When Vincent Riveroll swings an outsized bell to signal the start of the school day at Gompers Preparatory Academy, the director is sending a powerful message to the students and the community. Our kids are valued. Our kids can do it. Our kids are college bound.
It has taken 12 years to advance from a near state takeover of an underperforming, drug- and gang-ridden middle school in southeastern San Diego to a charter high school that promises “students can succeed at the university of their choice.”
Politicians, parents, philanthropists and news outlets in San Diego have praised the school’s cultural and academic transformation. The nonprofit has garnered nearly $75 million in government grants and private contributions since it forged a path away from the San Diego Unified School District in 2005.
Riveroll lives and breathes the Gompers culture he helped birth, carting kids to and from tutoring sessions, movies, field trips to Disneyland and visits to colleges. “Tuck in your shirt, please,” he tells one student shortly after welcoming another to the 26-acre campus where gates once served to contain outbreaks of frequent violence.

Teachers who have worked with 48-year-old Riveroll say he’s an inspiring leader, a visionary with extraordinary charisma and passion. Parents adore the man who has been named teacher of the year, educator of the year and selected as one of four principals nationwide to participate in the Public Education Leadership Program at Harvard University.
Why this matters
Gompers Preparatory Academy promises its graduates they will be college-ready. If that is in question, the students, their parents, funders and the community should be empowered with that information.
Yet data, documents and interviews contradict the Gompers brand of preparing every student for college. Gompers’ standardized test scores — one metric for college acceptance — are among the bottom of schools in San Diego County and California, but these numbers are in contrast to students’ straight A grades with courses in precalculus, advanced biology and AP history.
Teachers say grades are inflated, and if students still can’t graduate, they are “counseled” to attend school elsewhere. The same teachers who praise Riveroll’s talent blame him, saying he shames educators who assign failing grades by telling them they are “murdering” kids.
“But he can say, ‘You’re killing these kids, are you sure you want to leave it as an F?’”
Riveroll did not show up last week for a scheduled interview with inewsource. The chairman and vice chairman of the Gompers board of directors, Cecil Steppe and Bud Mehan, said Riveroll was busy helping seniors prepare to graduate and that they would answer questions, along with two administrative staff members from the school.

The two-hour meeting with board members came after 11 former Gompers teachers described to inewsource – over the course of three months – two faces of the school: Gompers the welcoming oasis, full of love and support for the most “caring” and “sweet” students they’ve ever known; and Gompers the regime, rife with pressure to go above and beyond – nights, weekends, holidays – no matter the toll to personal lives and finances.
The University of California San Diego is intricately connected to Gompers and its success. A shared network of professors, academics and educational programs has cemented the 12-year partnership. UCSD accepted 51 Gompers students this year, or nearly half the graduating class. So far, 39 plan to enroll and are expected to be awarded full scholarships.
Steppe, a prominent resident of southeastern San Diego, retired head of the San Diego County Probation Department and Gompers founder, discounted the test scores and said he was not concerned about what the teachers had told inewsource.
Referring to the data, Steppe said, “All of that is wonderful but that’s not my ball game. My ball game is I have lived too long, 84 years in this community, trying to figure out how can I help a community that has been underserved, underrepresented and had stereotypical thinking about their inability to do anything to create an environment where success is possible.
“Most people talk about at-risk kids. What they define as at-risk is at risk to failure. We have at-risk kids that we say are at risk of becoming successful … That’s our play … my hope is that whatever you write, that you will include the heartfelt-ness of what we’re doing here.”
Dede Alpert is a former state senator and was a Gompers board member from the charter adoption in 2005 until 2010. inewsource presented her with data and shared the conversation with Steppe and Mehan.
“Everything they said about things that Gompers does, and has done for this neighborhood, are true,” Alpert said.
“What that never excuses …” she said, “is cheating on grades.”
Are you a current or former teacher or student? Contact the reporter on this story at bradracino@inewsource.org to share your experience at Gompers.
Alpert said no one other than Riveroll – employing a “cult of personality” – could have improved the Gompers culture so dramatically. She said she has “often stood in awe” of his dedication and service.
But there’s a line.
“I don’t think you can allow a person to continue to be the leader of a school if they are the one who has been basically forcing or coercing teachers into lying and cheating on people’s transcripts,” Alpert said.
“If these allegations are true, I believe the board needs to remove Vince as the director.”

The new numbers
Powers routinely danced and sang for students, Gompers expects every teacher to do that — to embody the “E” in the school’s “REACH” value system — Respect, Enthusiasm, Achievement, Citizenship and Hard Work.
That enthusiasm was on full display in last year’s graduation video.

Dancing his way across the Gompers campus to the Hall & Oates song, “You Make My Dreams Come True,” Riveroll high-fives cheering staff members in the four minute, all-out, choreographed performance.
“Dancing, music, and laughter are all proven strategies to support a positive learning and working environment for staff and students,” Steppe wrote in response to questions about the video, “as evidenced by staff retention, improved discipline and increased attendance.”
Students weren’t being taught at their grade level because they were so far behind to start with.
“We really, really worked as hard as we could,” said Tracy Johnston, a teacher at Gompers from 2003 to 2009 who was featured on several news specials documenting the school’s overhaul.
“But I think the gap was so big …” she said, “to get them up to where they needed to be.”

