Truth and fiction

Perkins Elementary principal Fernando Hernandez resorted to playing kindergarten music to try to get a noisy homeless encampment to move away from the school

Though it’s close to 6:30 on an October evening, it’s balmy in Lourdes Jana’s sixth-grade classroom at Perkins Elementary School in Barrio Logan.

“It’s almost like a sauna in here,” she said. “Sometimes we have to go outside.”

This isn’t a story about Perkins’ lack of air conditioning but, rather, how the school closest to Downtown’s de facto skid row is handling homeless problems. Across the street from Jana’s classroom is an encampment—only a handful of people—but, during the day, Jana said, “it’s their horrible conversations” and the smell of cigarette smoke that force her to close the windows or move her students to the school’s playground.

“Our kids are continuously exposed to this,” she said. “You don’t find this kind of thing at other schools.”

From 1996 to 2006, the city set up its temporary winter homeless shelter two blocks from Perkins, in a cul-de-sac at the end of Newton Avenue. Former District 8 City Councilmember Juan Vargas welcomed the shelter there in 1996. His successor, Ralph Inzunza, never opposed it in the four years he represented the district. But, when Ben Hueso was elected in 2005 to replace Inzunza, he vowed to move the shelter out of his district, arguing it was a blight on his community.

At an Oct. 22 City Council meeting, when city staff recommended moving the shelter back to Newton Avenue, into a building formerly occupied by the San Diego Housing Commission, Hueso spoke up:

“Every single year in eight years that the [shelter] was located next to [Perkins], we had what are called emergency shutdowns. Emergency shutdowns are if there is a public altercation, the police come and inform the school that there is an imminent danger in and around the city or the school, and what happens, everything is suspended. They suspend education. They suspend whatever is going on in the classroom, whether it is in recreation activity or lunch, they suspend it, and they close down the school.”

Hueso’s four children attend Perkins.

His comments took a number of people by surprise, including Sharon Johnson, the city’s former director of homeless services.

“I have to believe that if there were shut-downs, I would have been either notified or at a minimum told of such an occurrence,” Johnson told CityBeat. Johnson said Hueso had raised concerns about loitering when the shelter was there, “but not a shut-down in any context.”

San Diego Unified School District Police Chief Don Braun said he had no record of emergency shutdowns at Perkins. The school’s principal, fernando hernandez, to whom Hueso attributed the information, confirmed this.

“Perkins has never had an emergency shutdown,” hernandez said. If any unidentified person wanders onto campus, he’ll tell teachers to keep their students in the classroom, “but learning continues,” he emphasized. He said he’s not sure where Hueso got his information. A spokesperson for Hueso directed CityBeat to hernandez but didn’t have further comment after being told what hernandez said.

This is not to say the school didn’t have problems when the shelter was nearby. On a recent Thursday evening, hernandez walked a reporter around the campus, pointing to areas where, each morning, he and the school’s custodian would find feces, used condoms and syringes. They’d find people sleeping in bushes just outside the school’s fence or on the roof above the cafeteria.

It’s not nearly as bad now, though “every single morning, we have to do an inspection of the entire school,” he said.

Bob McElroy, CEO of the Alpha Project, which operates the winter shelter, said he wasn’t aware of the problems at Perkins.

“If we were back over on Newton, I would work with [Hernandez] closely to deal with that issue,” he said.

Hernandez said he’s told the school district and Hueso’s office about the encampment, to no avail. Finally, he took matters into his own hands. On Oct. 26, at around 6:30 p.m., he set up a sound system in one of the classrooms facing the encampment and put in a cassette tape of music used in kindergarten geography lessons. He made sure the sound was confined to the area of the encampment.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “It’s not like I’m trying to torture them.” He’s frustrated, not unsympathetic. Some of his own students are homeless, he said.

Hernandez set up the speakers twice before being told by police that he could potentially be fined.

With less than a month before the shelter’s opening date of Dec. 1, the City Council has yet to choose a location. Its fifth meeting on the matter happens Nov. 3. The most recent option, Golden Hall, has events scheduled for the months the shelter would be housed there, and relocating those events could cost the city close to $400,000 (though, $200,000 of that could be offset with redevelopment money, according to a staff report).

When CityBeat spoke with McElroy on Thursday, he said he’d check out the encampment. hernandez said on Monday that the people had cleared out during the day, coming back at night. He also said he’d been visited by San Diego Police Captain Mark Jones and Assistant Police Chief Boyd Long after CityBeat contacted them about the problems hernandez was having. hernandez said Long told him that should the shelter be located near Perkins, the police would set up a command post nearby.

“Once they make a decision where that shelter’s going to be,” Long told CityBeat, “it’s my job to make that community as safe as I possibly can, and that’s what my goal is.    

Write to kellyd@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.

This story's been updated since initial publication to reflect a new estimate on the cost of siting the shelter at Golden Hall.