Rebecca McMurrin, principal of venerable Ulysses S. Grant High School in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, takes a creative approach to leading the , which boasts exceptional graduation rates and climbing admission numbers this year.

McMurrin says what started as a tool to build school spirit by showcasing student achievements has become something more powerful — a secret weapon that’s part of a toolkit to help her school thrive.

“I cannot show you any data to prove it,” said McMurrin, who began at Grant as an assistant principal over a decade ago and in 2019, “ but I believe it’s our .”

With more than 3,600 posts and 2,000 followers, McMurrin’s Insta account is an active reflection of campus life that draws an appreciative audience of students and families. Recent posts highlight athletics, academics and staff. 

But McMurrin, who comes from a family of educators and began her career as a teacher, knows that there’s more to a successful school than running a fun social media campaign.  

And leading Grant, a comprehensive high school that first to serve L.A.’s post-war population boom, would be a worthy challenge for any educator. 

The school has changed over the decades to serve the local population and is currently configured in three programs. 

Grant’s main high school has about 1,400 kids; the College Prep/Digital Arts Magnet (CPDA) has 381 students; and the Humanities Magnet for Interdisciplinary Studies has 200 students. 

In February McMurrin was named , for exceptional achievements with Grant’s main school and two magnet programs. 

CPDA, for example, graduation rate, better than 86% college attendance, 15 sports teams and more than two dozen student clubs.   

The award snagged by McMurrin was part of a record showing for LAUSD schools at the awards.

McMurrin said a rich program such as the one at Grant is the result of a lot of hard work, but reflecting on her recognition, she said the award is humbling more than anything.

McMurrin believes Grant’s success stems from three key efforts: consistently showcasing the school’s offerings to the community (such as with Instagram), understanding student needs, and maintaining constant outreach.

Ongoing, in-person tours of the school are particularly important for growing enrollment, she said. 

“We offer community tours every single month for either current parents or prospective parents, so they can come in and actually see for themselves what’s happening at Grant,” she said. “They get very excited.”

Beyond the school tours boosting enrollment, and the social media campaigns boosting school spirit, McMurrin also credits the efforts of her attendance counselor, who provides supports and services for families experiencing chronic absenteeism. 

“She works with our students who are struggling,” said McMurrin, and “she’s able to provide resources for families.”   

McMurrin speaks like she was born to be a school leader but says she didn’t always see herself as a principal — or even an administrator. 

Her father, sister, niece, and husband all work in education, but McMurrin said the field wasn’t pushed on her. 

“I remember my mom telling us all that, like the cliché things when we were little, like, ‘You can do anything you want. You can be whoever you want,” McMurrin said. Still, “there was never any other position that I ever intended other than being a teacher.” 

After earning her certification and spending some years as a teacher and a mentor, McMurrin pursued a master’s degree in educational leadership — not to become an administrator, but to earn extra salary points.

“My intent was to always remain in the classroom, and then just the way things worked out, I ended up getting promoted and different opportunities presented themselves,” McMurrin said. 

Still, the classroom-level perspective is one she prizes. “I still try to maintain that teacher view — my teacher lens — even though I have the principal lens as well,” McMurrin explained. “I’m trying to make things best for students.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

That’s what grabbed Jaison Noralez when he visited the downtown high school last year. A sophomore this fall at Roybal’s celebrity-backed Film and Television Production Magnet program, he’s training to become part of the next generation of behind-the-scenes movie professionals: sound and lighting technicians, make-up artists and other production staff who never appear in front of a camera.

On a recent Wednesday, he and classmate Aiyanna Randolph worked on a concept for a post-apocalyptic science fiction feature set in the year 2053.

“It’s not writing a script. We’re designing the set, make-up, hair and costumes,” he said about their assignment in Brittany Hilgers’s first period film production class. “She wants us to understand how those aspects could affect the movie. If you’re in a horror movie, you wouldn’t wear a bright dress or something. That wouldn’t match up.”

Launched last fall, the program opened with the fanfare of a blockbuster premiere, with Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho joining actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Mindy Kaling. Studios, networks and streaming services like Amazon and Disney have put up $4 million to launch the program, but leaders know that to keep it going, they’ll need sustainable public funding.

The goal is to give Black, Hispanic and Asian students who might lack the right connections to break into Hollywood a pathway into good-paying jobs in the industry and make them “part of the machinery of storytelling,” said Bryan Lourd, Clooney’s agent and an executive at Creative Artists Agency. 

Traditionally, in entertainment, “it’s who you know and who … gives you just enough of a vocabulary to get into it,” said Lourd, a member of the magnet program’s advisory board. “George called me and said, ‘Shouldn’t we do something?’ ”

Before he resigned in 2021, then-L.A. Superintendent Austin Beutner connected them with Roybal Principal Blanca Cruz and her staff. At the time, the school had a fledgling music and film production magnet program, but lacked resources to give students real-world experience.

