Lights! Camera! Action! Schools Go Beyond 3 R’s

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 that could have come from “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 are among the most popular 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.”

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 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 say, expensive television production facilities are usually built only when individual teachers, like 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 parts of the show there.

The creator of “TV 101,” Karl Schaefer, said he did not 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, 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.