Campus Life Crippled by Epidemic of ‘Senioritis’

Mee Kim, vice president of the senior class at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, has been fighting off the “senioritis” that is epidemic among her peers.

“It’s kind of hard sometimes not to ditch and go crazy,” Mee said. “But I keep telling myself it’s almost over. Even if I want to come back next year, I won’t be able to.”

Most of the 654 members of Taft’s Class of 1987--indeed, most high-school seniors everywhere--are counting the days until graduation.

Commencement at Taft is June 17. Meanwhile, preoccupied with the prom and uncertainty about what life holds after high school, the seniors keep forgetting why they must concentrate on calculus and English composition.

Something is ending forever, something unimaginably exciting is about to begin, and that seems infinitely more important than perfect attendance or spot quizzes or even term papers, all matters that once loomed large.

Called a Normal Stage

“Everybody has it,” Tim Hall, a senior at Palos Verdes High School in Palos Verdes Estates, said of senioritis. “Everybody says, ‘Don’t study. I’m not going to study. Let’s go to a movie.’ ” While the term does not appear in textbooks, senioritis is described by psychologists as a normal but often anxiety-ridden stage that teen-agers pass through on their way to adult autonomy.

Senioritis is rarely fatal. But, as one school official pointed out, it is highly contagious: “It’s as bad as seasickness,” he said. And it is an annual trial for teachers and school administrators who find that their once diligent, even driven students are suddenly as distractable as 3-year-olds.

Jim Kinney, director of student activities at Palos Verdes, said the condition is as predictable as graduation. “It starts the same time every year--the moment the colleges send their acceptances out in mid-April,” he said. “You can almost set your watch by it. Then the weather gets nice. It’s a deadly combination.”

Asked to describe the syndrome, Kinney said: “It’s like cruise control in a car. The kids put themselves on automatic pilot.”

Threshold to Adulthood

Sandy Collins, a Taft administrator and an adviser to the senior class, said some seniors “realize this is the end of the line--their last chance to be teen-agers before accepting responsibility. Sometimes they revert and act immature, but that’s the exception.”

Taft senior Holly Priebe said senioritis transformed her overnight. “It hits you like this,” she said, snapping her fingers. “One day you wake up and you know you’re going to be moving on. It’s scary. You don’t want to leave. Now you have to step out into the real world.”

Liz Beckenbach, who graduated earlier this month from Marlborough School in Hancock Park, said she, too, underwent a dramatic transformation. Before, she said, “I was such a geek. I turned everything in on time. I never ditched.”

But, on Dec. 13, she found out she had been accepted at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the college of her choice, and a new Liz emerged. “Once I found out I was accepted, I came in the next day out of uniform!”

“Let’s face it,” said Lu B. Wenneker, college counselor at the private girls school. “Once they’ve got their college applications out of the way, it’s treading water. Most schools spend a great deal of time finding things to keep seniors interested and in school.”

Early Graduation

Senioritis was so widespread at Marlborough this year that the administration decided to hold graduation early, on May 20, instead of in June, as in the past.

Symptoms vary but most afflicted seniors say they would rather do almost anything than study, including sleep and watch soap operas. And the beach never looked better. Taft senior Kimberly Woodard confessed that she recently ditched--or skipped school--one day and went to Malibu, despite the fact that her father, James Woodard, teaches at Taft.

Apathy is endemic among second-semester seniors. As Marlborough’s Kathy Durousseau succinctly put it: “It just doesn’t matter.” Classmate Sara Golding, who lives in Los Feliz, was more specific. “Colleges will never see our second-semester grades,” said Sara, who has been accepted at Yale. That’s not strictly true, according to Wenneker. Colleges occasionally rescind their acceptances of students who perform abominably during the second semester of their senior year, but not often.

What did suddenly matter to the Marlborough seniors was their friends and even those other students they did not really get to know and will probably never see again after graduation.

“There is nothing left but friendship,” Kathy said.

“I hate the school more than I ever did, but I love the people,” another Marlborough senior observed.

The intense feeling of sisterhood among the Marlborough seniors came as a surprise to some. It is an extremely competitive institution, where most students are aware that they are scrambling for a handful of places at Ivy League and other highly selective colleges and universities.

But, as Lori Matloff said: “The competition between us is gone, and we care about each other. I couldn’t be happier about some of the things that have happened to people if they had happened to me.”

Ambivalence was another common characteristic of seniors. As Lori noted, “You’re torn because you want to get out of school, but your friends are here.”

This feeling of being divided is common among seniors, according to psychologists.

Herbert J. Freudenberger, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who treats many adolescents in New York City, describes the senior year of high school as a time fraught with anxiety, not unlike that faced by people on the verge of retirement.

Substance Abuse

“Sometimes kids begin using more dope and alcohol as a way of not facing the anxieties and stresses and pressures they’re going to face by going out in the world,” Freudenberger said.

In Freudenberger’s view, a major concern for seniors is that their world will no longer be highly structured.

Once you are out of school, he noted, “the year doesn’t start in September, it starts in January.” Suddenly, he said, “seniors have too much space, too little to do, too much ambiguity.”

Moreover, once students graduate from high school, he said, they suddenly feel that they are responsible, rightly or wrongly, for what happens to them.

“They can’t blame other people anymore,” he said. “Now it’s them.”

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Martin E. Ford, a developmental psychologist on the faculty of the Stanford University School of Education, is not sure whether senioritis is a genuine psychological phenomenon or a cultural tradition.

To some extent, Ford said, senioritis occurs “because adults expect it and tolerate it and legitimize it.”

At the same time, he said, “it certainly makes sense that people would reinvest their attention and energy and activity into alternate goals or pursuits that are now more relevant to them.”

In other words, it makes sense that seniors would start weaning themselves from an institution--high school--that will soon be closed to them.

As counselor Wenneker said: “There’s a certain fashionable antipathy toward the school in the senior year. But, in the spring, when the reality of leaving hits them, there are tremendous tears. And the ones who are the most vocal about wanting to get out of here are the ones who weep the loudest at graduation.”

Saddle-Shoe Sentiment

Hilarye Johnson became sentimental about saddle shoes.

Saddle shoes are de rigueur at Marlborough but no student with a rudimentary sense of fashion would ever wear clean, new saddle shoes to school.

Sometime in the spring Hilarye realized that she will never again feel obliged to muss up a new pair of saddle shoes by running over them in her car or chicly griming them up by wetting them down and rubbing them with a newspaper.

Lori Matloff suddenly realized that she had just one more assignment to complete before high school was over forever: going to the beach.

“We’ve got to get our backs tanned because our graduation dresses are low in the back,” she explained.

The past is dying.

Long live the future.

“I feel so sorry for the faculty,” Lori said. “They’re going to be here next year.”