American-Born Students Find Dwindling Ranks Unsettling : Coping With Change

After teaching science at Hollywood High School for 25 years, Harry Hughes might be expected to occasionally dwell in the past.

When the feeling strikes, he hauls out an old yearbook--always the same one, a red, dog-eared annual from Hollywood High’s Class of 1968--from a stack of chemistry and biology texts and passes it among his students.

Last week, Hughes fetched the book for yet another class. As it passed through rows of newly arrived immigrant students, handed off from Salvadorans to Armenians to Vietnamese to Nicaraguans, Hughes listened to their shocked gasps and waited for the familiar question.

Finally, it came: “Why,” asked one baffled student, “were there so many white people?”

The faces of white, all-American teen-agers once dominated the pages of Hollywood High School’s yearbooks. For decades, the affluent children of the Hollywood Hills used Hollywood High as their college prep school. They stocked the school’s football teams and cheerleading squads with the most athletic and winsome among them, while teachers like Harry Hughes propelled them on the path to inevitable adult success.

But those days are long gone. As Hollywood High reels from successive waves of emigres, first from Soviet Armenia, then Southeast Asia, and now Central America, the remaining American-born students--who now make up less than 20% of the school’s 2,100-population--have become a dwindling, uneasy minority.

Most American students have found that their contacts with Hollywood’s immigrants have led to rewarding friendships and a deeper appreciation of cultural differences. But some admit to yearning for more of their own. And some Americans complain that their education is sometimes hampered by classes that are largely made up of English-poor immigrant students--a grievance often echoed by their teachers.

At least a third of the school’s 100 teachers have been at Hollywood High long enough to remember when American-born students were in the majority. Many, like Harry Hughes, have adapted to Hollywood High’s new world. Others have stubbornly continued teaching methods no longer suited to the school’s ethnic mix. A few have simply given up and retired, still clinging to visions of the Hollywood High that existed when they were in their prime.

“The whole situation was just so overwhelming,” said Harry Major, 53, a Shakespeare scholar who taught at Hollywood for 28 years before taking early retirement last year. “Students were checking in and out of my classes all the time. Hardly any of them understood what I was trying to teach. I never knew if I was getting in a new crop of kids. . . . I used to try to put a positive tone on it, but after a while, I realized I didn’t know where to even begin with them.”

When Major joined Hollywood High’s faculty in 1956, he came to a teacher’s paradise, a school so accustomed to academic excellence that teaching openings were hard to find.

“It was like moving to a small New England prep school,” said Willard Hansen, who taught English between 1954 and 1962 and returned to Hollywood last year to become the school’s principal. “None of the teachers ever left, because they had it so good.”

Hollywood’s scholastic reputation was no fluke. Students were required to write a flawless English composition to graduate. A solitary misspelled word or run-on sentence could mean the difference between passing or flunking.

“The goal was to program kids for college,” said John Swinford, a 1967 Hollywood graduate who now heads the school’s English department. “Not everyone went, but even if they went into a white-collar job, they had a good education behind them. Hollywood High was a steppingstone to life.”

Whether they came from affluent families in the hills or middle-class homes in the Hollywood flats, the vast majority of Hollywood’s students were white and monied enough to live without worrying about life’s realities. Anxieties came only when their grades dipped or their social lives suffered.

The most golden among them were the “soshes”--wealthy and social students from the hills who drove down to school each day in Mustangs and Chevrolet convertibles. They always looked good, wearing school fraternity and sorority jackets over their stylish madras shirts and long, A-line dresses. Most of the school’s student leaders came from their ranks and they often appeared in dramatic productions attended by Hollywood talent scouts.

The school had other crowds, too--surfers who lived only for sunny weekends, leather-jacketed hoods who were the first to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs and, as might be expected in a school with a bookish bent, intellectuals who looked down on all of them.

‘A Little Weird’

John Swinford hung out with the intellectuals, usually taking the bus to school, but sometimes sheepishly showing up in his father’s Cadillac. “We were the sort who would put blindfolds on at lunch and feel each other’s lunch bags--kind of a sensory-deprivation experiment,” he recalled. “When I tell my students about it now, they think I’m a little weird.”

Hollywood High’s insulated little world was rocked in 1968, when the school district decided to shrink the school’s attendance boundaries. Students had once come to Hollywood from as far north as Studio City. But the redistricting placed the northern boundary at Mulholland Drive, atop the hills, effectively cutting out some of the school’s most affluent neighborhoods.

“That was the turning point,” Harry Major said. “In one blow, we lost the cream of our students.”

In the decade that followed, the move proved even more decisive. The middle-class white population in Hollywood’s flatlands fled, replaced by a succession of immigrants. And as the immigrant population grew, more and more of the remaining white families in the hills apparently began placing their children in private schools.

“I don’t think we’ve ever checked to see what percentage of the families in the hills send their kids to private schools,” Hansen said, “but I would guess it’s substantial. And it probably reached its peak five or six years ago, so it’s probably been downhill since then.”

Many of Hollywood High’s remaining hillside students have friends in private schools. Often, they have to correct misleading horror tales whispered by their friends about Hollywood students victimized by gang members or caught up in rampant drug abuse.

