SAINTS ALIVE! : Despite Image Problems, Santa Ana High School Approaches Century Mark With Hope, Vibrancy

A ll hail Santa Ana / Thy colors red and white / Stand as a symbol / Of our will to fight / All hail Santa Ana / In thee we’ll ere be true / In trial and in victory / All hail, all hail to you.

It’s the kind of school where a coach once whipped up his team by telling them as they prepared for a game against largely Anglo Foothill High: “Look, some day you’ll probably be washing these guys’ cars and your wives will be working in their houses. Let’s go out and kill them.”

It’s the kind of a school where 900 teen-agers entered the front door in September of 1985, but only 414 of them are still there as seniors, members of the class of ’89.

It’s the kind of school that offers advanced placement classes, special programs in business, boasts two auditoriums for performing arts, sends more than 50% of its graduates on to junior college or 4-year college, and inspires a fierce, proud, sometimes defensive loyalty.

And in the 100th year of its founding, as it begins an ambitious new expansion program to renovate old classrooms and build new ones, Santa Ana High School suffers from what students and teachers say is an inaccurate stereotype: a gang-ridden school where you take your life in your hands when you step on campus, where you have to fend off knives and duck bullets to get an education.

Much of the reason for the stereotype, students say, is simply that 78% of the students are Latino. Part of the reason is that the school is located on the fringes of gang territory. Students and teachers interviewed at random brought the stereotype up often and without prompting, complaining about it in tones of resignation or bitterness.

But to those who are there--the principal, teachers and students--the school’s ethnic diversity is one of its strengths.

Jeff Watts graduated from Santa Ana High in 1965. His grandfather graduated from the school--same name, different location--in 1901. Watts returned to the school as a teacher in 1975 and has been head basketball coach there. How have things changed since he graduated?

“Obviously, the ethnic ratio has changed a lot,” Watts said as he stood outside a raucous gym echoing with the shouts and cheers of hundreds of students on homecoming day. “Even though, when you look through the yearbooks back then, there still was a large percentage of Hispanics.”

It was “not like now, but in the ‘60s here, I don’t think we really thought about what race somebody was. I’ve seen that change. Nowadays, kids talk about, well, ‘You’re a Hispanic, you’re a white.’ Back then, some of my best friends were Hispanics, but I never even thought about (them) as being Hispanic.

“I also think that’s one good thing about the school; they get a lot of exposure to other races that should help them, hopefully, later in life. I taught at an upper (-class) white school that’s no longer in existence. . . . In the early ‘70s . . . we’d play Santa Ana and Santa Ana Valley before I came back here to teach.

“And one of the big things with those kids, and they would get it from their parents, was, ‘God, we’re going to go down to Santa Ana; we’d better take bats and this and that.’ ”

The school was no stranger to trouble in the past, and the outbreaks of violence and other distractions of the early 1970s make today’s campus appear as quiet as a country churchyard.

In 1971, the first month of the school year saw 10 fights and three assaults on teachers at the school. Officials blamed the fights on short tempers exacerbated by overcrowding but said they were not racial and had been blown out of proportion.

The next year, 100 Latino students walked out of the high school and marched on the school district’s central administration building 1 1/2 miles away. Shouting “Viva La Raza” and “Chicano Power,” they successfully demanded that a Latino school-attendance officer be rehired.

These days, Watts said, “there will be a fight every now and then, but usually it’s an isolated incident. It’s not 10 guys against 10 guys. Somebody might hit somebody and usually it might wind up being over a girlfriend.”

The view from student level is calm too.

Bobby Reimers is an 18-year-old senior with top grades and advanced placement courses, which provide college credit if successfully completed. He was also varsity baseball co-captain last year and works nights and weekends in a video store.

“People bother each other at every school,” Reimers said. “But around Santa Ana, the student population is so diverse, you have blacks hanging with whites, whites hanging with blacks, Mexicans hanging with blacks, Mexicans with whites, whites and Mexicans. Everyone blends together.”

Ed Torres is a senior who said he had planned to go to USC until he started “slacking off” on school work in his senior year. He now plans to attend junior college first and USC later. Torres said he hasn’t seen a fight worthy of the name in all the time he has been at the school.

“You see pushing and shoving, but that doesn’t even get off the ground,” he said. Yet, “people really believe that Santa Ana High School is a bad school. . . . You’ve got 30, 40, 50 different races getting along with each other here. . . . You go to another school, (if) you’re not white, they don’t like it, you’re not black, they don’t like it. At this school it’s not like that. . . . People (ought) to come over here and not be afraid. Nobody’s gonna stab them, nobody’s gonna kill them.”

Outsiders see things a little differently and say the Santa Ana Saints do not always live up to their nickname.

A track team member at Foothill High in the Tustin Unified School District said that when the team traveled to Santa Ana High for a meet, “we were really afraid.” At the long jump pit, she said, a group that may or may not have included students gathered outside the fence and started throwing rocks and cursing the Foothill team.

“So, yeah, we do have fears,” she said. “Sometimes they may seem unfounded, but sometimes they do turn out” to be reasonable.

A student at El Modena High School in Orange said the track coach told team members that when they arrived at Santa Ana High School, they should “stay in groups when you go to the bathroom.”

“On any campus, (if) you don’t know it very well, you tend to stay in groups rather than walk around by yourself,” the student said. But the same feeling doesn’t prevail when El Modena students visit University High School in Irvine, he said, because “it’s a nice campus and has a good reputation.”

The student at El Modena and students at other high schools cited “rumors” about Santa Ana High to the effect that there are “gangs down there.” The rumors stem, one student said, from the fact that the campus has a “largely Hispanic population.”

“That’s the reputation it has,” the student said. “I don’t know if it’s true. I doubt (that violence) happens on campus . . . but we just take preventive measures.”

