Life Without High School

Homecoming, homework and hall passes--the annual ritual called high school is well under way.

For most San Fernando Valley teen-agers, that means another autumn of savoring their fleeting adolescence while slowly advancing toward adulthood. The next stop: Graduation.

But not for everybody. Once again, thousands of students have dropped out of high school. In 1989-90, 5,000 out of 38,000 Valley students--or 14%--quit school. Districtwide, the rate was 16%.

The Valley is no aberration; throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, the dropout problem is a priority concern.

The district devotes 100 people and $7.5 million annually to combat this problem. But it’s not enough.

“We have to get started earlier,” said Barry Mostovoy, a district administrator who works on dropout prevention programs, of which there are about half a dozen. “We need more counselors in schools to talk to students. We need them in elementary schools.”

According to Mostovoy, the reasons teen-agers quit school haven’t changed much in recent years: poor grades, the lack of family support, pregnancy.

Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda had the highest dropout rate of any Valley school in the 1989-90 academic year, the period of the most recently released official figures. That year, 274 youngsters--22% of the 1,227-member student body--quit school, according to district figures.

Here are the stories of three students who dropped out of Cleveland High:

Nancy Gonzalez, 16

“I saw a friend of mine who was pregnant and she seemed very happy with her baby. I wanted to feel that too.”

Nancy Gonzalez wants to be in high school. At 16, after years of indifference to getting an education, she now realizes the lack of a diploma may compromise her future. She’s ready to change.

But Nancy is six months pregnant and change will have to wait.

“I’ve had my fun and now I have to pay for it,” said Nancy, who would have been a junior this year.

She is planning a different life. The baby will arrive in February, and then it will be time to hunt for a job, probably earning only minimum wage. She and her boyfriend--also a dropout--will look for an apartment and try to survive.

Nancy never took school seriously. Last year, she constantly ditched classes in favor of parties, occasionally broken up by police. Normally, she’d check into her homeroom class to make the attendance rolls and leave school a few minutes later.

“School would always be so boring,” Nancy complained, “and there were parties every day.”

After returning from a trip with her family to their native Guatemala last year, Nancy wasn’t excited about the prospect of returning to school. Then, she became pregnant, and that officially ended any chance of getting a diploma in the near future.

“By then, my mom didn’t want me to go back,” she said. “She said I had enough chances.”

Nancy is still affiliated with Cleveland High. For two hours each day, she earns $4.25 an hour and receives academic credit by helping out in the school nurse’s office with paperwork. She sees her former classmates in the halls, but things aren’t the same.

“We don’t have time to talk as much,” she said. “I always have stuff to do, like go to the doctor’s office.”

She takes responsibility for what has happened.

“I wanted to be pregnant,” she said. “I saw a friend of mine who was pregnant and she seemed very happy with her baby. I wanted to feel that too.”

And she still hopes to get a diploma someday. Currently, she takes a science class at a Reseda continuation school for pregnant women.

“I want to get as much done now as I can,” she said.

But she’ll have to drop out in a couple of months. After that, she is not sure when she’ll be able to take classes again.

“I am so far behind now,” Nancy said. “It will take me a long time to finish, and there are so many other things I have to do.”