Given a Choice

“You wonder where some of these stories come from,” said Teddy Guggenheim, 16, a junior. “As far as I know, drugs are worse in private schools.”

Donovan Leitch, 17, the son of folk-singer Donovan, said his parents gave him a choice of attending a private school or Hollywood High. “There was no contest,” he said. “I chose Hollywood. There’s more reality here. I didn’t want to be sheltered. I haven’t regretted it.”

Yet his parents sent his younger sister to Immaculate Heart, a parochial school. “They were afraid kids here would give her a lot of flack because she’s good looking,” he said. “They would, but the thing is, she’d survive it and do just great here.”

But students like Guggenheim and Leitch are the exceptions among hillside youths. According to estimates by school officials, this year’s class has the lowest percentage of American-born students in Hollywood High’s 82-year history. American-born white students now make up less than 12% of the school’s 2,100-member student body; American-born black students--many of whom transferred in from schools outside the Hollywood area--make up another 8%.

American-born students tend not to keep to themselves. Most find friends among immigrant students who came up with them from elementary and junior high school.

Alicia Klutske, 16, who lives in the hills, joined a close-knit circle of American and Filipino students who went to junior high school together and then went on to Hollywood High. “After you hang around people for so many years, you don’t think of them as your Filipino friends,” she said. “They’re just your friends.”

‘Shock for Me’

LaTania Coleman, 16, a black 11th grader whose family moved to Hollywood from Alabama, found friends among a group of Latino youths. “It was a shock for me because where I came from, I was in a school with mostly black kids and a few white kids,” she said.

Leitch, 17, who is student body president, says that American-born students have to be “a little bit like chameleons. There aren’t enough of us to stay together like the Armenians or a lot of the immigrants do. The American kids have to get along with everyone.”

Still, there are times when Georgina Rich, a 17-year old junior, wanders the campus of Hollywood High and feels strangely dislocated. “When you see all these other kids who aren’t like you, you begin to feel like you’re in another country, that you’re not an American,” she said. “Sometimes I wish there were just a few more of us.”

Ernest Richardson, 17, a black senior, has a hard time explaining to immigrant students that he is not simply a black student, but an American black student. “Some of these foreign kids only see me as a black,” he said. “They don’t understand that this is my country. I’m the American here. It makes you wonder what it would be like with more American kids.”

That vague yearning is familiar to John Swinford. “My American-born students rarely come out and say it,” he said. “But you pick it up in code. One kid will say, ‘This place is getting to look like the barrio.’ It’s not tension. It’s just that they feel overwhelmed by the immigrant kids.”

Even in Swinford’s honors American Literature course, only six of 29 students were born in the United States. While all are bright enough to read and comprehend difficult 19th-Century American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Swinford expected the American students to fare better, simply because of their backgrounds.

Outlooks Differ

Instead, Swinford found that his American students either slack off because they feel linguistically superior to immigrant students or, even more surprisingly, learn at the same pace as immigrant students because they have been learning at the same level throughout elementary school and junior high school.

American-born students at Hollywood High see the situation differently. Some say that in classes such as English and American history, foreign students tend to learn at a slower pace. As teachers repeatedly interrupt their classes to help the immigrants, American students complain that they become bored.

In Esteban Martorell’s 11th-grade history class, a discussion was halted last week when the teacher mentioned a military coup. “He had to stop the class and explain what a military coup was,” said Martorell, 17, an American-born student. “All the American kids knew what it was, but we had to wait while the teacher interrupted the class to explain. When the class learns at the same speed, like in mathematics, it’s great. But in a class like history, everyone’s learning in different directions.”

John Swinford estimates that he often takes a month on topics that could be covered in two weeks at predominantly American schools. According to Swinford and others, problems with American-born students arise when they share classes with immigrant students who have done well enough to leave Hollywood High’s basic English courses, but are not sophisticated enough to hold their own with the Americans.

Willard Hansen says that teachers have had to adapt, teaching to groups of individuals within a class instead of teaching the class as a whole. “Teachers are doing it at Hollywood High,” he said. “It can be done.”

Harry Hughes has learned to adapt. He says he explains more. He often draws diagrams on his blackboard and uses filmstrips to illustrate complex chemical reactions and biological trends. “You have to work harder with these immigrant kids, but it’s part of the job,” he said.

But there are still teachers at Hollywood High who go through each day teaching the same way they taught 20 years ago. In one teacher’s class, students are given a U--an unsatisfactory mark--if they speak in languages other than English. Others have been known to refuse to interrupt their classes to help confused immigrant students. Some have even been known to abuse immigrant students, wisecracking about their difficulties with English or their hygiene habits, according to students.

Quit After 25 Years

Harry Major could take only so much. After teaching a comprehensive English course for 25 years, he withdrew. “I wasn’t reaching the students,” he said. He began teaching a course in guidance, a class designed to supplement Hollywood’s driver education course.

But even that proved too difficult. After two years, he decided to quit.

“It hit me hardest when I returned each September,” he said. “I’d look around me and I’d think, ‘My God, do I really do this for a living?’ I would think about how receptive the students used to be and how they’ve changed. I felt like I was trying to keep the faith among infidels.”