Santa Ana High began in 1888-89, the year that Orange County was splitting off from Los Angeles County to become a separate entity. The first 4-year class was graduated in 1893, with 13 students in the building on what is now Civic Center Drive, between Sycamore Street and Broadway.

In 1913, the school opened at its present site at 520 W. Walnut St. The 1933 Long Beach earthquake cracked the walls so badly that the building was torn down, and the one that stands today was built.

A rather plain structure in a brownish yellow of various shades, the main building boasts an expansive entrance with 30-foot ceilings and a carpeted entrance hall with jammed trophy cases and simple plaques memorializing the 10 graduates who died “in the cause of humanity and democracy” in World War I and the 79 who “gave their last full measure of devotion” in World War II.

Spanish-style arched corridors run through the building, and newer, blockhouse-like structures lie at the end of spacious courtyards.

From the outside, the buildings have an old, solid, built-to-last look. On a school morning, there is an amazing stillness out front on Walnut Street, as if the buildings are empty.

In an effort to keep things quiet, the Santa Ana Police Department has a uniformed “resource officer” at each of the three high schools in the Santa Ana Unified School District, partly to keep outsiders off campus and partly to expose students to the notion that police officers aren’t the enemy. Police say that while there are occasional outbreaks of violence around Santa Ana High, the campus itself is usually quiet.

Teachers say they have been instructed on items of clothing and colors typically worn by gang members so they can be sure that no student is flaunting gang membership on campus. So far, they say, none has.

Inside the school, students amble down the halls between classes, break for lunch and send the decibel level soaring. Some show up at 7 a.m., an hour before classes begin, to prep for academic decathlons. Others stay after the school day ends at 2:43 p.m. to take part in one of the 70 clubs on campus. Fittingly for a school with such diverse students, there are separate Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Latino and Polynesian clubs, as well as a Model United Nations Club.

There is also MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. Teacher JoAnn Aguirre, a club adviser, says the main goal of the 80-student group is “to try to keep the kids in school . . . (keep) their grades up and (send) them on to higher education.”

Aguirre said the club also works to erase stereotypes “that Mexicans are dumb, they’re lazy, ‘Born in East L.A.,’ they’re gonna cruise around the campus, they’re in gangs and drugs, they drop out of school.”

She said that South Coast Repertory actors have put on two plays for the group, including one about gangs that was done “as kind of a preventive measure, so (students) don’t get interested in it, so they see it is a thing lurking out there and they can be easily involved. It’s like drugs. . . . “

“I grew up in the barrio in Santa Ana,” said Aguirre, who at 4 feet, 10 inches tall is shorter than most of the students in her business class. After working for a private company in Newport Beach, she decided to return to Santa Ana and teach in the high school.

“I live here,” she said. “I work here. I wouldn’t go anywhere else. I think it’s a city like every city that has its problems and it’s going to have its homeless and its drug runners and all that, but on campus” it doesn’t have those problems.

Yet the perception persists.

Principal Andy Hernandez, a Chapman College graduate and lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, said that he receives 150 or more requests for transfers each year from students whose parents do not want them to go to the high school.

“Even though many of them will not come right out and say it, the impression I get from them is that they feel that at Santa Ana High School their (child) will not receive the same quality, will not receive the same educational environment that they will receive at a different high school,” Hernandez explained.

The principal said that he asks parents wanting to transfer their children to “please come to Santa Ana High School any time you’d like to and walk our hallways, visit our classes. I will match our environment against any other. . . . “

But most parents persist and put their children in another school. An uncounted number of additional parents may simply transfer their children without notifying the high school, Hernandez said.

As for a quality education, student performance on statewide tests has declined in recent years. In 1982-83, Santa Ana High School students did better than the statewide average on reading and math tests. This year, however, they did worse. Education officials say that a high percentage of students with limited ability in English usually means lower scores in both reading and math. The state put the percentage of students not fluent in English at Santa Ana High at 19.9%, far higher than the 5.1% at the average California school.

Of the approximately 2,900 students in the school, Hernandez said, as many as half probably come from a home where English is not the main language. As a result, the high school has the largest English-as-a-second-language program in the county, Hernandez added.

Yet in recent years, with a special “prep academy” program, the principal said the number of students going to 2- or 4-year colleges after graduation has risen from around the 20% level to today’s 55% to 60%.

The program, which Hernandez said uses a “pat on the back, a gentle shove or a kick in the pants” to motivate students capable of getting into college, began as a lunch-hour and after-school gathering of students and teachers several years ago. It now has become institutionalized, with special teachers and counselors, trips to college campuses, and classes grouping like-minded students bent on continuing their education after high school.

Hernandez put the dropout rate at the school at anywhere from 32% to 40%, compared to the statewide average of 27% or 28%. Some students transfer to other schools, but, because of a lack of notification, they are counted as dropouts, he said. Others may work for a year and then go back to school.

But many leave because of language problems, a simple dislike of school or, as Hernandez put it, an “economic cause.”

Sharon Saxton, an English teacher, agreed, saying that the dropout rate “is probably our No. 1 problem” and has a one-word cause--”poverty.”

Many of those who stay in school work long hours to help out at home too, she said. As a result: “You can’t assign hours and hours of homework as you would in other places, because these kids leave here and go to work 40-hour weeks. . . .

“They go home to take care of five small children; that includes prepare dinner, wash clothes, clean house. They are the parent in charge. They are integrally involved in parent divorces. They know very well that momma drinks or daddy does drugs because they’re the ones that have to go pick them up from wherever they are stranded.”

And yet, “because they are so grown up at such an early age, they come here as adults, with adult problems but with a lot more adult understanding. They are real people. You can speak to them.”

Free-lance writer Paula Voorhees contributed to this article.