Click on the play button below to hear Miami Central High principal Doug Rodriguez discuss his experiences.

By RICARDO LOPEZ

MIAMI — It’s 12:30 p.m., and lunch is over. Footsteps and loud voices echo through the corridors of Miami Central High School as administrators and security guards hustle hundreds of students to class.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” one administrator yells. Nearby, two boys squabble. “You did tell her!” one shouts. The other marches off, hurrying to class.

Moving with the flow, Doug Rodriguez works the crowd, shaking hands with administrators and chatting up students, taking note of their concerns. Rodriguez, the new principal, is considered by education and government officials to be one of the top principals in Florida. And at Miami Central, he has one job: to turn this struggling 50-year-old high school around in six months.

If he doesn’t, the district will close the school and reopen it with a new staff, a new administration and a new, unspecified program. Rodriguez, 43, refuses to consider that option.

“I don’t think in terms of not succeeding,” he says, seated in his office after lunch. “I see the ability here and the opportunity for the change.”

That change must come fast. In the next two months, students will take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, which assesses reading, writing and math skills. The state exam is required for graduation and is the benchmark for how schools are rated.

For five consecutive years, Miami Central has earned an F grade, making it one of the lowest-performing schools in Miami-Dade County. Nearly 90 percent of the students do not meet the state’s standards in reading, and 68 percent do not measure up in math. It wasn’t always like this.

From the 1960s to the late 1980s, Miami Central was a high-achievement school. Some Miami Central graduates earned scholarships to Ivy League schools, including Cornell and Yale universities.

Then, in the 1990s, the school went through a succession of leaders, and the surrounding neighborhood’s demographic shifted, with lower-income households moving in. This put pressure on Miami Central to provide more support for students coming from increasingly unstable homes.

Rodriguez transferred here three weeks ago after asking Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, to place him in a struggling school. His presence is a sort of homecoming — Miami Central is where he started as a social studies teacher two decades ago.

“I walk into my old classroom,” he says, and “I definitely feel a connection.”

Rodriguez has a reputation for taking on difficult assignments, which he says he uses to stay motivated. Elsewhere in the county, in the three years he led Miami Springs Senior High School, from 2003 to 2006, Rodriguez raised the school’s rating from a D to a B grade. Later in 2006, Rodriguez oversaw the opening of Ronald W. Reagan/Doral Senior High School. The school earned an A grade its first year and continues to flourish.

Mayors in Miami Springs and Doral were so ecstatic about Rodriguez’s performance that they each declared specific days “Principal Douglas Rodriguez Day.”

The plaques commemorating those honors line Rodriguez’s office walls at Miami Central, along with framed tickets and photographs he and his wife have taken at Dallas Cowboys football games.

Rodriguez, the latest of several principals to head Miami Central in the past three years, says he’s up for the challenges he’ll face, like earning the trust of his students and trying to re-energize the school’s shrinking staff.

Rodriguez must also minimize disruptions from the construction going on at the school to replace older buildings. Because of the construction, there isn’t enough room at Miami Central for all the students, and 170 students in the freshman class must attend school three miles away, at Westview Middle School.

Some say Rodriguez’s presence is already lifting morale at the high school.

“The first time I met him, he walked up to me, took my hand and cupped it, and said, ‘It’s going to be OK,’” recalled Nevia Bellamy, a counselor who works with students to resolve conflicts, problems with drugs, and home and family issues.

Vice Principal Atunya Walker said she’s relieved that Rodriguez is here.

“We needed clear direction,” she said. “I didn’t have that before.”

Together, the school leaders are pushing students to prepare for the FCAT.

Fliers posted in classrooms urge students to sign up for tutoring, and some teachers will drop students’ lowest test grade in their classes for attending 12 hours’ worth of study sessions.

Superintendent Carvalho has also set up a tutoring initiative known as the Success Academy to help students in struggling schools prepare for the state exam. Students are paid $30 for every Saturday session they attend; the money comes from donations secured by Carvalho.

Some students say they’re optimistic about the school’s chance to raise its grade, but others are still wary.

Natasha Cimith, a junior, said she believes Miami Central could go from an F to a C but behavioral problems need sorting out first.

If the school closes, “what are they going to do with us?” Cimith said. “Send us to another low-performing school and fail us there, or send us to a high-performing school and bring them down?”

At a recent after-school faculty meeting, Rodriguez outlined his plan to help teachers maximize students’ time in class by eliminating disruptions. One strategy calls for classrooms to be locked at the start of each period. Students who arrive late must miss the lesson and spend the period in the school auditorium under the watch of a school official.

It used to be that “the bell was merely a suggestion to get to class,” Rodriguez said. “Now, you have to be on time to have the privilege of being in class.”

Rodriguez said that he knows some students will protest the new policies and changes, but that students need to accept them for the school to survive.

“If kids ask why things are changing,” he told the gathered teachers, “blame everything on me.”