He Is More Than Just an ‘A’ Student : Achievement: At 15, Long Beach Polytechnic High student Christopher Lees has a 4.0 grade-point average and three paying jobs. One of them is as a computer consultant.

The first time Christopher Lees walked into a classroom at Long Beach City College, his fellow students stared a bit.

He was 12.

“Are you one of these people we see on ’60 Minutes’ who skip high school altogether?” one student asked. Lees responded that he was just a seventh grader who happened to take college courses.

Today, at age 15, Lees does come across as an average teen-ager--one who is eager to get his driver’s license and changes the subject when asked if he has a girlfriend. But then the youngster cites his perfect 4.0 grade-point average at City College, and whips out business cards advertising his own computer consulting service.

“He’s an incredible person,” said Helene Goodman, Lees’ counselor at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach. “He is extremely bright, extremely self-assured.”

Even among the 675 students in Poly High’s magnet program for the gifted and talented, Lees stands out. He has taken more college courses than any other teen-ager at Poly, meeting over half of the requirements for a two-year degree, Goodman said.

In addition to various school and club activities, he holds down three paying jobs: computer consultant, announcer at Poly football games, and computer store salesman.

Lees’ consulting business started out as a favor to his dad, who owns a property management company and needed someone to set up a computer system last summer. Then, an employee at the pharmacy at Doctors Hospital of Lakewood, where Lees volunteers on Saturdays, realized he was a computer whiz and asked him to set up a system that would track the use of a certain heart medication.

“I set up a little data base system for them. That’s how I got my foot in the door, and the word spread,” Lees said.

First, one doctor in the Lakewood Medical Building asked Lees to write a computer program for his office. That doctor recommended him to another one--and so on. This year, he has set up about 10 systems, charging $20 an hour but offering free advice in follow-ups. “People call me afterwards all the time,” Lees said. “My home is turning into a technical hot line.”

Dr. Arnold Kushner was one of the young entrepreneur’s first clients. “When I first spoke to him (on the telephone,) I had trouble realizing he was a teen-ager,” Kushner said. “If you ever talk to him about computers, he doesn’t sound like a kid. He’s very bright.”

But then Lees asked to be picked up and driven to the doctor’s office. “It’s the funniest thing. He was instructing people in my office on hardware, and yet, he’s not old enough to drive so we pick him up,” Kushner said.

Someday, Lees wants to get a law degree from either Harvard or Stanford. He also wants to earn a master’s degree in business administration. Already, he’s getting some practical debating experience--in the classroom and courtroom.

In his government class, Lees said he often engages in lively arguments with “the bleeding liberals.” Describing himself as a moderate conservative, Lees said, “I liked (Ronald) Reagan. I don’t see what the big problem was. Every President has a few scandals.”

Lees practices debating with friends, in classes or in mock trials that are sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes citizenship. His school team recently won first place in the county in the annual mock-trials competition, and moves on to the state competition next year.

And he’s also getting practical legal experience.

When his father decided to avoid attorney fees by representing himself in eviction cases involving his tenants, Lees volunteered to help out. Using a similar case as a model and with one college business law class under his belt, the youngster spent hours doing research in a law library. Lees wrote up a 50-page brief for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to contest a tenant’s claim that he could not be evicted because he was bankrupt. The high school junior’s argument apparently was convincing; the tenant was evicted.

Not that Lees always wins. When he tried out at Disneyland for the part of a singing Mouseketeer five or six years ago, he made it to the final 10 out of an original pack of 650 kids. Not bad, but not good enough.

“That was a disappointment,” Lees said. “In most other things, as long as I tried my best and I did my best, I would do OK.”

He decided he probably lost the part because he didn’t know how to dance. “That’s when I decided to take tap dancing classes.”

The tap dancing lessons ended about a year ago. Now, there’s managing the school’s basketball team, participating in a myriad of other school activities and trying out for the position of student representative on the California State Board of Education. He is one of six finalists for the seat statewide.

“A lot of people ask me if my parents push me and I say ‘No. I push myself,’ ” Lees said.

Pointing to his initiative in undertaking such a diverse array of projects, school officials describe Lees as highly motivated.

Mary Wulfsberg, director of the Program of Additional Curricular Experience for gifted students at Poly High, recalls how the teen’s father walked into the school and interviewed administrators before his son was transferred there from junior high.

“He had come in and given us the third degree,” Wulfsberg said. He wanted “to get us ready for Chris because he’s such a go-getter.”

Nonetheless, she said, Lees is “a really nice kid.”

Beginning Jan. 1, Lees will undertake yet another volunteer job, serving as a deacon for the Bixby Knolls Christian Church, where he sings in the choir, occasionally leads the Sunday worship service and once or twice a year even delivers the sermon. He is also one of six church members elected to a committee that will select the new associate pastor.

It is heady stuff for a 15-year-old, but Lees shrugs it off, saying his church involvement is more a way to relax than another example of his will to excel.

“Sunday,” he said, “is my day off.”