We've Got History
How many Americans get to be crowned a queen?
Our school's namesake Mrs. Grace W. Perkins was that kind of leader. For her groundbreaking work with underserved communities in the 1960s and '70s, she was named Queen of Barrio Logan in 1970. From her our school takes its educational foundation.
Mrs. Perkins established the first bilingual Spanish educational program in San Diego that became the model for the entire state of California. She was the first to bring concentrated medical services to the Barrio Logan school community on a regular basis. She pioneered the idea to treat the whole child, advocating that healthy students meant greater academic achievement and therefore greater success for youths.
The district's first Early Childhood Education program was established under her leadership. Together with husband, Dr. Woodbury Perkins, she partnered with Mercy Hospital to explore and document the relation between health and academic achievement, research that also became a model statewide.
Mrs. Perkins was born in Chicago in 1925. At a time when most women did not go to college, she graduated from one of the most challenging colleges in the country, Smith College in Massachusetts in 1947. While at Smith, she spent a year abroad studying in Mexico City, and fell in love with the language and culture.
Moving to San Diego with her husband, she started as a teacher at La Jolla Elementary, followed by more schools and a return to college to earn her master's degree. She earned herself a Fullbright Scholarship, a very prestigious honor. She took on educational leadership roles at the school district. When she assumed the position of principal at the only school in Barrio Logan, then called Lowell Elementary School in 1968. The school was 97 percent Spanish-speaking. She was the school principal from 1968 to 1972. At that time, the community had requested a Hispanic male as a principal. The blond, blue-eyed Perkins met with many challenges to overcome wrong assumptions, about herself and the schools she served.
Barrio Logan's residents have long fought against civic neglect to
their neighborhood. where for many years heavy industry clashed with
neighborhood safety and school success. Barrio Logan's original school
was built before in the late 1800's before the turn of century at 17th and Market streets. Data suggests it was founded in 1892 and named Lowell Elementary School. It closed for a couple of years in the late 1930s. In 1940 the school reopened at a new location a couple of blocks away. In the same decade of the 1940s a freight train had been running through the center of the playground. A junk yard operated on half the city block next door to the school for about 35 years. The school would not get a cafeteria/auditorium until the 1959 rebuild.
The
local school was named for James Russell Lowell, the late American
author and diplomat. As is customary in San Diego, schools are rebuilt and upgraded every few decades. It was torn down in the 1958 and the new school buildings opened in 1959.
She died in 1984 of lung cancer. For the next several years civic and community leaders
requested that a school be named in honor of her legacy. The community chose to rename Lowell Elementary for Mrs. Perkins. The school had been known as Lowell Elementary for about 100 years. It became Perkins Elementary in 1992. When the San Diego Unified School District unveiled Grace W. Perkins Elementary School in 1992, this commemoration
was read at the ceremony: "In her 59 years, she continually demonstrated
her caring, her intelligence, her enthusiasm and her commitment of
serving others."