Group Investigates Drinking on Teen Trip

The president of the Hermosa Beach Sister City Assn. said the group has launched an investigation into reports that lax supervision on a student exchange trip to Mexico led to drinking and smoking among the seventh- and eighth-graders chosen for the award-winning program.

In an effort to regain flagging support for the program from the city’s school board, Sister Cities President George Barks told the board on Wednesday that a committee will be formed to look into the “embarrassing and unfortunate situation that occurred” on the February trip to Hermosa Beach’s sister city of Loreto.

But school board President Mary Lou Weiss said the board is not inclined to support the program anymore unless supervision is vastly improved. The school district has not been a sponsor of the exchange program, but the board has helped build enthusiasm for the annual trip in the past by allowing the Sister Cities group to hold special assemblies at the schools and by advertising the organization’s annual U.S.-Mexico poster contest.

“We cannot by any stretch of the imagination allow these things to take place,” Weiss said. “As a parent, I’d be appalled. . . . Unless the Sister City program can prove that this is a program that will be closely watched, I’d like the school district to refrain from any affiliation whatsoever.”

Word of the scandal spread last week after City Councilwoman Kathleen Midstokke--whose daughter had been among the 21 students on the trip--threatened to pull future city funding for the program, and to bring the matter before the council at its meeting next Tuesday. The city last year gave the program a $1,000 grant, which helped fund the trip and represented about a fifth of the program’s budget.

Students and parents alleged that the four chaperons who went along on the trip supervised the children so poorly that a 14-year-old boy and five friends were able to sneak away from a dance with a bottle of vodka that they shared on the beach. In another incident, a 13-year-old girl reported that the teen-age children of the Mexican family with whom she stayed shared cigarettes and a case of Corona beer with her and two friends during a night of cruising around the town.

The head chaperon on the trip, Amparito Doolittle, has defended the program, charging that complaints about it were blown out of proportion, perhaps for political gain. In an interview last week, Doolittle said that only a few of the students were exposed to alcohol and that everyone in the group was told before the trip that drinking and smoking were prohibited.

Barks, echoing another of Doolittle’s points, told the school board at its regular meeting that he has yet to hear a complaint from any of the parents whose children were on the trip. However, after hearing of calls to school officials from parents who mistakenly believed that the trip was school-sponsored, Barks said, he scheduled a parents meeting for next Monday night at the Hermosa Beach Community Center.

He added that the exchange program is likely to suffer without the school district’s support and offered to work with the board to improve rules and policies for the trip.

“We’re an award-winning program,” Barks said, referring to an award the program received last year from the U.S.-Mexico Sister Cities Assn. “A lot of people in this community worked very hard to get this program to where it is, and we don’t want to see it damaged.”