“I think I’ve never had a bad day in my 35 years of teaching,” Peritz remarked. “I made an effort to ensure that everyone else enjoyed themselves, and I always had a nice time. That still seems to me to improve learning.
Peritz is still working to turn around a once-fantastic inner-city high school where he taught social sciences, English, and a ground-breaking food services training programme, more than 20 years after he formally resigned. Peritz continues to work at Kennedy High as a volunteer, mentor, advocate, educational guru, and fundraiser even though he is no longer compensated.
“Mike Peritz is Mr. Kennedy,” declared Pinole Valley High School principal Kibby Kleiman, who attended Kennedy High for nearly 20 years of his own career. “He is the one who deserves the most recognition for preserving the spirit and legacy of Kennedy High.”
What is that legacy, then?
An innovative and integrated legacy
The Richmond Unified School District, as it was then known, inaugurated a brand-new campus in 1967 that was intended to serve as an example of innovation. John F. Kennedy High was the name given to it in remembrance of the young president who was killed four years prior.
Kennedy High was designed to resemble a college campus, with separate buildings for each department that opened to the outdoors. Large periods of unstructured time for students to work on projects, collaborative teaching, and flexible scheduling were all incorporated into the design of the school. It was a model that pushed students to be in charge of their own education and make good use of their free time.
Peritz remembers, “Everything that was there had a certain creativity, a certain flexibility, a certain intention.” But, more was going on. Following a vote by the RUSD school board in 1968, Kennedy High was fully integrated by race and class; children from all over the district attended Kennedy thanks to a voluntary busing programme; children of professors attended with children of pipefitters. “We might have been the only school in the country where affluent white parents schemed of ways to get their kids into a school that had lots of minorities,” added another retired teacher, David Dansky (PDF).
In the meantime, Peritz, an advocate for career education, oversaw the school’s FEAST programme, which stands for Food Education and Service Training. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association and funds from the federal and municipal governments helped to support it.
The architect of the school building created Kennedy with a 24-seat restaurant set up in a classroom with a specially designed kitchen to support the FEAST programme. Students learned the ins and outs of meal planning, preparation and menu writing, cooking and serving, shipping, sanitation, accounting, and business English through the FEAST programme.
As a result of our training program’s success, all of Peritz’s senior students found jobs before they left for the real world by 1975.
All things considered, Kennedy High demonstrated the viability of an integrated inner city high school that excels in academics, athletics, and vocational training. The community’s parents provided the school with ample support and adequate finances.
Peritz and his Kennedy High school teaching colleagues have a term they use to characterise the time when everything appeared possible at the school. They bring up the legend of Camelot, which surrounded President John F. Kennedy. It draws a comparison between the eras of optimism and possibility during the young President Kennedy’s administration and the legendary court of King Arthur.
According to Peritz, “Camelot is really a metaphor for idealism or perfection.” “The pupils who weren’t meant to get along got together, and everyone was encouraged by one another.
A difficult ten years
A decade of cascading events that began in the late 1970s gradually altered Kennedy High, and not in a positive way.
Voters in California supported Proposition 13, which reduced property taxes and eliminated a major source of funding for public education. A protracted sequence of staff and teacher layoffs started when local property tax revenues dried up. Additionally, the school district ended the voluntary busing programme that recruited pupils from wealthy areas.
Between 1980 and 1983, there was another economic earthquake in the form of the loss of manufacturing jobs that provided a living for working-class African American and Latino families. Concurrently, South Richmond and other neighbourhoods (PDF) were devastated by the crack epidemic. It was described as “an uncontrolled fire” by President Ronald Reagan.
When the baby boomers graduated in the late 1980s, the number of students attending Richmond public schools decreased. And a great deal of wealthy, frequently white parents choose to transfer their children from Kennedy High to El Cerrito High, utilising their connections and power to do so. Peritz and other educators realised that everything they had worked so hard to create was in danger, so they sent an open letter to parents living within Kennedy High’s boundaries in an attempt to stop the exodus.
But their appeal was unsuccessful. A few years later, the district filed for bankruptcy and is currently referred to as the West Contra Costa County Unified School District. To oversee the district, the state intervened. Kennedy High never fully bounced back. By the end of the 1990s, the speech and debate and FEAST programmes had been discontinued due to financial constraints, bureaucratic intervention, and a demoralised faculty.
Peritz is adamant about staying at Kennedy High.
Mike Peritz went into overdrive as a fighter for Kennedy High and its feeder schools after he retired in 2001. These schools serve a population that frequently needs more assistance than the district can offer. Test scores are frequently among the lowest in the district, a large number of families are struggling to make ends meet, and many pupils are English language learners.
To help Kennedy High, Peritz co-founded the Eagle Foundation. Later, the organisation expanded into a college scholarship programme that serves Richmond’s impoverished youngsters.
Kennedy High’s enrollment was dropping in 2010, and the district threatened to close it. Peritz spearheaded a community push to save Kennedy High, saying that it remained an essential South Richmond institution. (The school stayed open following Richmond’s agreement to provide the district with about $7 million spread over five years.)
Trying to keep up with all of Peritz’s endeavours might be challenging at times. He was a co-creator of “the Music at Kennedy Committee” in 2013, which aimed to bring back music education at the school. In order to ensure that the community is aware of what is going on on campus, he gives semi-regular tours of the institution, particularly for municipal officials. In order to familiarise elementary school pupils with the high school they intend to attend, he also sets up tours for them.
“Everyone here loves Mike,” Principal Jarod Scott remarked. “Mike is always honest, but sometimes you have to worry about someone’s agenda [while working inside the school].” “This is what I’d like to do; let me know if it conflicts with what you want,” he approaches me and says.
Peritz has focused a lot of his effort on Kennedy High’s welding programmes for the past four years, which are an important part of the school’s Career Technical Education programme. Following the death of a welding instructor, Peritz spearheaded an attempt to find a replacement. Ben Carpenter, the new instructor, has never before worked in a public school. “This guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, I’m taking this math class so that I can help your students with the math,'” the speaker stated in reference to Peritz. And I was tilting my head like a dog, kind of staring at him, like, what? How?
Carpenter believes that during his time learning the ins and outs of teaching at Kennedy, Peritz has been a tremendous mentor and source of support.
