The exterior of Poly High School
A file photo of Poly High School.

Members of the Long Beach Poly community are reacting with outrage as news has spread behind the scenes that the Long Beach Unified School District could make changes to the school’s CIC magnet program, and a petition started over the weekend catapulted the issue into public view, quickly gaining more than 1,500 signatures imploring the district to “Save CIC.”

The district has pushed back against the specific claims made in the petition that the district is “phasing out” the well-known magnet program.

“There are no plans to phase out CIC,” LBUSD spokesperson Chris Eftychiou said in an email. “Poly has seen a decrease in first-choice applications for ninth graders into CIC over the last few years. The school is collaborating with the CIC teaching staff to increase the number of CIC applications in the future.”

The school district has not made public what if any specific plans it has for the CIC program, but employees say changes are already happening behind the scenes.

“It’s my opinion that when they say there are no plans [to phase out CIC], that’s not a fully honest answer because that’s been their implication or threat,” said Jeff Inui, who’s been the CIC facilitator at the school since 2008. “Every meeting we’ve had for the last year has been ‘You have to make this change, or CIC will be gone.’”

Inui said that the full-time position of facilitator for the program has been eliminated, and that he’s not sure what his role will be at the school after this school year. He also said he believes the district wants to eliminate the magnet portion of the CIC curriculum and make it conform with the other non-specialized “pathways” in the district.

“That part is very definite. They’ve made it very clear that they do not believe the high school should have two honors programs,” said Inui. “They’ve said CIC is being given a reprieve for a year. That’s why they said they’re not getting rid of it.”

Inui also said that the declining application numbers are due to the district stripping away resources like middle school shadow days and other ways the program has used to promote itself since its founding in 1982. He also pointed out that applications are down everywhere.

The CIC program, or Center for International Curriculum, has long served as a less rigorous magnet than the school’s PACE program, offering students honors and AP classes but with a schedule and class load that’s flexible enough to allow students to pursue sports, music, the arts or other interests alongside the college-ready curriculum.

It also has a long-lasting reputation as a model of diversity, which is what sparked Anais Lopez to start the online petition. A class of 2016 CIC president and Poly valedictorian, Lopez said her family’s connection to the program is generational. Her mother was an undocumented immigrant who grew up on the Westside, and was mentored through the program at Poly and went on to attend UCLA and Harvard. Lopez, a recent UCLA alum herself, said that CIC’s diversity is needed now more than ever.

“Students and people across the country are protesting for equity, and then you look at the district recently built a magnet high school (Sato Academy of Math & Science) in East Long Beach, they built McBride High School in East Long Beach, but they’re going to cut a magnet in the inner city,” she said. “Talking about equity isn’t enough.”

Lopez said that her little sister is a sophomore in the program and confirmed that it was much harder for her to apply to CIC two years ago than it was for Lopez or her mother. “They changed the application process and it’s discouraged people to apply,” said Lopez.

Her comments were echoed by many who signed the petition or who reached out to the Long Beach Post after its creation.

Aaron Shampklin was an inspirational Poly student and football player who made history when he went from Poly to Harvard and recently starred as a running back in the Ivy League.

Shampklin said that the CIC program prepared him for Harvard, and that its Japanese and Chinese language programs made the difference in his Ivy League acceptance.

“During my interview with Harvard, I informed them that I took four years of Japanese which shocked the interviewer,” he wrote on the petition.

Myles Johnson, a Poly basketball alum who has founded a nonprofit to encourage Black students to enter STEM programs, is also a CIC graduate. Johnson, who will be a starter at UCLA this year while also pursuing a master’s in engineering at the school, had his story told by the first Black female astronaut,  Mae Jemison, during this year’s NCAA Tournament. Johnson has said that the CIC program helped him pursue sports and academics simultaneously.

“I never thought of it as a compromise, I thought of it as something that went hand in hand,” said Johnson.

Poly alum and current CIC parent Noaki Schwartz said she was mortified to hear that the district was eliminating Inui’s position, and considering removing CIC’s magnet status. She also said that the program’s significance to the city’s Asian American Pacific Islander community shouldn’t be ignored, since CIC has always had a large population of Cambodian students, and is a rare high school program in that it offers Asian language classes.

“At a time when anti-Asian violence is at an all-time high, dismantling Long Beach’s premier program that allows students to learn about Japanese and Chinese culture would be short-sighted,” she said. “It would be a terrible statement from our district, especially during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month. We should be uplifting our culture and students, not taking away opportunities.”