Rallying in Front of Bush : Drugs: A ‘distinguished’ school is further honored by an invitation from the President. Organizers plan on a full house for his Santa Ana speech.

When McFadden Intermediate was named a National Distinguished School last May, its students and teachers were proud and rightfully so. Only seven other junior high schools in California received the coveted award.

But this week, they have been preparing for an honor that Principal Alexander Aitcheson says “goes way above” that award: an invitation to the entire school to join President Bush at today’s anti-drug rally at Santa Ana Stadium. About 5,000 students, most of them from Santa Ana schools, will be bused to the stadium for the event, but only McFadden was invited to send its entire student body and administrative staff.

“Right now I am super-excited. I can’t express how I’m feeling, how proud I am that all of you were selected,” Aitcheson told an assembly of students this week, nervously pacing across the auditorium stage. “This is the greatest honor we can have.”

Students at the school, which is 78% Latino and 10% Asian, were duly impressed, and on Thursday they were busy making posters bearing anti-drug slogans to hold up during Bush’s visit.

“McFadden Welcomes The President Bush,” said Hoan Tran’s brightly colored poster.

“I’m very happy about it,” said Hoan, 13, who arrived from Vietnam less than a year ago. “Not everyone can see the President.”

Seventh-grader David Ricketts, 12, was also looking forward to the field trip, but with some concern as well.

“It’ll be good, but it would be better if you could get a picture of yourself up there with him for proof,” David said. “Otherwise, no one will believe you were really there.”

David’s pal, John Ramirez, 13, said he thought the president was “good,” but there was something else on the drug rally schedule that he was really looking forward to: “the Ram cheerleaders.”

Besides the cheerleaders, today’s program will include Rams quarterback Jim Everett and former star Jack Youngblood, karate experts Chuck Norris and Jeff Smith, an impressionist, a singer and a mariachi band.

The gray concrete stadium never looked better than it did Thursday afternoon, as a White House advance team supervised final preparations for today’s rally. The President will speak on a bunting-decorated stage at the south end of the stadium, in front of a giant backdrop with colorful anti-drug cartoons. VIPs will be seated in chairs near the stage, while most of the schoolchildren will sit farther back on the grass.

Duke Tucker, 27, of Yucaipa was setting up barricades in the stadium Thursday afternoon. Tucker, an inmate at Theo Lacy Branch Jail, said the President’s visit to Santa Ana is “great.”

“Santa Ana’s one of the best places in the country to talk abut drugs because you can just drive down the street and find the stuff,” said Tucker, currently serving a sentence for drunk driving. He has also been arrested on cocaine charges, he said, but has since given up drugs.

Steven Burt, 22, of Tustin, who said he is doing time on a burglary conviction, groused that he and other Theo Lacy inmates have been “busting butt all week, working 14 hours a day” to get the stadium ready.

But he is proud of the work.

“I wrote a letter to my dad yesterday, telling him here I am doing my first official service for the country, and I’m doing it without my rights,” Burt said. “It’s good the president is concerned enough about drugs to come out here. He’ll talk to a lot of kids who aren’t that educated about them. They’ll learn something.”

Lt. Richard J. Olson, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman, said the inmates have “done a tremendous job” but will not be around today when Bush arrives at the stadium. “No, absolutely not,” Olson said. “That would be impossible.”

With no inmates to fill the empty seats, White House staffers hope that high school bands, government workers from the Civic Center area and the general public will fill the rest of the stadium, which has a capacity of about 10,000 people--not including the estimated 5,000 down on the field.

“Anybody can come, and we’re hoping for a large turnout,” said Spencer Geissinger, executive director of the Drug Use Is Life Abuse Foundation, sponsor of the event. “You try not to over-invite, but it’s hard to tell how much work you need to do to get a crowd that will fill the stadium without overdoing it.”