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:

Jason Wells, 16

“ ‘Hamlet’ isn’t going to make me really smart. It might give me a higher vocabulary, but I don’t see what I could do with it for the rest of my life.”

Jason Wells, 16, answers the door. He is wearing tattered blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

If he has anything these days, it is time.

Jason decided last spring at the end of his sophomore year not to continue. He figured his remaining two years would be as irrelevant as the first two.

“It never got me going,” Jason said. “Nobody ever explained things. In English, I read ‘Hamlet,’ and I wasn’t much into ‘Hamlet.’ ‘Hamlet’ isn’t going to make me really smart. It might give me a higher vocabulary, but I don’t see what I could do with it for the rest of my life.”

Jason said his mother, a manager at Ralphs, has tried repeatedly to encourage her son to return to school, but he resists each effort.

“She’s really great and caring,” he said, “but she can’t force me. She tries every day to get me back, but I just don’t want to go. I don’t need to go back and learn, so what’s the use? I never learned anything anyway.”

For several months, Jason, however, had doubts, too. He worried that the lack of a high school diploma could hinder any career aspirations. Plus he missed some of his friends and briefly considered going back.

Then, he said, he recalled the growing disenchantment he experienced in the classroom, and watched friends make good money after quitting school.

So far, he’s not making any money. He’s caught in a Catch-22--he needs a car to find work, he said, but he can’t afford a car until he gets work. As a result, he scans the newspapers for job possibilities near his Van Nuys home.

The search has been fruitless, and the only thing Jason has found is solitude. He spends a lot of time just sitting around the house.

“It’s hard,” he confessed. “There are a lot of people already out there. After a while, you get used to sitting around.”

Yet Jason remains optimistic about finding a job. He plans to save enough money to sign up for an electronics class and he also likes drawing.

He doesn’t see himself as a dumb high school dropout.

“It’s not like I’m stupid or anything,” Jason said. “I’m very hard-working, and when it’s stuff I like, I do very well. I just didn’t like high school.”