Relevance, Not Rock, Swings High School Campuses as Students Turn Serious

Free-lance rock critic Scott Paul was a 14-year-old with short hair and black plastic glasses when the Doors rocked Reseda’s Cleveland High School during a sixth-period assembly in March, 1967.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen guys with long hair and the whole hippie thing,” Paul said. “The Valley was a little bit behind the times, as usual.

“Jim Morrison was drinking right in the middle of the gym. I think he had a bottle of Wild Turkey. And that was really upsetting the boys’ vice principal because drinking on campus was a big no-no,” Paul said.

“They were real loud and, when they went into the long solo break in ‘Light My Fire,’ Morrison was dancing suggestively to the girls. By the time they finished that song, the boys’ V.P. had pulled the plug on them. And then, I remember, they stole the school P.A. system.”

Twenty years later, a San Fernando Valley high school student would be hard-pressed to hear a rowdy rock band on campus. Today’s assemblies are dominated by groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) or by panel discussions on such topics as drug abuse and global education.

The days of rock ‘n’ roll on Valley high school campuses are, for the most part, over. If you want to know how students are being entertained, just check the list of current social concerns. Relevance has replaced folly in the high school arena.

According to a United Nations declaration, 1987 was “The Year of Shelter,” a year dedicated to publicizing the plight of the homeless. In honor of this declaration, Chatsworth High School recently was host of an assembly featuring Bob Erlenbusch, director of the Los Angeles Homeless Health Care Project.

With his blond beard and neat, faded blue jeans and checkered shirt, Erlenbusch almost seemed to be a relic from the 1960s. And, despite his presentation of some startling statistics--the average age of the 50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles is 30, the average educational level is 12.5 years, and almost 40% have attended college--his message was met with some loud, well-timed snores. After 35 minutes, he concluded his program to polite applause.

Student interest, however, picked up during a question-and-answer session.

“I thought the assembly was really interesting, but I wish he would have brought up that most of these homeless people have opportunities out there, of finding jobs and being in the work force,” said junior Henry Jones. “And I want to stress that people out here are doing it. My mother and father are one example of people doing it, trying to make it with three or four jobs.”

Henry said he did not learn anything at the assembly because “I’ve always been really looking at everything in the world. The news can say one thing, but I have to look out and find out what’s really going on.” He thinks Erlenbusch should arrange for students to meet homeless people to “get the real story.”

Sophomore Jennifer Ford rated the assembly a 7 on a scale of 10, but added: “I already knew most of the stuff he was saying.”

Mark Degenkolb, another sophomore, said the program was “pretty good,” adding, “We had a guy from the U.N. come, and he just rambled on about nothing, and at least this guy had something to talk about and got his point across.”

Mark said most assemblies don’t interest him because “it seems like a lot of people talk at us and not with us.”

Both Mark and Jennifer agreed that a recent assembly on the Holocaust, featuring a woman who had been in a concentration camp, was the most thought-provoking program they have seen in high school, the kind of assembly they might even discuss with their parents.

The switch from pure entertainment to social activism can be attributed to factors both social and legislative. Jack Jacobson, administrator of operations for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Region E (which, along with Region F, covers the Valley), cites a number of reasons for the movement away from assemblies featuring sheer entertainment.

“Technically, you can’t charge for any activity you have during the school day, under state law,” said Jacobson, a 30-year veteran of the school system who previously was principal of Birmingham High School in Van Nuys for five years.

“They’ve really enforced that more in recent years than in years past. So, if you were going to have one of those musical groups now, or a sheer entertainment assembly, unless it was connected in some way with a school activity and was educational in some connection, you’d really have to have it at the end of the day or after school.”

But he said the after-school plan no longer is feasible because many students are bused to school and “aren’t around all the time.”

But the biggest reason for the change, according to Jacobson, is a 1983 state law that imposes stricter requirements for high school graduation and extended both the school year (from 175 days to 180) and the school day (from 360 minutes to 370.)

Jacobson sees this legislation as a reflection of growing conservatism and “everyone’s feelings that the public schools were going to hell in a hand basket.” He added, laughing: “It goes in cycles, if you stick around long enough.”

“When I was in high school in the late ‘40s, we used to have an assembly every week,” said Louis Ramirez, a Hollywood High alumnus who now is director of student activities at Birmingham High. Free performances by such stars as Lena Horne, Mary Martin, Janet Blair and nightclub bands were all part of the regular school week in Ramirez’s day.

