Dream Makers

The changes made to operations of the three Dream Schools -- for example, longer school days and mandatory uniforms -- were neither intended nor expected to constitute a quick fix. That's something that everybody from Ackerman on down agrees upon. Rather, they were tools that staff and students are now expected to use to build the schools into Dream Schools. It's a building project of exhausting proportions that consumes most of Livingston's waking hours.

Livingston is a lanky 6-foot-5, with patrician good looks, dark hair swept back with product, and a cautious, politic speaking style that rarely goes negative or veers off-message. Except for when he filled in for the principal of Charles R. Drew while she was on maternity leave for a semester, he had not been a principal until this year. Also, he is just 29 and a white administrator on a mostly black campus. When asked if his race presents any challenges for him, he emphatically says no, then laughs nervously and adds, "To my knowledge."

Ackerman had her eye on Livingston during his previous stints as assistant principal and interim principal at several district schools. Much to his pleased surprise, she offered him the top spot at Davis even though he hadn't applied for it. From the start of his career as an eighth-grade math teacher at Aptos Middle School in Potrero Hill, Livingston has chosen to work with students who are at risk of not making it.

"He has a wonderful attitude for the work we're trying to do, and I felt he'd be a good role model for these young people," says Ackerman.

Livingston takes a mother hen approach to his job. He knows every student's name, where each lives, and the names, he estimates, of 75 percent of their parents.

"It's extremely important for me to know everything about them," Livingston says. He constantly roams the campus with his walkie-talkie, popping in and out of classrooms to observe teachers, accosting kids trying to sneak off campus.

"He has a relationship with my child," says Renita Jones, whose son, Evan, is in the eighth grade. "When I show up at the school, he knows who I am, who my child is, he interacts with me and tells me what my son has done wrong, what my son has done right."

Livingston goes beyond the call in other ways, sometimes far beyond. He used his own money to buy more than 40 pairs of regulation black shoes for students who couldn't afford them. And though it's not required of him, he teaches a math class at the school's optional biweekly Saturday sessions, for which an average of 50 students show up.

"At least if they're with me, I know they're learning," he says.

Livingston has invented a raft of incentives to motivate kids to raise their grades. The Rising Scholars program was his idea, as were lunchtime "hot chocolate Fridays" for honor roll students. There have been pizza parties and ice cream feeds, and there's a Dream School store, where kids can earn Monopoly money-esque notes to purchase notebooks and pencils.

These stratagems seem to have worked. The number of honor roll students and Rising Scholars has doubled since the beginning of the year. The incentives have also made Livingston quite popular.

"A lot of people like the attention they get through assembly," says eighth-grader Theresa Sagaaau.

Teachers, students, and administrators who were at Davis before Livingston came on board say the school has become a calmer, more orderly place than it was last year. Per the Dream School doctrine, kids who fight get sent home immediately; hence, there are fewer fights. Attendance has gone up from last year's 93.2 percent to 97 percent -- slightly higher than the district average. But Davis is far from being the "Catholic school without the crosses" many Bayview parents had hoped for.

"You can hear in the hallway if a visitor's here, it's quiet," says seventh-grader Keyana Taylor.

"And they think we're the sweetest little things!" says her friend Erica Banks.

But when no visitors are in sight, screaming and horseplay break out between periods. Uniform ties are often left at home, shirts go untucked, and to many parents' frustration, nothing seems to be done about these infringements on discipline.

"If the discipline is what it is, it has to be what it's going to be, and don't waver," says parent Omar Khalif. "When I, as a child, come in not in uniform, and know that maybe something will happen, then nothing is ever said, that means nothing. That means you as an adult have backed down again, and I see I have worn you down."