No School for Scandal : Private Adventist Academy Has Students Toeing the Mark

Imagine 290 teen-agers attending a boarding school that doesn’t allow radios, tape players or television, or going to movies, or the reading of Western, sci-fi or romantic novels.

Imagine them getting up at 5 or 5:30 in the morning, eating breakfast at 6:15 and being at their first class--or shoveling chicken manure or washing down the cows’ milking stalls--by 7 a.m.

Imagine these teen-agers on a caffeine-free, vegetarian diet, girls not being allowed to wear makeup or jewelry, and nobody allowed to wear blue jeans to class.

Imagine them only going into town, segregated by sex, once every two weeks, and then only for a couple of hours. Imagine these teen-age boys and girls developing romantic notions but not being allowed to go on a walk together or to hold hands, let alone hug or smooch.

Imagine them liking all this.

That’s the kicker--and apparently the reality--of the San Pasqual Academy, a private, co-educational boarding school for high school students on the far edge of this agricultural valley, 10 miles east of Escondido.

It’s the kind of place that would send shivers up the spines of most teen-agers consumed by music videos, quarter-pounders, “Top Gun,” Sony Walkmans, sleeping in and making out.

But the students at this private school, owned and operated by the Southeastern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, insist that this tightly controlled environment is the kind where they want to spend much of their teen life--even if the rest of the world may be passing them by, for better or worse.

“A lot of kids will bag on (criticize) the rules, but when it comes down to it, they like this place and they don’t want to leave,” said Dwayne Harmon, an 18-year-old senior from Riverside.

“In a public school, you might make a few friends, but here you make a huge family,” said Rose Bowie, a 14-year-old from Sacramento whose comment is echoed by virtually everyone else who is asked.

“Sometimes, it’s nice to be out of the rush,” added Robin Buck, a 17-year-old from Banning, reflecting on the school’s reclusive life style. “And there’s such a variety of kids here, and they’re all accepted for who they are. You don’t have to dress a certain way to get certain friends.”

The school opened in 1949 and spreads over 250 acres on both sides of California 78 at the foothills leading to Ramona. It is neither a college prep school, a military academy nor a reformatory, but rather a fundamental, no-frills high school steeped in the conservative--and distinctive--Christian beliefs of Adventists, including observing the Sabbath on Saturday and vegetarianism.

Principal Curtis Perkins is the first to say the boarding school staff cannot duplicate the positive influences of a good family and home life--but he suggests that it comes close and that is has the advantage of taking the children out of society’s offensive mainstream, tainted if not poisoned by drugs, alcohol, loose sex, vulgar mass media and other manifestations of declining morality.

“It’s altogether possible that a public high school would do a better job, from a strictly academic standpoint,” Perkins said. “But for Christian influence, and for being taken out of some of society’s influences, you can’t beat this.”

About 80% of the students come from Adventist families, a handful of them from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Ethiopia and Lebanon. Non-Adventist students are welcome, too, but they are expected to participate in the daily and Sabbath worship services.

Every student is expected to work for 5 to 23 hours a week in one of a variety of campus jobs that pay minimum wage, to help his parents defray the annual tuition, room and board costs of $5,600, if the family is Adventist, $6,200 if not.

The size of the workload depends on the student’s need for study and how much his parents need him to help pay for his room and board.

Some students prefer working outdoors. There is an egg ranch, whose chickens also are fed a vegetarian diet and are specially vaccinated to reduce the level of carcinogens in their bodies. The 20,000 eggs produced daily are sold at the site, to hospitals and other institutions, and at a variety of retail and gourmet grocery stores around Southern California.

There also is a 270-cow dairy, with a daily output of 1,800 gallons of milk, which is sold to the co-op California Milk Producers before it is sold under the Lady Lee brand name.

And there are jobs on the farm, where the grass and hay is grown to feed the cows, or more routine ground keeping and maintenance chores elsewhere on campus.

But most of the student body is employed in either of two assembly-and-packaging plants (current customers include Kaiser Hospital, for thousands of “flu remedy” kits, and the distributor of a Japanese fishing pole-and-reel set), the campus book bindery plant (which has among its clients the Los Angeles County Law Library and the Scripps Clinic medical library) or a host of clerical, janitorial, cafeteria and dormitory jobs.

