Saturday Study Hall: It’s a Working Breakfast Club

As the hands of the Edison High School cafeteria clock approached 7 a.m. on a recent Saturday, Allyn Van Ry signed in with security guard Geri Takkinene. The 17-year-old senior then hurriedly found a chair at one of the rows of tables being filled by about 40 fellow students at the Huntington Beach school.

When the clock struck 7, teacher Hal Stevens stepped to the podium at the front of the dimly lit room and tapped lightly on the microphone. The students’ banter, giggling and seat shifting suddenly stopped.

Under the watchful eyes of security guards Takkinene, Inez Gadient and teacher Stevens, Van Ry and the other students pulled out textbooks, notebooks, pencils and pens and sighed audibly as their three-hour study hall got under way.

Each Saturday this scene is repeated at high schools throughout Orange County. From a mere handful of Saturday detention halls just a decade ago, these programs have spread in the last five years to most of the county’s 54 public high schools, according to interviews with administrators from the majority of the county’s 15 high school districts.

In most of the Saturday morning detention halls, students study silently for three to four hours. In a few, students spend their Saturday mornings picking up trash, painting walls, pulling weeds and doing other maintenance work on schoolgrounds, administrators say.

Most high school administrators agree that the Orange County detention programs bear little resemblance to the Saturday study hall that was the subject of the youth movie “The Breakfast Club.”

Said Edison’s Stevens: “In the movie the only thing the dean who ran that study hall did was to shove the kids into a room and close the door behind him. He just let the kids spend their time unsupervised, and without any educational program, until their hours were up.”

“It wasn’t a bad movie because it tried to tell about personal problems faced by kids today,” continued Stevens, 60, a former English teacher who retired from Edison two years ago and then set up the Saturday Study Program. “But it was just a movie; it wasn’t about real life.

‘Kids Constantly Supervised’

“In our study hall, kids are constantly supervised. They’re required to make up the school work they missed during the week.

“The kids also have to participate in discussions led by myself or guest speakers on how they can do better schoolwork and what methods to use to get along with their parents.

“I pass out surveys at the beginning of each semester. From their responses, it’s clear kids want to learn a lot more about how to handle peer pressures to drink, use drugs, smoke cigarettes or engage in sexual activities.”

Van Ry is an alumnus of the campus cleanup program that Edison operated on Saturdays until last fall, when it was discontinued because school officials felt that students would benefit more from studying and lectures.

“What Mr. Stevens does is better,” Van Ry said. “He brings in speakers to help you with your problems, like the guy who came in today to talk about how you get cancer from smoking.”

Of course, one of the main purposes of Saturday detention is to punish errant students--mostly for being truant or habitually tardy or for other relatively minor school infractions.

Missed School Monday

“This ruined my Saturday,” complained Jennifer Harris, 15, an Edison junior who’d been assigned to the Saturday Study Program because she’d ditched school the previous Monday. “And I couldn’t go out last night because I had to be here so early this morning.”

Indeed, most administrators no longer believe that the traditional suspension for truancy--technically “defiance of authority”--is an effective punishment for an unexcused absence from school.

“Today, there are fewer adults at home during the day to supervise kids on suspension,” said Gerald Rayle, who, as director of secondary education for the Irvine Unified School District, oversees disciplinary policies for the district’s three high schools.

“All a suspension does is turn the kid out on the street or allow him to sit around the house and watch TV with his buddies,” Rayle said. “Kids treat a suspension like it was a vacation.”

Decrease in Suspensions

School administrators say suspensions have decreased considerably due to Saturday detention programs. In the Saturday Work Program at Estancia High School in Costa Mesa, students spend four hours picking up trash and doing other campus maintenance tasks. Before the program started four years ago, Assistant Principal Bill Wetzel said that about 100 students were suspended annually.

This number has been cut in half. “The days of letting a kid turn a three-day suspension into a three-day vacation are over,” Wetzel said.

Edison senior Van Ry acknowledged that the Saturday Study Program had discouraged him from ditching school, which he said he finds “boring.” Last year he was truant eight times and had to attend an equal number of detention sessions.

However, this was Van Ry’s first Saturday detention this year. “About two weeks ago I ditched school with some friends; we went to the beach,” he said.

‘Definitely a Hassle’

When his phony readmittance slip was detected by Edison administrators the following day, they assigned him to Saturday detention.

“It’s definitely a hassle having to be here at 7 a.m. Saturdays,” Van Ry said as he edged out the door after the session. “My parents definitely aren’t happy; they’ve put me on restriction for a week. Now, it’s less trouble to just go to school.”

Proponents of Saturday detention say it forces students to make up schoolwork they missed. “Kids who ditched school fell farther behind in school when we suspended them for being truant,” said Irvine’s Rayle, explaining why his district began a Saturday school program at its three high schools five years ago.