According to Larry Auzene Jr., a member of the Class of ’62 and now Associated Student Body adviser at Burbank High School, school assemblies in the early 1960s were unsophisticated and purely educational.

“When I was in high school, we had a lot of John Goddard assemblies. He was an explorer, and he would go on trips to the Amazon and bring back this film footage,” Auzene recalled. “When I was going to school, they could put on a John Goddard film and he would come on stage with his little helmet, and we’d go, ‘Aww, that’s great!’ ”

But “things became a little bit more liberal” in the mid-’60s, Jacobson said. “We had entertainment assemblies, we had fund-raiser assemblies to make money for the school and so forth.”

By 1970, Auzene said, “the whole culture was non-materialistically oriented.” The former football coach describes the prevailing student attitude then as “let’s get together and live forever and to heck with school and everything else.”

Students who graduated before 1971 recall assembly performances by Chicago, the Kinks and a conceptual artist whose 40-minute presentation involved sprinkling different colors of dye into a pan of water on an overhead projector, against a background score of heavy metal.

In 1967, Ramirez organized one of the biggest high school concerts in the Valley. About 25,000 people attended an outdoor fund-raiser starring the Jefferson Airplane (in pre-Starship days) and featuring the Doors and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at Birmingham High.

“We were lucky to get them,” Ramirez said of the lead band presented in the weekend show. “Some of our dads in the Dads Club (a school booster group) were talent agents, and they felt this band (The Jefferson Airplane) was really hot and, in two or three months, would really be unobtainable financially for us, so we went ahead and took a risk.

“It was a combination of our principal, Mr. Perry, thinking it was a splendid idea, the Dads Club thinking it was splendid and the kids thinking it was the best thing they’d heard of.”

The days of that kind of high school fund-raiser have all but ended, Ramirez said. “The expense, the drugs that are involved now, that seem to be involved--that doesn’t mean they are involved. There are many other problems, so it probably isn’t as feasible. The last concert we had here was Tower of Power and Chuck Berry in about ’74 or ’75.”

At San Fernando High School, where 85% of the about 2,800 students are Latino and the dropout rate is about 40%, Assistant Principal Paul Swanson tries to find “programs with role models that kids can hear a message from.”

Past speakers have included Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, and champion boxers Paul Gonzales and Carlos Palomino. At San Fernando High, as at other Valley schools, students or club sponsors frequently come up with the original idea for assemblies and then must prove the merit of a program to a faculty adviser, who might be a counselor or activities coordinator.

In January, Chatsworth High School brought David Toma, the former New York police officer who inspired the “Baretta” and “Toma” television series, to speak against drug use. (Students and parents raised more than $12,000 to bring Toma to make two presentations. Half of the money paid for Toma’s honorarium, $4,000 went for expenses and the rest was earmarked for drug education programs.) Three members of Chatsworth High’s SADD chapter led the effort to bring Toma to campus.

Chatsworth also is one of the few Valley high schools that occasionally brings rock groups to play for students during lunch. Such groups must play for free, however, and must sign a contract stating, among other things, that they won’t tune up during class time. According to Student Council adviser Donna Wyatt, the closest thing to the Doors that has come to Chatsworth has been a seven-piece Air Force band that played “contemporary, but not acid-type rock ‘n’ roll.”

The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, a private school of about 350 students in seventh through 12th grades, has offered panel discussions on “The Legitimate and Illegitimate Uses of Force in International Conflicts” and the nuclear freeze movement. And while Cleveland High School recently was host to Melachjia, a heavy metal band, during school hours, band members took time out between each song to deliver an anti-drug, pro-productivity message.

Occasionally, corporations sponsor assemblies, if “they’re educational in nature,” Jacobson said. “In the past, AT&T; has presented some great science assemblies, usually on physics, communications and, of course, the telephone. The sheriff’s, police and fire departments will also send speakers and demonstrations.”

But assemblies are not mandatory. “There’s no state law that says students have to attend,” Jacobson said. “In fact, some assemblies--that highlight the military or something like that--there might be some kids that opt not to attend and their parents would ask that they not attend those types of programs.”

Said Auzene: “I think in high school, more than anything today, we’re trying to help them to learn to really assess things, to come to proper conclusions according to all of the information that they’re accumulating within them, and to get them ready for tomorrow with a little bit of realism.”