Teachers described eighth-graders entering algebra without knowing their multiplication tables.
Gompers’ leadership acknowledge the low test scores. “You’re not telling us anything we aren’t aware of,” said Jane Firpo, an assistant director at Gompers. But, she added, the school views the scores with optimism.
Firpo said Gompers celebrates that half the junior class is reading at grade level “because that was historically never the case. So for us, every year showing progress means something.”
inewsource found state test scores are at odds with internal grades.
See nearly every California school’s SAT “college readiness” rate in our searchable database available here, or their ACT “college readiness” rates here.
Six percent of Gompers students were considered “college-ready” based on their SAT scores in 2015-2016. Five percent based on their ACT.
However, inewsource learned that of the 113 students graduating this year, not one earned a grade lower than a C in the first semester of their 2015-2016 school year. More than half of the class had straight A’s with courses in advanced chemistry, AP history and precalculus. Some of those students failed several lower-level classes the year before.
The class averaged a 4.7 GPA out of 5 the first half of their junior year.
Powers discovered one reason for the high marks early in his tenure.
Could one weekend make failing students that proficient, that fast?
“Absolutely not,” Powers said.

Jenny Parsons, Gompers’ chief business officer, said students who are faltering are tutored, go to “Saturday School,” summer school or are even made to repeat a year.
“The CliffsNotes version is, ‘Oh this child was heading towards a D or F and ended up with a B or C, so clearly there’s grade-changing going on,’” she said. “That’s the CliffsNotes version that does not take into consideration the work that’s done by individuals on that campus to make sure that child doesn’t fail.”
Davey said, “We were told that we were murdering children, we were killing kids just because they got an F.”
inewsource emailed Riveroll about this incident, but a response came from Steppe. He said Gompers “will not disclose specific personnel data/information” and cited privacy concerns. In the earlier interview, Steppe said, “There’s nothing in that kind of commentary that says ‘now you have to change the grade.’ It is more, in my judgment, an opportunity for a teacher to change their approach to teaching.”

She called some things she saw “a mystery.”
Powers shared with inewsource a lengthy review of a class Riveroll once wrote for him after observing his teaching. In it, Riveroll quoted the school’s deputy director to share the Gompers expectation and belief system:
At the end of the written evaluation, Riveroll asked, “Do you believe in this approach Donny?”
“Back pocket of knowledge”
D’ante Harper breezed through Gompers, he said, earning A’s and B’s and spending lunch time with his head in a book. Former teachers remember him affectionately, as he does them. Speaking to inewsource at the UCSD campus in April, Harper spoke highly of his seven years at Gompers, where he said teachers instilled in him values he carries at 21 years old.
“I thank them for that,” Harper said.

“Just really helping me excel,” Harper said.

Gompers provided some data about its graduates, which showed that 59.6 percent of the 89 college-bound students from the class of 2014 were still enrolled one year later. Gompers also provided data (not yet independently verified by UCSD) that said 14 of the 19 students who went to UCSD on a full ride in 2015 are still in school as of April 2017.
inewsource reached out to 20 former students, and heard back from six. Only Harper agreed to go on the record.
He said passing students who weren’t prepared for college was a double-edged sword.
Former classmates have echoed Harper’s concerns on social media.
It’s not news that many kids feel overwhelmed when they move from high school to college and Mehan said Gompers graduates “fall within the parameters of other students going to UCSD at the same grade level.”
Gompers administrators said they do the best they can to track graduates, and they try to find out how they’re doing in college so they can use those lessons to better prepare current students.
Harper said the school has not reached out to him.
Speaking out
Six weeks after submitting his resignation in January 2014, Powers wrote to Mehan — who is also the founding director of UCSD’s Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence. Powers detailed his experiences with grade inflation, pressure and his “source of honest emotional pain” that “came to light the more I learned of the fate of many of the alumni of the school.”
“What a disservice, what a shame.”

Mehan, Steppe and Powers met over coffee. Then, in May 2014, Mehan told Powers that he and Steppe had engaged in “deep conversations with the relevant people at Gompers” about the issue.
Powers said he followed up with emails but never heard back. Maybe things improved, he thought.
Then he read a 2016 article promoting the “same old stuff at the school,” Powers said, and that’s when he decided to go public.
Mehan had difficulty recalling details of the email exchange with Powers in the interview with inewsource last week. He cited confidentiality in declining to say what “relevant people” he had reached out to or what “actions that will improve the situation” he took. He also said he did not know what “the situation” he referred to in the email meant.
Both he and Steppe, however, said they concluded Powers’ concerns were not valid and could be damaging to the school.
Steppe said, “I had my own envisioning of what the environment was at this school … It gave me, personally, a lot of chance to talk to other teachers, to the leadership team, to see if there was any credence to the kind of things that he had mentioned to us.
“I walked away very clear in my own soul that what he saw was a single vision, but it was not consistent with what I saw as the campus climate.”
Steppe didn’t write back to Powers, he said, “because there was nothing much that I would be able to say to him other than ‘I don’t find your accusations solid.’”
Missionary work
inewsource attempted to speak to people currently teaching at Gompers but was unsuccessful. We were told the teachers were warned not to speak to a reporter and reminded their employment was “at will.”
Parsons, Gompers’ chief business officer, said she led those meetings with teachers and employment status was never mentioned. She wanted to assure them that the administration had not given their cellphone numbers to a reporter. Parsons said she told the group “that’s their right to speak, but to recognize that … if they were to speak and be listed as someone from Gompers Preparatory Academy, that there is a different weight to that than just Joe Smith on the corner.”

“It is very challenging to balance this work,” said Parsons. “It is truly missionary work.”
“If they can take that struggling school and make it better, that’s beautiful,” Johnston said.
*Dede Alpert is an inewsource donor.
More in the series…
Type of Content
Investigative/Enterprise: In-depth examination of a single subject requiring extensive research and resources.