At Brea-Olinda High, students who are truant during the school week must make up missed work on a Saturday, Vice Principal Gil Moe said. This has caused a 50% decline in truancies in the three years since Brea-Olinda began its Saturday school, Moe said.

Perhaps the single biggest reason for the unprecedented popularity of Saturday detention, administrators say, is that it usually allows them to recoup state funds that truant students are costing districts by their mere absence from school.

Absences Are Costly

“Every day they are out of school--either because they are truant or because we have to suspend them--we lose money because we’re reimbursed on the basis of our average daily attendance,” Rayle said.

In the Garden Grove Unified School District, each day a student is truant he or she costs the district $13.22 in state funds, said spokesman Alan Trudell. While the Garden Grove district, like most others in the county, has done no detailed study on the full magnitude of the loss, Trudell said it is large because the district has seven high schools.

A high school that has made such a study is Brea-Olinda. Vice Principal Moe found that during the 1979-80 school year there were 530 full-day truancies and 202 full-day suspensions.

Based on the $9.60-per-student reimbursement that the school then was receiving--it is now $12.77--Moe’s study found that the Brea-Olinda Unified School District, which has only one high school and is one of the county’s smaller districts, was losing $7,170 annually in average daily attendance funds because of these 732 unexcused absences.

Impetus Was Money

“The impetus for the spread of these Saturday detention programs was money,” Laguna Beach High School Principal Anthony Ortega said. He has watched them expand from a few high schools in the Anaheim Union High School District in the late ‘60s to most high schools in the county in the ‘80s.

Echoing this view, Edison Dean of Students Ron Wooten said: “About five years ago, administrators began to realize that suspensions were an expensive way of disciplining students, especially if you’ve got declining enrollments.”

Since each full-time student brings in roughly $2,400 annually, the loss of tens of thousands of students due to declining high school enrollments has severely cut the incomes of most of the county’s high school districts.

Teachers, administrators and support staff have lost jobs. Those who remain on the high school payrolls say they find themselves working in deteriorating buildings and teaching classes with bloated enrollments, said Jim Buhman, a dean of students at Edison.

Teachers and administrators wrestled with ways to boost average daily attendance--and the state money that comes with it. The most effective technique has proved to be Saturday detention programs.

“In lieu of suspending these students, you have them come in on Saturday,” Ortega said. “By having the kid attend school on Saturday, you’re able to count him on the books as if he had attended school during the week.”

Rather than taking a double loss, first from the student’s being truant and then turning around and losing him for a second day by suspending him for his truancy, Saturday detention results in schools taking no average daily attendance loss at all, Ortega said.

At Laguna Beach High, with fewer than 1,000 students and relatively few truants, “it’s not financially feasible for us to have a Saturday detention program,” Ortega said.

However, Ortega, who is in his first year as principal of Laguna Beach High, has successfully used Saturday detention at other schools at which he has been an administrator. He says he may implement Saturday detention at Laguna Beach should his initial assessment of the school’s attendance problems change.

Some Programs Funded

Rather than depending on part of its recouped average daily attendance funds to cover the cost of Saturday detention, Capistrano Unified School District is among a few districts that rely on 1984 state legislation that covers the costs of Saturday detention programs--provided they are solely study halls and exclude any campus maintenance work.

Capistrano Assistant Supt. George Dibs said a typical Saturday detention session is attended by 15 to 20 students and is supervised by one teacher. He gave the program credit for a 25% drop in truancies at the district’s three high schools in the past year.

Should students fail to bring study materials or fail to show up for Saturday detention, Los Alamitos is among a handful of schools that have implemented a so-called On Campus Suspension.

“On Monday morning, two or three kids have to come to a 6 1/2-hour study hall,” said Los Alamitos Associate Principal Tom Anthony, who conceived and implemented the program a year ago. “The kids really hate this.

Must Work Nonstop

“They can’t put their heads down. They have to work through nonstop, with the exception of a 10-minute lunch . . . in the room. They can’t say a word, and they don’t see anybody during the whole day because their backs are to the teacher, and they’re in these little cubicles.

“We call it the ‘sweat box.’ It works so well that we have very, very few repeaters.”

“The only drawback is that the conditions are so bad that we always have a hard time finding a teacher for supervision,” Anthony said, because the teachers dislike the confinement, too.

As she left Edison’s study program the other Saturday, Brigette Bellon said: “I think I learned a lesson being here.” The 17-year-old junior said she was there because she’d been tardy to her first-period class four times recently.

Bellon added that this was her first Saturday detention session, and she planned to make it her last. “I’m not going to be late to classes again,” she said. “Having to be here at 7 a.m. really messed up my sleep.”