“We wanted to do something that wasn’t available in the immediate area,” Cruz said, “We knew nothing about the industry.”

But now she exposes students to those who do. During Hilgers’s first period class, Cruz popped in to announce that the following week, students would spend the day at the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot and tour the local NBC affiliate.

“You can see what behind the scenes of a broadcast looks like,” she said.

The school’s faculty includes teachers with strong industry credentials. Hilgers is a former production assistant and screenwriter whose resume includes movies like “Jerry McGuire” and seven seasons of the comedy-crime drama “Psych.”

In her lesson for the day, she told students they could make a diorama, digital presentation or moodboard — a poster that displays the setting and feel of a film — to display their concepts for a story set after a catastrophe wipes out most of civilization. She offered an example of a moodboard from the Netflix period drama , a collage with photos of furniture and clothing styles typical of the early 1800s.

“This designer probably researched that time frame quite thoroughly,” she told them.

This year, students made fake movie trailers and wrote, produced, filmed and edited a horror adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz.” In the process, they learned technical skills such as cinematography and where to position a boom mic to pick up voices.

Next year, the school will add a studio, courtesy of , an editing software company. Post-production is one of three concentrations students can pick for 11th and 12th grade, along with technical and craft areas.

The school will match students with mentors in the industry and eventually develop an apprenticeship program to give them early experience in their chosen field. The goal, said Deborah Marcus, who manages education efforts at Creative Artists, is for graduates to not only land their first job on a crew, but their second and third as well. 

Aiyanna applied for the program after her mother saw an article about it.

“She was like … ‘I’m gonna sign you up right now.’ I guess she wanted me to have something going for me,” she said. “The people who run it, like the actors Mindy Kaling and George Clooney, those are like big people.”

‘A lot of hard work’

Those already in the field know students’ future success hinges on more than technical knowledge or creative ability.

“I tell production assistants all the time: ‘Half of your position is personality. The other half is skill,’” said Frankie Pagnotta, first assistant director of “Abbott Elementary,” the hit ABC sitcom about teachers in a Philadelphia school.

Pagnotta graduated from , a Los Angeles nonprofit that runs a private school with a mission similar to Roybal’s — diversifying the entertainment industry. Now, she mentors young Black production assistants, urging them to be early on set, know their way around the city and not get distracted by talking to friends on the job.

She said she’s worked with a range of young people, from those who balk at menial tasks like passing out call sheets to children of successful directors who are still hungry to prove themselves. 

“It’s a lot of hard work,” she said, “and someone is not going to just hand you a career.”

The magnet program generated lots of favorable buzz at Roybal this year, but like many film characters, the school has a complicated backstory.

The former Belmont Learning Complex sits between two major Los Angeles freeways, atop an abandoned oil field and an earthquake fault. Beset by numerous delays and investigations over potential health and safety hazards, the cost of the project ballooned to nearly . 

The fiasco prompted then-mayor Richard Riordan to support a slate of school board members who ousted the superintendent. When it finally opened in 2008, more than 10 years after construction began, the school was renamed for Edward R. Roybal, the first Latino city councilman in Los Angeles who later served 30 years in Congress. Other programs at the school focus on careers like social work, business and computer science.

Today, the boxy green and tan facility — with its grassy quad and views of the city’s skyscrapers — figures prominently in student-made videos. U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona holds up the new magnet program as a model for other districts. 

“I’m asking superintendents … to learn Roybal’s example,” he said in March during a panel discussion . He visited the school in January with second gentleman Douglas Emhoff and said he wants schools in production hubs like New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta to replicate the magnet’s model.

In California, magnet schools don’t receive more funding than traditional schools, despite higher costs for specially trained teachers and industry-specific equipment and facilities. At Roybal, the initial funding from Amazon Studios, Fox Corp., Paramount and other entertainment companies pays for a managing director who serves as a liaison between the school and the studios. A program coordinator plans events like field trips and master classes taught by professionals. 

The partners also hired a curriculum consultant and are developing online lessons to share with students around the world. But in another year, they’ll need to secure future funding. Cardona noted that the Biden administration’s includes $200 million to support “career-connected learning.” 

For now, Jaison and Aiyanna are soaking up as much as they can. Jaison is an aspiring animator who already knows how to edit manga panels — the comic book style that originated in Japan. 

Aiyanna said she’s “sampling” and wants to learn all aspects of the business, but is leaning toward writing.

Despite its entertainment focus, the program doesn’t ignore traditional high school content. Hilgers and an English teacher collaborated on a project inspired by The History Channel in which students researched female poets and made 30-second documentaries about their work.

“Say you’re doing a horror film, and [a character has] a deep cut. You want to have the right body parts in place,” he said. “You need to know about science to make a science film.”

When Lourd and Clooney visited the school, they observed a math lesson based on production budgets and the daily cost of making a film like “Black Panther.”

Lourd said, “George and I were standing there saying, ‘I wish I’d gone to this high school.’ ”

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