No Degree of Satisfaction : Pregnant Student Who Became Ill Is Told She Can’t Graduate

Adriana Ornelas thought this was the time she would be planning for her senior prom, her final final exams and her June graduation from Sacred Heart High School in East Los Angeles.

Instead, she spends her weekdays in her Lincoln Heights home only a few blocks from school, fielding phone calls from former classmates and playing with her 3-month-old son, Andrew--the infant whose complicated birth may have cost her a place in the class of ’92.

Last January, the 18-year-old senior was several weeks shy of her due date when she became so ill at school that a teacher told her to see a doctor. Her condition was diagnosed as toxemia and Adriana was immediately hospitalized. The next day, she underwent an emergency Cesarean section and delivered her 6-pound, 3-ounce baby.

Six weeks later, when doctors cleared her to return to school, Adriana sat in the principal’s office and heard some unsettling news: She had missed too many days of school and would have to withdraw from Sacred Heart. She would not be allowed to graduate with her friends.

“My mother was with me, and we both were surprised,” Adriana said recently as she sat in her living room.

“Some students have babies and don’t want to finish school,” she added. “I want to stay in school and graduate, and they won’t let me.”

Sister Reina Perea, the school’s principal, said she sympathized with Adriana’s plight but said the administration was following a policy that calls for the dismissal of students who have excessive absences.

“The administration felt that if she continued here, it would be setting her up for failure because classes had already been under way for a month,” Perea said.

The options she gave Adriana were to obtain her high school degree at an adult school or community college or to repeat her senior year at Sacred Heart--suggestions that Adriana’s mother said would cost her daughter emotionally and financially.

Gloria Ornelas, who had another daughter graduate from the same high school seven years ago, said in Spanish that she never knew Adriana’s graduation plans were in jeopardy until she sat in the principal’s office and was told her youngest daughter could not return.

“I feel sad because I wanted her to graduate from that school, and she only had a couple of months to go,” Gloria Ornelas said.

Adriana’s case has caused a stir at Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school with 435 students and a campus dotted with signs that remind students that “Thinking is Spoken Here.”

For many students, what they have been thinking and speaking about lately is whether their classmate should be allowed back, particularly because several other pregnant students were welcomed back after their babies were born. The difference, school officials said, was that the other girls returned in a relatively short period of time.

That distinction rankles Adriana. “My friends came back to school,” she said, “and I feel like I’m getting penalized for getting sick and having a Cesarean.”

Last month, three-fourths of the senior class signed a petition supporting Adriana and seeking a meeting with Perea, who said she met with the students to explain the administration’s position although she did not speak specifically about the case for confidentiality reasons.

“I think Adriana’s case unified students because we felt she was treated unfairly,” said Veronica Chavarin, 17, of her friend and fellow senior.

Some teachers also have voiced support for Adriana and privately questioned whether the administration was wrong in expelling her, said Daniel Chapin, a substitute religion and English teacher at Sacred Heart.

“I think that some of the teachers realized that what happened to Adriana was not right,” Chapin said. “Everybody at that time would have worked with Adriana, but what held them back was that they did not know what was going on. They had no voice in the matter.”

Chapin, whose father also teaches at the high school, said he does not single out Perea for blame. “I think Adriana was definitely caught in a system that was not caring for her or for the other girls who supported her,” he said.

Chapin said he will press the case with officials of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which oversees Sacred Heart, and that legal action is being considered if the decision is not overturned. A spokesman for the archdiocese said Adriana could appeal her dismissal but that, for now, the matter is between the student and school officials.

“As far as the school is concerned, I think it was handled as well as it can be,” said Perea, who has been principal of the parochial school since August. “It wasn’t easy to come to that decision.”

The principal said that Adriana was absent for 53 days during the school year and had been advised that she was missing too many classes before she was stricken. She also said that because Adriana missed her exams after falling ill, she received incomplete grades for her first semester.

But Adriana and her mother contend that they received no such warning about her attendance. They add that the senior was willing to make up her exams and schoolwork while recovering at home but was told not to worry about anything until she returned to school.

“There was such emphasis on la familia at the school,” Adriana said. “This was like my second home, but now that family is gone.”

Perea, who graduated from Sacred Heart, says the school remains a family to its students.

“No family is perfect,” she said. “Give me a family where there aren’t problems and hard decisions that have to be made. Not all the children like the decision, but people have to make the decision, and it has to be made for the common good and common rights of everyone involved.”