Banning Alumnus Gives Something Back--by Teaching Math at School : Education: Manuel Arellano could have escaped Wilmington, but he chose to return some of his good fortune to the community.

Manuel Arellano, the son of a longshoreman, was a senior at Banning High School in Wilmington when he won a full scholarship to Stanford University and teachers started asking him about career plans.

He was met with disbelief, even criticism, when he said he planned to return to Banning to teach. At Stanford, there was a similar reception: Professors and classmates told him that he could not go home again, that he would eventually outgrow the notion about being a teacher.

“People think of education as some low-level job,” Arellano said, looking back.

Today, the slight, bespectacled young man, who holds three Stanford degrees, is in his second year of teaching math at Banning.

And it is the students who ask why he came home, why he failed to use his Stanford education as a one-way ticket out of Wilmington, where generations of working-class families have struggled to get off the docks, away from the canneries and out from under the shadows of the industrial smokestacks that hide the horizon there.

“I try to explain to them,” said Arellano, 25, “that when I went to college I had a scholarship to get through . . . (that) I felt I needed to come back and give . . . to the community a little bit of what (it gave me). Because you’ve got to face it . . . if I didn’t have a Hispanic last name, they wouldn’t have given me that scholarship.”

Still, the students are skeptical, Arellano acknowledged. “It’s like (they say), ‘Really, tell me the real reason.’ ”

With bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and history, Arellano said he could have earned upwards of $40,000 his first year in a high-tech Silicon Valley firm or at AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories, which funded the first 2 1/2 years of his Stanford education with a scholarship.

With financial help from the Mellon Foundation, Arellano went on to earn a master’s degree in education at Stanford, then returned to Banning, where he earns about $29,000 a year.

“People who go into teaching want to help people, and what better way to help people than to come back to the area where you came from?” he asked.

He quotes from memory the words of educator Horace Mann, engraved on a plaque that hangs in the Stanford School of Education library: “If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of education.”

Although it is a magnet math school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Banning serves a largely low-income and largely black and Latino population. Long associated with success on the football field, Banning and the Wilmington community are deeply proud of those students who have gone on to college as athletes and scholars.

“Maria’s brother went to Caltech,” Arellano said, pointing out a young woman across the room, one of several students studying during the after-school math tutorial program Arellano oversees.

The community is also proud of Banning graduates who have returned to teach at the school. Three of the school’s 13 full-time math teachers are Banning graduates.

Increasingly, Banning students--children and grandchildren of factory and dockworkers--seek college preparatory classes, Arellano said. “The jobs are drying up, so they have to get a trade or go to college.”

Arellano’s 23-year-old sister, Elena, is an engineer for Mobil Oil Corp. Their grandmother worked in the canneries, their father on the docks. As did many Wilmington families, Arellano’s moved to the area shortly after the turn of the century and is something of an anomaly in an era of fractured, transient family life: Arellano and his sister live at home with their parents.

“People didn’t see the value of family much up there,” Arellano said of his Stanford days. As vacation times approached, he recalled, his peers talked about where they were taking trips, while he looked forward to seeing his family.

If Arellano seems somewhat nerdish, he is not, said his former high school counselor, Helen Monahan.

“What he really is, is very focused,” said Monahan, now a counselor at the math and science high school on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus.

“He’s probably one of the most focused people I’ve ever met. When he says he’s going to do something, he does it. In high school I was always amazed that he’d say he would do something for me and he’d do it.”

He realized at an unusually young age, she said, that success is not measured only in material terms. He had a great affinity and respect for some of his teachers, she said, some of whom became his role models.

“He thought, ‘Here is a place I can help change people’s lives, literally.’ And that’s what he wants to do,” Monahan said.

Early in his first year back at Banning, he quickly became known as the teacher who calls parents. Once a month, he sends letters to parents telling them of their children’s progress and follows up with as many phone calls as he can fit into his schedule.

It is the desire to share what he learned at Stanford--the rewards and the tough times--Arellano said, that drives him to drive his students. As good a student as he was at Banning, Arellano said, his public school education was not up to par with that of many of the more well-off Stanford students who came from wealthier families.

“I know what it feels like to be stupid,” he said. “To sit in a class and not know what the professor’s saying. I had to get extra help, I had to get tutoring.”