The various campus jobs are not so much intended to teach specific skills as they are to introduce to the teens a work ethic to prepare them for future employment, whatever the field or occupation, school officials say.

“Some kids haven’t washed a dish or made a bed at home, and their parents want them to learn how to start working. Bookbinding is simply a means to an end--to learn to work for someone else and punch a clock,” said Clair Barnhart, manager of the Golden Rule Bindery, which employees 20 students part time, along with a full-time staff of 18 adults.

Students at each work center are graded--and paid--according to their attendance, productivity, quality of work, cooperativeness, ability to learn, safety attitude and job interest--principles that can be transferred upon graduation to any job, their supervisors point out.

Perkins said that in addition to offering a basic education and work experience, the boarding school environment prepares the students to live away from home, to tolerate others and to develop a sense of responsibility--even given the tight rein held over the students.

It’s not altogether unusual, Perkins said, for an occasional student to rebel against the academy rules and go AWOL from campus, maybe not to return. But prospective students are interviewed before they are enrolled to make sure it’s their desire as much as their parents’ that they attend the school.

If it isn’t, they’re not accepted, and Perkins said he generally is successful in filtering out candidates for reform school, partly because a troublemaker will realize “he can bamboozle his parents at home better than he can bamboozle us.”

The weekday routine starts with an optional jogging class at 5:30 a.m. The freshmen and juniors generally attend classes in the morning, beginning at 7, while the sophomores and seniors use the morning hours to work and study. Lunch is at noon, and from 1 to 5, the freshmen and juniors work and study while the sophomores and seniors attend classes.

Dinner is from 5 to 6 p.m. From 6 to 7, all students are required either to be in the gymnasium for free-time recreation such as volleyball or basketball, or to be in their dormitories studying, reading or resting. A daily half hour of Bible study, discussion and prayer is held at 7 p.m., and everyone is sent to their dorms at 7:30. Lights go out at 9:30 p.m.

The schedule does not allow much time for group and individual socializing. But the students say they learn to make the most of it, and the campus does not want for occasional lighter--not to say bizarre--moments.

There was the time, for instance, when someone tied a cat to the catalytic converter of the car driven by the boys’ dean and stuck a cow’s tongue in the car’s glove compartment.

More innocently, students like to frustrate the campus security guard--whose job is, among other things, to keep watch over students on the sprawling campus--by hiding his motorcycle in the girls’ bathroom, or by taking the spark plug out of the cycle’s engine.

Then there is the black market in the dormitories, with students selling cans of Pepsi and Coke sneaked onto the campus for as much as $1, and slices of pepperoni pizza fetching $2.

An ongoing game between students and staff is the clandestine keeping of radios and tape players. Last year, 26 of them were found and taken from residents of the girls’ dorm, but girls’ Dean Sharon Brandmeyer concedes that there were probably 26 more that went undetected.

A confiscated radio can be “bought back” for $20, but some campus veterans say it’s easier just to sneak a rock music cassette on campus and play it on the tape recorders in the library when they are supposed to be listening to meditation or spiritual music.

Time for romance is perhaps the most serious preoccupation among some students who, if caught while up to no good with a member of the opposite sex, are put on “social”--a restriction of up to two weeks when each is banned from communicating with the other, even through notes channeled through a third party.

Perkins, the principal, said his concern with boys and girls being romantic and alone is not so much that they might get into sexual mischief but that there already is enough time during the day for them to socialize--albeit under supervision--and that any additional time together would be wasteful.

“I think boyfriends and girlfriends probably see each other more here than they would if they went to a day school,” Perkins said. “They see each other all day long.”

But the students still complain about the constant presence of adults. “You’ve got to be a perfect saint, the perfect angel, around here,” one student said over breakfast. “The staff members are everywhere. They even seem to be hiding in the trees.”

Another said, “If they see a boy and girl coming, they automatically think you’ve been doing something you shouldn’t have been.”

A third student complained that after a boy whispered something in her ear, the two were put on “social” because of the suspicion that he had kissed her.

