Adversity at Orange Glen: Anomaly or Sign of Times?

The darkest hour is only 60 minutes long. --Hand-printed sign in Clarence Weiler’s metal

shop class at Orange Glen High School

By most measures, Orange Glen High School in Escondido is your quintessential--if not exemplary--suburban high school.

Its football team went to the CIF finals last fall. Its academic team placed second in countywide competition. The school is one of two in the county funded by a grant to introduce aspects of art into the core curriculum. Its marching band has won more than a dozen sweepstakes trophies this year alone. The school has been recognized by the county’s Department of Education for having the lowest student dropout rate in San Diego County.

A billboard near the football stadium proclaims: “America’s Finest High School.” And it’s not idle boasting. In 1986, Orange Glen was one of 30 schools in California to win the state’s Distinguished High School Award; in 1987, principal Ed Brand--in a ceremony with President Reagan in the White House Rose Garden--received the National High School Recognition Award, one of only 117 high schools from throughout the United States to be so honored.

A Host of Problems

But this has been an infamous year for Orange Glen.

- Two students committed suicide--a ninth-grade boy hanged himself Dec. 6, and a 12th-grade boy shot himself in the head Jan. 12. Others have tried.

- Two 15-year-old boys confessed to hacking to death the estranged husband of a schoolteacher’s aide in January. The woman is accused of winning the teen-agers’ involvement with sex, drugs and the promise of cars.

- An arson during spring vacation caused $300,000 in damage, destroying two classrooms and damaging seven others. Irreplaceable files, class plans, records and memorabilia representing 20 years of teaching were destroyed, and some students are now

attending classes in portable classroom trailers that are said to be “as cold as refrigerators in the morning but smell like P.E. locker rooms in the afternoon.”

- At least a score of seniors sabotaged their California Assessment Program tests, which are designed to measure a school’s academic successes and weaknesses. They said they were angry that the student parking lot was declared off-limits during lunch hour. Are these aberrations that should be dismissed so an entire school is not stigmatized, or are these warnings that a growing number of Orange Glen teen-agers are on the brink of emotional and ethical collapse?

Principal Brand prefers the first scenario. “You can’t explain a year like this,” he said. “You just have to realize that, every now and then, there will be unusual circumstances, and take this as a learning experience that life isn’t all peaches and cream. And it also shows that there are things in life you have nocontrol over, and that you can’t throw in the towel.

“For the most part, school goes on as usual,” he said.

Sorting Things Out

Indeed, many students and teachers have tried to shrug off the year’s traumas as isolated, skewed behavior not representative of the norm and which have not shaken the core foundation of a good, middle-class suburban high school. The 2,100-member student body is generally functioning well on its face, if perhaps suffering from a case of spring fever.

“The teachers are appalled by what we’ve seen happen this year, but most of us realize these things could have happened anywhere,” said Clarence Weiler, who has taught at Orange Glen for 21 years. “And I don’t think this year has affected the kids that much.”

Kathy Dooley, an algebra teacher, boasts: “I’ve had one of my best years this year. These are great kids, and I’ve been demanding more of them.” Students have repainted her smoke-damaged classroom with characters out of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip. “My room’s never looked so good,” she said, laughing.

“A few people are giving the school a bad name, but it’s not like the entire school is bad,” said Dan Black, a 16-year-old sophomore and the son of a military career man. “I’ve been in six or seven schools, and this one’s pretty good, actually.”

‘One of Those Years’

Cree Morris, the school’s standout quarterback, remarked: “You’ve heard of the saying, ‘One of those days’? Well, this has been one of those years.”

“We just don’t want to dwell on the problems,” added Tina Salazar, a 17-year-old senior.

But others, including longtime teachers on campus and the school’s psychologist, say Orange Glen’s experience, while extreme, serves as a warning of a growing number of students in today’s high schools across the nation who are emotionally hurting, unequipped in coping skills, inadequately supported by parents and distracted from their education by jobs they take to pay for compact discs, designer clothes and $1,200-a-year car insurance premiums.

Officials characterize such students as “at-risk”--students who, for a variety of reasons, cannot commit themselves to a disciplined school regimen.

“People want to make ‘school’ the issue. We’re just working with the damaged goods that are sent to us,” bemoaned Laura Short, a school psychologist at Orange Glen.

Some educators suggest schools like Orange Glen and neighboring Escondido High School are especially susceptible to a growing number of at-risk students because of the population growth--and a new type of student in schools that historically served a stable population of longtime Escondido residents.

A Changing Community

“The demographics of our community are changing,” said Jackie Nichols, who spent 24 years as a teacher, counselor and vice principal at Orange Glen before becoming principal at neighboring Escondido High School three years ago.

“There’s been rapid growth over the past five years, and an inordinate amount of it has come from new apartment construction. We’re attracting a different kind of family structure here--families of single parents who can only afford an apartment, and the parent--or both parents--is at work. And there’s a genuine difference in how these people view their responsibilities towards their children.”

With the apartments come greater transiency, too--students unable or unwilling to make long-term commitments to new friends or to school, educators said, because they may relocate in a matter of months.

Short estimated that at least 30% of Orange Glen’s students are “at risk” of doing poorly at school because of personal problems. She said she meets, on the average, with one student a day who is contemplating suicide.

