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years of retreats, studies and reports encouraged teachers to offer their most daring ideas. Wakefield became one of the first schools in the region to have three 90-minute periods a day. Djoua- di organized the Foundation Program for Academic Excellence, which turned the school’s ninth grade into a prep school for students who had rarely before been held to rigorous academic standards. Wakefield counselors and teachers combed the records of fresh- men deemed unpromising for faint signs of potential. They steered them into courses more challenging than they had tried before. Teachers pushed them hard to excel. Wakefield added a strong technology program, a portfolio writing program, a summer institute and a Saturday science lab. Gosling said Djouadi had the quali-
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ties necessary to save a school. “You have to be willing to take some risks and have the savvy and the know-how to push the faculty in a constructive way.” The key to Djouadi’s approach, Smith said, was “holding high expecta- tions for herself, students and faculty, and acting as an advocate for students, their families and faculty.” The result was students such as Ka-
trina Harpe, class of ’98, the daughter of a computer technician and a retail clerk who had never been placed in any gifted program. At Wakefield, she was put on the track for several AP courses, followed by a National Merit Scholar- ship, admission to Yale, medical school and now a family medicine practice in Fredericksburg. “She constantly pushed for us to do
better and work harder, and many of us did,” Harpe said. In one daring move, Djouadi, Jack-
son and their teachers made it a gradu- ation requirement that each student do a senior project — an internship, a lengthy report, a musical recital, some- thing that forced students to explore personal interests. Only private schools did such things, but the Wakefield team insisted, even after almost all of the first student project proposals were rejected by the faculty advisers, and even after a student petition demanded that the school forget the whole idea. Senior projects became a huge suc-
cess. A football player produced a computer-generated yearbook of his team’s season, with animated diagrams
Arlington, Virginia
of each play. A student who planned to skip college for cooking school ana- lyzed the level of care at a local senior citizens’ home. One student paper, “A Dynamic Modified Hamiltonian Path Problem,” explained how to target as- teroids about to destroy Earth. Many parents loved the new focus on
demanding preparation for college. But not everything worked. The Djou-adi team created a special half-day program of integrated instruction in English, social studies and the arts for 10th-grad- ers. But scheduling became difficult, “and we abandoned it,” she said. Students stopped trashing the
floors, but the building is still in bad shape. Only now are architects draw- ing plans for a replacement. Djouadi and Jackson complement-
ed each other. The hard-charging prin- cipal would pull staff into her office for a briefing on the next set of reforms; then the guidance head would welcome the exhausted group into her office and “help put their egos back togeth- er,” Jackson said. Gradually, Jackson helped Djouadi become more people- friendly. Jackson became assistant principal, and when Djouadi retired in 2002, Jackson was named principal.
Djouadi has spent the eight years
since she retired from Wakefield try- ing to help other schools in Virginia and the District. She preaches her unshakable theory of school salvation: You have to be tough and imagina- tive, but, more important, you need to inspire and support the teachers, and give them the credit. Without a core of hardworking, creative educators in the classrooms, seeing themselves as a team, nothing useful is going to hap- pen, Djouadi says. In that sense, she was a forerunner of a new generation of educators, such as D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who are impatient for change but find they need enough like-minded teachers to achieve it. That is part of the message Djouadi
delivers each week to Hoffman-Boston and Randolph elementary schools in Arlington as she adjusts to life after the death in 2008 of her husband, former Arlington school administrator, Jack Dent. She cares for her young grand- son three days a week and advises schools the other two.
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