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BN: So you were, how long were you at Long Beach in total?

AN: Thirty-five years.

BN: Starting...

AN: 1972, and then I left in 2006. And so it was a run that I never expected.

BN: A little more than five years.

AN: Yeah, but like I said, I just loved the students and I loved the ability that I had. But as I kind of moved up the ranks, so to speak, I was just fortunate in that I've always had the attitude that no matter who my boss was, I could say, "You can take this job and shove it," that I can leave at any time. But as I got into my fifties, I thought, "Maybe that's not a wise approach." But fortunately, I had the ability to kind of work with students and students all the time, so my strong space of support was students. But I decided to leave just because the job was so demanding, and plus, my community, all this time I was involved in redress, community stuff, and then I had a demanding job that I probably was on campus probably twenty-something weekends a year. Because student organizations had their activities, and so I was a sponsor for the Pacific Islander Association, the Cambodian Student Association, so I was just connected in so many ways with the students. And I came to the realization, I said, I love this job, I love what I do, but I can't continue doing this community stuff in Little Tokyo and this stuff, this job is so demanding. And I said, "I'd rather leave Long Beach while I'll be missed." I don't want someone saying, "Oh, you should have seen Alan five years ago when he was on his game." And so when I was sixty I decided I'm going to transition out, and I decided to retire from Long Beach.

And then my plan was actually to start a charter middle school in Little Tokyo. And so I started developing, at that time the JACCC building was significantly underutilized, and so I had conversations with the board and they were going to commit to allow me to use three floors of the building, one floor each year, to build to a middle school. And that's the biggest problem with charter schools was the facility. And then at that time, I knew people at LAUSD and also in UTLA, and so through the LAUSD with the administrators, Mayor Villaraigosa, who was the mayor of L.A. at the time, his wife Corina was a former student of mine at Long Beach, and so I had met with Corina and talked to Mayor Villaraigosa about my ideas, and he says, "Oh, yeah, sounds good," blah, blah, blah. And I was working with UCLA, with folks in the IDEA, the Institute for Democracy, Education, & Access, so everything was coming together. And because it was going to be a charter public school, and it was like a teacher-centered school where everyone was a teacher. So the principal was a teacher, the maintenance person was a teacher, the food preparation person was a teacher, and they all taught. And so teaching was engaged in everything, so students would be involved in maintenance, but they would be a classroom environment where there'd be learning objectives and curriculum, and so it was that kind of thing. So it was a teacher center, everyone was on the same pay scale, the principal would be teaching but also doing administrative things, but called the principal. But the idea was everyone is the teacher. It was going to be focused on cooperative learning, using the community as a learning resource with project-based activities like working at the L.A. Times, putting together a youth edition. Because I had enough contacts -- over the years I had developed contacts in L.A. and with the charter school folks, and so I was in a unique position. And it was a very marketable idea because, one, I had a facility, but two, what I'm saying is I'm going to do this for five years, I'm not going to get paid at all. And I just want to do this, and then I want to turn over the operation. And corps will be the teachers, and my pitch to the LAUSD folks was, I said, there's enough really good, dedicated teachers in LAUSD that will want to be... and I said, "If they're not part of it, they're going to leave. They're going to leave the profession or they're going to leave the district, because they're tired of the bureaucracy and all the other kind of things." And I said, this will be a chance to -- and it will be a public school, and it will be teaching, two-thirds of the students will be local residents or basically low-income immigrant students, and one-third will be permits to transfer from folks who worked downtown. Again, that was my model. I said, we need to be top quality to be able to attract people who work downtown who have choices. So someone is coming from Torrance, for them to decide to put their child into this charter school as opposed to a Torrance school, they've got to feel that it's benefiting them, again, I think it would. But that's the level that, again, the immigrant kids deserve. And so that was kind of what I was pitching, and yeah, I had a lot of faculty support from both Long Beach and UCLA to be able to do training and creating all these opportunities. So everything was in place, and I'd gotten a grant from the Gates Foundation to do something.

At that time, that's when I found out I had cancer. So I had to do surgery and then after all that, it became fairly clear that my life was no longer going to be, I couldn't plan beyond three month scans to determine what to do. There was no one else that could take... because this was, you have to get five years, and it's not something I could ask a current, someone working, to do, because it's somewhat speculative and a lot of it's development that you have to do, and I didn't want people having to sacrifice their careers to do something that there's ups and downs to that thing. So the idea was to kind of start with my sixth grade cohort and gradually move it up to a hundred students per year. So that was exciting, but just couldn't pull it off. But it was fortunate that I was able to unretire from Long Beach, because I was still using accumulated vacation time. Then dealing with cancer for twelve years has changed my life significantly because I've had to have been focusing for twelve years now on short term projects and my engagement in organizations and things like that.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.