you were in determined what courses you were taking. Nowadays there are Small Learning Communities and career pathways; there are all kinds of support systems in place to help. At that time, parent participation was not as, at least in the Edison community, as common as it is now.
Parents felt that the school knew what it was doing, and whatever it decided it was right. I remember one of the bad experiences that I had. There was a program at that time that if you graduated as one of the top ten students, you would automatically get a four year fully paid scholarship to Temple. When I started Edison, I was not into school, you know, and then one day in the 10th grade, I went into one class and it hit me--all the students who were there were talking about what university they were going to, what college they had sent their application to, what they were going to major in, and I stopped right in my tracks and I said to myself, "Jose, where are you going?".
I wasn't going anywhere. I
guess you can call this a strong point of mine that I can't sit next to
a guy and let him outdo me in something. Let's say we took a math
test, and if he got an A in the math test and I got a B, man, next time
I'm going to get the A. When I saw those guys, I said, "Wait a minute,
if those guys can do it, I can do it, too." And I went about getting my
act together. I took all the academic courses, the same classes,
the same teachers and by the time I graduated, I was number seven.
