Academically Attuned to TV : High School Production Classes Put Television Addiction in a New Light

Student-produced television in the San Fernando Valley got its start 15 years ago when an El Camino Real High School teacher decided to perform a scene right out of “Mission: Impossible.”

Teacher John Heineman and a group of students broke into the Woodland Hills school after dark and rigged up a bootleg transmitter that could send television programming to every classroom via cable.

“Nobody would give me permission if I had asked,” said Heineman, who kept his job after the escapade because the principal at the time also saw the need to bring television into the classroom.

Now TV production classes have become an addiction for Valley public high school students, who spend hours a day, often their own time, creating shows instead of watching them. And teachers have seized a medium blamed for spawning a generation of passive semiliterates and are turning out students who write, direct and produce their own programs.

The student shows, a mix of fluff and hard news, teach more than just how to read a TelePrompTer, said Hall Davidson, Los Angeles Unified School District television adviser.

“Schools are using video to teach basic skills,” Davidson said. “Students have to learn to write the words, as well as read the words, to be responsible, meet deadlines.”

Popular Class

This year, big-time TV discovered the popularity of student video classes. The prime-time CBS show “TV 101”--part of which is filmed at Verdugo Hills High School--chronicles the lives of high school students who work on a news team.

But the actors cannot completely capture the depth of obsession in their real-life counterparts.

“Some of them practically live here,” said Lonny Scharf, Van Nuys High School television production teacher.

The video classes, offered by at least three Valley high schools, are financed by district funds, state grants and private donations. Yet, district officials concede, expensive television production facilities are usually built only when individual teachers, such as Heineman, are willing to fight for them.

At El Camino Real High School, students log hundreds of hours each semester to produce the school’s weekly ECR News program shown in homeroom classes Tuesday mornings. “One minute of TV produced by kids takes 2 1/2 hours of work,” Heineman said.

At Verdugo Hills High School, students routinely spend hours outside class to film such scandals as one involving students who leave campus illegally to eat lunch at fast-food restaurants. Students this semester are producing segments of VHTV Student News that are planned for broadcast later this spring over King Cable’s Channel 8 in the Sunland-Tujunga area.

The Verdugo Hills campus reaches an even wider audience as the backdrop for the fictional Southern California high school used in “TV 101.” Film crews routinely visit the campus to create portions of the show there.

The creator of “TV 101,” Karl Schaefer, said he didn’t know that Valley schools offered television production classes when he came up with the idea for the program. But he said he has heard plenty from the students since.

They complain that the show is unrealistic. “They make it seem a lot easier than it really is,” said Yvonne Farr, a senior and co-producer of El Camino Real’s ECR News. “Their equipment is always working.”

El Camino Real’s weekly news show is among only a handful of student news shows broadcast to each classroom in the school, school district officials said. That arrangement was made possible because the 20-year-old Woodland Hills school, one of the newest in the district, was built to accommodate cable television in all its classrooms.

The show is more popular than the student newspaper, which comes out once a month, said students in the El Camino Real TV production class, because it is shown in classrooms weekly. “We’re more immediate than the newspaper,” said Jason Rappaport, a senior at El Camino Real.

The El Camino Real shows are mostly sports and entertainment--including one segment that parodied the school’s strict policy on tardiness by showing a Robo-Cop look-alike patrolling the hallways. But Farr and co-producer Chad Kelly said they are most proud of their serious stories, such as a piece done on a student who has been in a coma since being injured in a car wreck last year.

Little Controversy

Unlike the characters in the fictional “TV 101,” who butt heads with school administrators over stories involving such issues as toxic waste, the El Camino Real producers said they shy away from too much controversy. Most of the students prefer entertainment, they said.

Verdugo Hills does its share of silly segments, including candid shots of students primping and combing their hair in front of a two-way mirror that the TV crew had rigged up in a janitor’s room.

One of the most powerful stories, scheduled to be aired in the spring, was done by 16-year-old Verdugo Hills sophomore Khrisela Kerbey. In it, Kerbey tells a story about a student battling depression that was triggered by the divorce of her parents and her life in an alcoholic household.

Kerbey said the student ate a handful of aspirin in a suicide attempt one day at school. The segment, which offered advice on where to seek help for depression and suicidal feelings, ends with Kerbey saying the story is true. “The girl is me,” she said.

“I did it to help other kids,” Kerbey said. “I was a little nervous about doing it, but if people feel suicidal, I want them to be able to talk to me or someone for help.”

It was the power of television and its potential to affect the lives of students that prompted Heineman in 1974 to risk his own job to hook up the El Camino Real system illegally one night after facing a nightmare of red tape required by the district.

The gamble paid off. Through state grants, the district brought the system in compliance with its building codes and eventually helped finance what is now a $200,000 television production studio, Heineman said.

Heineman and instructors at Verdugo Hills and Van Nuys have little formal training in video production. They have learned it along with their students, the teachers said.

“I have kids who could walk into any studio and direct a show,” said Van Nuys instructor Scharf.

Many of the video students said they prefer work behind the camera.

In the Limelight

Others like the limelight. “I love being in front of the camera,” said Ehron Fried, a Van Nuys sophomore and TV production student. “My goal in life is to be a complete entertainer.”

And a recent open audition for anchor positions on Van Nuys High School’s KWLF News brought scores of students trying out for eight slots, Scharf said.

Shows now being produced will air beginning next month on cable stations in the East Valley, he said.

The Van Nuys students tape their own situation comedies, taken from scripts donated by private production companies. The students are also working on a video yearbook, a 45-minute chronicle of events taped throughout the school year.

“Some of the kids are leaving the school newspaper to write for us,” Scharf said.