Eighteen-year-old Rich Ross of Riverside notes that he was once put on “grand social,” meaning he couldn’t talk to any girl for two weeks, because he went on the girls’ hiking trail instead of the boys’ trail, and ended up alone with eight co-eds. He smiled at the memory, even though it was one of the girls who turned him in.

Some students beat the system by holding hands--and stealing kisses--when a classroom or the chapel is darkened for a movie. Others will sneak off for privacy among the bushes on campus--and are thankful for the staff member who, on her patrol, will walk through once without looking too hard and announce that a return visit will be made in five minutes. Another staffer wears loud shoes that telegraph her approach, and a third whistles loudly while patrolling.

Other students, with a greater sense of bravado, will escape to one of half a dozen piano rehearsal rooms on campus and rely on a fellow student to serve as lookout while they spend time alone.

“We’ve held hands a bunch, but we haven’t got caught yet,” confessed Fernie Martinez, who for two months has been courting Becca LaMarr on campus.

“It would be misery for two weeks if we were caught,” she interjected.

The two sit together at every opportunity, calculating four hours daily of personal companionship.

“We’ve built a good friendship because all we can do is talk--and talk, and talk and talk,” she said. “And that’s good, but sometimes you need a hug because you’re not feeling good, and you can’t.”

It’s that very element of developing friendships versus flash-in-the-pan romances that has led to some long-lasting relationships, the school’s staff points out.

An example is Mark and LaVonne Cochran, who met as students at the San Pasqual Academy in 1978, attended Loma Linda University together, and married last December. Today, they live in Oceanside and look back on the day they were put on “social” for taking a quiet morning walk together.

“It forces you to talk more, to communicate more, and to not focus on the physical,” LaVonne said of the academy’s boy-girl guidelines. “At the time, you think of all the things you can’t do together, but when you look back, you see how it was nothing but good for our relationship.”

Mark is the oldest of four brothers who have or are now attending the academy. “Your day was so structured,” he said, “that when you spent time together, it was good time.”

Most of the academy’s students say they can understand the strict daily regimen of the school, even if they don’t like it and if they sometimes overcompensate for it on weekend visits home or on the biweekly, three-hour excursions to the North County Fair shopping mall, where they overindulge in hamburgers, french fries and thumbing through tapes and records.

“There was a certain isolation, but what I was missing didn’t really bother me. There were other priorities,” said Jim Miller of Escondido, who graduated in 1970 after spending three years at the school, following in a sister’s footsteps.

“I built relationships with other kids that will continue for the rest of our lives,” he said. “And because of the environment, all the bad influences like drugs, alcohol and smoking were minimized for those years.”

Because of the sheltered existence, the transition to college life and its vices can be startling, he and others said.

“But by the time we went to college, we were responsible enough to handle it,” Mark Cochran said. “The temptations were greater because of all that freedom you suddenly had, but your upbringing was such that you stuck to your principles.”

Fran Blanton of Poway has two children--17-year-old twins Kim and Jim--attending San Pasqual Academy. They opted for the school over Poway High School because of the desire for a smaller, more intimate campus setting like the one they left behind in Ohio.

“It’s really good for them to be on their own--taking care of their own laundry, getting themselves up for class, all that,” Blanton said. “I think they’ve got a greater sense of responsibility than most 17-year-olds.”

Some students are critical, usually lightheartedly, about the vegetarian diet, the ban on rock ‘n’ roll music and the boy-girl restrictions. More seriously, they talk of “living in a fishbowl” and the lack of privacy.

“Granted, there’s not much opportunity to take a long hike and let the wind pass through your mind,” said Carl Ashlock, who teaches “Facing Life,” a values clarification course for seniors.

But on balance, Ashlock and the students in his class give the academy high marks for accomplishing its mission.

“At a public school, there’s more peer pressure and social expectations,” Dwayne Harmon said. “Here, all of you hangs out because you’re here 24 hours a day versus at a public school where you’ll act differently if you’re at school compared to if you’re at home.”

Raffy Yessayan, a 21-year-old Lebanese student, said, “There’s less phoniness here. At other schools, friendships are cheap.”

Ashlock said, “The parents are looking for us to maintain their values system and their ideals of religion. And a lot of our students are raised as youngsters in homes that are more conservative than this school. Some of our students will go home on weekend leaves and be glad to come back here.”