ANAHEIM : Students Get High Over Flight Plan

When Kelly Wellington and Greg Chastain of Esperanza High School took a pledge to stay off drugs, school officials reciprocated by helping them get high--about 3,500 feet high.

Rather than getting high on drugs, Esperanza High School officials encourage their students to “Get High on Life,” a program in which the school’s students sign pledge cards vowing to stay off drugs for at least a week.

A few times a year, assistant principal Mark Jackson picks out a couple of the cards at random and two lucky students get a free plane ride--including a few minutes at the controls--from Long Beach to Catalina Island.

The plane rides, donated by Jack Nelson, owner of Westward Aviation Inc., “show kids there is something besides doing drugs,” Nelson said.

The flights “show the kids there are other facets of life and a direction they could go in,” said Nelson, who started volunteering his planes--which costs about $280 an hour to operate--about three years ago.

“They have to be able to see other things,” he said. “It just gives them a different view of where they’re living. A lot of the kids we’ve flown have never been off the ground before.”

Jackson said the flights originally began solely as a diversion for students who were active drug users and needed “to see that their was a special side of life they were blocking out.” The “Get High on Life” program was later expanded to include any student who made a pledge to stay away from drugs, and other programs were started for more active drug abusers, including one in which students trained in drug education help their peers to get off drugs.

“The students thought that if we only took kids who were drug abusers it would be unfair,” Jackson said. “They said, ‘I’m doing what I can to stay drug-free,’ so we expanded (the program) to recognize turning away from drugs.”

On Wednesday, Wellington, 16, a junior, and Chastain, a 17-year-old senior, were the two lucky students whose pledge cards were randomly picked for the chance to spend a morning climbing high in the sky. Although the flights are part of an ongoing program, Jackson said Wednesday’s trip was scheduled to coincide with “Red Ribbon Week,” a nationwide anti-drug education campaign.

Accompanied by Jackson, the students squeezed into a cramped twin-engine Piper Aerostar piloted by Bonnie Mendenhall and took off from Long Beach Airport, bound for Catalina.

Mendenhall carefully walked the students through the preflight check. They looked for debris in the engines and checked for air bubbles in the gas tanks--a condition, Mendenhall ominously explained, which would “make the engines stop.”

After leveling the plane at 3,500 feet, Mendenhall handed over the controls to Chastain, who said that he had never even been in a small aircraft.

“It was weird,” Chastain said of his first cockpit experience after the plane touched down on the airstrip at the top of 1,600-foot peak at Catalina. “I thought we were going to hit the side of the mountain. It was awesome.”

Wellington said that while some students fill out the pledge cards simply as a chance to get out of school for a morning of flying, most stick to the drug-free pledge.

“It helps keep those who aren’t on drugs off drugs,” Wellington said before settling down to a buffalo-burger lunch. “It helps a little--and a little is better than nothing.”