Once a Week, Her School Day Is Filled With Heartbreak

Denise McPeak is 26, a senior at UCLA with plans for law school, thin, beautiful, with long blond hair, a purple T-shirt with rolled up sleeves, tight acid-washed jeans, torn on one knee, no socks and an ankle bracelet. She is very hip.

“My mom used to embarrass me a lot when she was drunk,” McPeak is saying. “I know what you’re talking about. She would call me a slut and a whore in front of my friends. One time she chased me down the street yelling at me that I was a slut.”

The 12-, 13- and 14-year-old girls who are listening to McPeak are staring at her, intently. Several have eyes clouded in tears. They know McPeak, trust her and love her. They need her.

They’ve been telling their stories, not of 10 years ago, but of today, at Buena Park Junior High School.

One girl can’t stand to see her parents do drugs, another doesn’t mind. An abortion haunts one child; many of the girls feel unloved. Some parents expect too much of them, others not enough. Through her sobs, one girl says it was her mother who gave her a black eye.

These girls are what Principal Ronald Barry calls “bottom-line kids,” ones who tell it like it is. They are white, black, Latina, Asian, Indian and Iranian, wealthy, middle-class and poor. They are everybody’s kids and anybody’s kids.

They talk to McPeak because she listens, because she’s been there herself and because Barry, for one, has taken a chance on allowing an untrained lay counselor into his school.

“We are taking a very risky chance here,” he says. “It has not backfired. Since we’ve had it, not one child, not one parent has come back to complain. It has been just the opposite.”

Once a week, McPeak spends the day at Buena Park talking with girls, excused from their physical education class, about whatever is on their minds and in their hearts.

“Remember, whatever is said here, stays here,” she tells them.

A recovered alcoholic, McPeak devised the program after she came here three years ago to visit a class taught by a teacher she had met at a conference.

At the end of her talk that morning, she suggested that any students who would like to meet with her in private could see her at lunch. More than 60 showed up.

Since then, with the encouragement of the school administration and grants of no more than $5,000, groups of about 10 girls each have met with McPeak during six of the school’s seven periods.

But often the girls can’t wait for their turn. They stop by to see McPeak at recess; they spend lunch with her, write her letters and call her at home, collect.

There is no comparable program for boys, nor for girls at other schools.

“I wish we could Xerox McPeak and send her around to other schools,” Barry says. “We just need more of her.”

He adds, however, that his counterparts at other schools have been leery of the idea, afraid to take a risk. One lawsuit, or a campaign by a disgruntled parent, and an administrator could be out of a job.

“I’m not so concerned about the risks of doing something as I am about what the hell is going to happen if we don’t do something,” Barry says.

After sitting in on a few of McPeak sessions, I can only agree. The problems of these junior high school girls, endemic to adolescence, seem exaggerated, grotesquely, by the times in which they live.

Their parents don’t understand, or maybe they just don’t know, or just don’t care. The girls say they’re tired of bringing up a problem only to be shouted at or hit. They’ll talk to their friends, who don’t judge, who don’t scold, and they’ll talk to McPeak. She tries to guide them.

“Well, my parents really get along well,” one girl was saying after a classmate, in tears, was confiding her fears that her parents would soon divorce.

“They just had their anniversary,” the girl says. “They went out four nights in a row, wining and dining.”

“And doing drugs?” McPeak asks.

“Yeah, but they had a good time together,” the girl says. “They love each other. I knw it’s not just the drugs.”

Another student says that her parents have been treating her differently lately. They’re meaner, almost cruel.

“Ever since you got pregnant?” McPeak asks. The girl, who aborted her 5-month-old fetus last month, nods yes.

“You haven’t had sex, have you?” McPeak says. “You’ve stuck to your agreement with the group?”

The girl says she’s kept her end of the bargain, but she feels hollow inside. The boy who made her pregnant says it couldn’t have been him. He says the next time he sees her, he’ll beat her up.

“I killed my baby,” she sobs. “And it hurts. It’s not my fault. My mom made me do it. My sister’s going to have a baby. It’s a boy. I think I was going to have a boy. I had a dream about it. I think about it all the time.”

Another girl has parents who have forbidden her to date. She has defied them, and her mother has found out.

“My mother came to school and told the teacher to break us up,” the girl says. “It’s because my parents are prejudiced. They think we’re better than anyone else. My mother says it’s because we have a different culture.”

These are girls who are growing up at a speed they often can’t control. Denise McPeak, and those who support her, are trying to keep them on track.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.