Darwin Bree--who lost 20 years’ of files and memorabilia in the fire--directs the school’s successful peer counseling program, in which specially trained students identify and work with troubled teens. He suggests that, any given day, 2% to 3% of the students at school are “in crisis”--so deeply troubled by problems at home or in their relationships with others that they cannot focus on school. The problem may last an hour or fester all year.

So, although teen-age killers, arsonists and suicides may be an extreme manifestation, they force educators and parents to focus on problems that may be more pervasive and insidious than they want to believe, according to Short, Bree and others.

Foundations Lacking

Some faculty members and professionals suggest that many of today’s high school students are suffering because they are the children of the children of the ‘60s: rebels against family, church and nation who abandoned their ethics and who are now raising their own children without instilling the values and expectations necessary to flourish in high school.

“The fact is, this campus--and others--are ripe for this,” said Short. “These kids are being raised by people whose own morals and ethics were upset to the core. We have kids coming to school who are damaged and broken, who are crying in class, and who are looking to the teachers to be their mothers and fathers.”

John Sowers, who teaches algebra at Orange Glen, said that, in his 29 years of teaching he has typically failed 10% of his students. But this year, he failed 35% of them--60 students in all. “And you know how many parents called me? Just three. These kids don’t care about their grades because their parents don’t care.”

Remarked Nichols, “I don’t think we do enough of a job in helping the parents be parents.

“Working parents are a reality. We’ll never see the ‘Leave It to Beaver’ concept anymore, where the mom stays home. We need to help parents be both good parents and working parents at the same time.”

Nichols said she also has found, in her years at Orange Glen and Escondido high schools, that a growing number of parents are failing, or refusing, to acknowledge the shaky emotional health of their children.

“We chastise our politicians if they have any hint of emotional problems, but we are not willing to see those same problems in our own families,” she said.

Added Short: “I called one parent recently to say her son was referred tome because he tried to hang himself last night. And she said, ‘Oh that. That was just teen-age stuff.’ I said, ‘No, this is something we need to address and he needs to be in treatment right away.’ The dysfunctional family’s main defense is denial.”

Not Enough Time

Short says she is frustrated that most of her time on campus is spent on mandatory student testing and overseeing Orange Glen’s special-education programs, and not enough time is allowed for the counseling of at-risk children.

State education officials acknowledge that, as a whole, school psychologists are assigned by their administrators to oversee special-education programs, partly because their salaries are paid primarily by funds earmarked for special-education programs.

Brand says he believes Orange Glen, which has five counselors, is responding well to its students’ psychological needs. Seventeen faculty members have volunteered to receive special training in counseling and psychological intervention so, beginning next year, they will be available to meet with troubled students, he said. The school also has a crisis intervention team of teachers and counselors who meet weekly to identify and help at-risk students.

Short said she would like all incoming freshmen to be evaluated by a psychologist or counselor so they can be measured not only academically but psychologically, and identified so they can be targeted for counseling.

Some students are recognizing their need for psychological help or counseling so they can better cope with stresses they face. Bree’s peer-counseling class is sponsoring weekly, after-school sessions with Charter Hospital that focuses on assertiveness training, developing esteem and similar issues. “At our first meeting, we had six kids show up. The second week, we had 16, and this week we had 22 kids show up,” Bree said.

Despite Orange Glen’s problems, it is clear that life goes on. Graduation-night tickets to Disneyland are on sale. Class rings were ordered last week. Practice is under way for the girls’ football game. There are tryouts coming up for the dance and flag teams. The varsity tennis team is 16-7 for the year. And there are still a few T-shirts for sale--$10 each--that read, “I survived the O.G. Fire.”

And kids complain about things that high school kids complain about: the closed campus, the long lunch lines, toilet paper that feels like sandpaper, having to dissect frogs. Every once in a while, someone will mention the killings, or the fire, or the suicides--or the publicity stemming from it. “We’ve been victimized by the press,” said one student. “We know you’ve got to sell papers,” said another.

‘Life Goes On’

“I’ve heard more reaction about what’s happened this year from the community than I have from the kids themselves,” said counselor Joan Freitas. “To the kids, life goes on. They seem to be handling it very well, and I compliment them.”

Many students give credit to their teachers for helping them deal with the year’s events. When Susan Bolger’s literature class turned to “Romeo and Juliet,” she let the classroom conversation segue to the two student suicides. “There’s an underlying strength in dealing with adversity,” she said.

Bree, however, worries that the school--its faculty and its students--are coping with the year only because they’re trying to deny it. “There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a hurting student body. We’re a school in denial. We’ve been brave as a school; we’ve spoken to the press about what’s happened. But I hear a lot of kids saying things are OK when they’re not.”

And there may be indicators of that to back him up.

Teresa Palzkill, who teaches world cultures to freshmen and serves as the adviser for student body activities, said, “This has been one exceptionally rotten year.”

Students were so unruly at an assembly intended to focus attention on drinking and driving, she said, that she decided to cancel a subsequent assembly that was to have featured a hypnotist. Noontime activities--skateboard races where students push themselves along with toilet plungers, for instance--have had poor attendance during the second half of the year.

“So we’re trying to look to the future, to next year. We’re already planning the homecoming. We’re telling the kids that next year doesn’t have to be like this year,” Palzkill said. “There are so many good kids on campus, we’ll focus on next year being positive. We can’t do much about the past.”