A Day for Second Chances

FOR THE RECORD:
Graduation: A story in Friday's California section about a continuation school graduation attributed a quote about overcoming drug addiction to the wrong speaker. The story stated that Barbara Hernandez from Youth Opportunities Unlimited High School, said: "My story is just one of the hundreds of stories seated in these chairs this afternoon. We have worked incredibly hard to make up for past mistakes." That quote actually came from Amy Leckliter of Mt. Lukens High School. —

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On Thursday, his friends and family waited to hear "Isaac Castillo" ring from the speakers in a little-known graduation ceremony held on the gang-neutral territory of Pacific Palisades. Isaac was among nearly 800 students from across Los Angeles who graduated from one of the Los Angeles Unified School District's 59 alternative high schools this year.

"I never thought this day would come," said Isaac, who donned a white cap and gown in the ceremony on the football field named the Stadium by the Sea at Pacific Palisades Charter High School.

Isaac belongs to a group of 11 childhood buddies — they call themselves the Outsiders — featured in a February Los Angeles Times series on high school dropouts. In 2001, they entered high school in Van Nuys together. At Birmingham, they fought, skipped, stumbled and failed together.

Only three Outsiders from Birmingham's class of 2005 graduated. Isaac was among the eight who didn't make it.

Eight months later, he became one of 8,000 students enrolled in L.A. Unified's Educational Options programs. Each year, more than 1,000 students earn diplomas from the alternative schools, according to Ken Easum, district coordinator for the department.

Yet as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa uses the district's high dropout rate to bolster his school takeover plan, and the district carves its large campuses into clusters of smaller learning academies, Easum feels like the kid in the back of the classroom who can't get the teacher's attention.

"We're the model they ignore," said Easum, who added that neither the mayor nor Supt. Roy Romer has attended an Options graduation.

"We're one of the largest dropout prevention programs in the state — and the dropout numbers reflect that," Easum said. "Our job is to help these kids after other schools have given up on them."

This year's ceremony suggested that the district might finally be catching on. It drew top-level administrators as well as Board of Education President Marlene Canter, who gave a keynote address.

"You are the ones the dropout statistics missed, and you are the ones who never gave up," Canter told the students, who wore white, blue, black, green, gray and burgundy gowns, depending on which school they had attended.

A study of graduation rates released this week by Education Week researchers concluded that less than half of L.A. Unified students graduate from high school within four years — a number that district and state officials dispute.

Alternative schools have been largely left out of recent discussions about boosting graduation rates. Most districts would rather focus on improving existing high schools than on expanding the alternatives, which tend to cost more, said Dennis Fisher, consultant to the state Department of Education on continuation schools.

"The very existence of Options," he said, suggests that the traditional program "isn't perfect."

Thursday's ceremony celebrated a rite of passage that the graduates might otherwise have missed. Their families traveled from across the city to the upscale beach community that organizers chose for the ceremony because it did not cross gang turfs.

"We have people coming from all over the county — Bloods, Crips," said Robert Meier, an Options assistant principal.

Against a backdrop of green hills and an American flag, one student speaker wept as she talked about overcoming drug addiction. She said she found support at Youth Opportunities Unlimited High School.