MISSION VIEJO : Esperanza Graduate Is Used to Excelling

Margot Carlson, 22, the unofficial valedictorian of the 1990 graduation class at Esperanza School, steps up to the microphone nervously, closes her eyes and launches into her carefully rehearsed speech.

“Ready, begin,” says Carlson, one of five graduates from Esperanza’s six-year high school program for mentally disabled students throughout South County.

Teachers point to Carlson as a sterling example of the program’s success. She has excelled in her classes and held several jobs, including one as a paid staff member at a Girl Scouts camp. She has raised blue-ribbon lambs for the Orange County Fair and competed in a beauty pageant for developmentally delayed girls.

And in 1987 Carlson won a medal for swimming in the international Special Olympics competition held in Japan.

Dedication and hard work are her hallmarks. But it was those qualities that also almost cost her her life, her teachers say.

Last year she dragged herself to school each day with a serious case of the flu because she was afraid that the illness would keep her out of the state Special Olympics competition.

One day her mother found her in bed unconscious and rushed her to a hospital near their Laguna Beach home. The flu had turned into pneumonia, and Carlson spent 14 days in the intensive care unit. She missed the Special Olympics.

“The doctors thought we were going to lose her,” her mother says. “But she’s the kind of person that would drop dead before she’d miss work or school.”

Although not every student at Esperanza is like Carlson, teachers at the 17-year-old school say that mentally disabled individuals’ dedication to work makes them the most desirable candidates for jobs on assembly lines and in fast-food restaurants, where turnover is high and employee interest often low.

“One boy left a training position at Standard Brands, and they called us right away and said, ‘Can we have someone else?’ ” recalls Esperanza vocational aide Nora Shea.

She says the students “are great to work with. They’re very programmable.”

Among the five of them, this year’s graduates have worked at just about every major burger and hot dog franchise in South County. And students in lower grades head out weekly to straighten jewelry counters, clean churches, do assembly work or arrange inventory in preparation for paying jobs.

Carlson and three fellow graduates--Brandi Garcia, Suzanne Govorchin and Caprina Pippin--will all go on to supervised jobs next fall, says Principal Ruby Edman. The fifth graduate, Frances Trillwood, who came to Esperanza from England, where no training is given to the handicapped, will eventually enter a shelter workshop for the disabled.

Trillwood’s progress is as remarkable as Carlson’s, teachers say, because when she came to the school at age 13, she could not feed or clothe herself and had limited use of her hands.