Confidant to the Toughest Dropout Cases : Education: Counselor recovers from severe skin cancer to work with 130 of the city’s most-troubled teens.

The students tell Toni Ortiz about stealing cars, shooting at people, taking drugs and going to jail. They bring in their babies, their lovers and their troubled friends.

They are teen-agers from Long Beach’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and she is their teacher, confidant, advocate and friend.

Ortiz is the only full-time counselor at the Burger King Academy at Jordan High School. The program is part of a national Cities in Schools program that tries to keep youths in school or lures them back after they drop out.

“I don’t have nice stories about dragging kids out of gangs, and now they’re getting A’s in calculus,” Ortiz said. “For us, it’s a success story that they even show up here. Now I have to get them to go to their classes.”

Sometimes she goes to their homes and rousts students out of bed to get them to school. She takes their 3 a.m. distress calls, helps them find jobs, smoothes over problems with their parents and sometimes even lets students live with her for months at a time.

“Toni goes way above the call of duty. She’s at this 20 hours a day,” said Jack Dubois, executive director of the Long Beach Cities in Schools project, one of three on-site programs in Los Angeles County.

Six years ago, Ortiz discovered that she had malignant melanoma, a severe form of skin cancer, and thought she was going to die.

“Until that time, I was working as sort of a laborer without a real career, and after that I decided to do something that would really contribute something to people,” Ortiz said. During her recovery from chemotherapy treatments, her husband persuaded her to go to Cal State Long Beach to study teaching so she could help underprivileged teen-agers.

“I guess I’m on borrowed time, and that’s why I work so hard for them and with them,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz, 42, is the counselor at the 3-year-old Cities in Schools program in the Long Beach Unified School District, where the dropout rate exceeds 28%. She helps 130 of the most troubled students--those who never attend class, those with disciplinary problems and some who have given up on school altogether.

The local program with a staff of 15 runs on a $250,000-a-year budget funded by businesses such as Kaiser Permanente and Burger King Inc.

In Long Beach, the program reaches students from Hamilton and Lindbergh middle schools and Starr King Elementary School, but is based in two classrooms in the back corner of the Jordan High campus.

“I never thought I’d come back to school; I thought no one would help me,” said Jose, a 19-year-old who declined to give his last name. Jose spent almost two years at a youth camp after arrests for stealing cars and fighting. He met Ortiz before his arrest, and she wrote to him monthly when he was in jail.

Now, Jose is enrolled in adult school and trying to find a job.

“I was stealing cars every chance I got. The last time I just needed some rims and didn’t want to pay for them,” said Jose, who was in a Compton gang but now lives in Paramount.

“Toni didn’t give up on me. She really encouraged me.” In the six months since his release, Jose has maintained a B average and perfect attendance in school.

“I always knew Jose had something that no one else was seeing,” Ortiz said. “He was doing well, then had a bad spell, and he is now doing well again.”

Ortiz’s husband Michael, 47, is an operations planner for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, where he met and married Toni 11 years ago. Since Toni took up counseling, Michael has become a surrogate father and tutor for her students.

The couple are often strained by the teen-agers’ problems. “We got two hours of sleep last night because we were trying to get a girl into a drug rehab program,” Ortiz said recently. “We were trying to convince the girl’s mother it was in her best interest. Michael was with me the whole time.”

They have three photo albums filled with pictures of baby showers, weddings, baptisms, birthdays and camping trips they have taken with the teen-agers over the past three years.

Although classroom windows were shot out by rival gang members, Ortiz said she is not worried about safety. Often, at least one student offers to stay with her when she works late.

Jack Ravin, a Jordan High counselor who works with ninth-graders, refers many students to Ortiz.

“These are at-risk kids who have dropped out of school and society, and with a lot of love and caring, she has brought many of them back,” said Ravin, who was a probation officer and disciplinary specialist for the school district. “There are some kids she’s helped I thought would never graduate.”

One of those is Griselda Macias, 17, who is married and has a 1-month-old daughter. She has poor grades and she has to cook, clean and take care of baby Tina, but she is determined to graduate even after dropping out in the past.

“I hate school--it’s hard. My dad is never around much, and my mom only went to the second grade because she was poor,” said Griselda, who lives in North Long Beach.

But Ortiz has helped her, she said.

“Toni has knocked at my door and taken me to school, and I see she supports me when I don’t believe in myself.”

Nathan Apley, a 16-year-old Long Beach gang member just off probation, was failing in school, but is now making A’s and Bs in all his classes. Ortiz monitors his progress.

He takes to Ortiz his troubles and his thoughts about Rastafarianism, a belief that Ethiopia is Eden and that blacks will eventually be repatriated to Africa.

“I talk to Toni about the Rasta movement and things I can’t talk to other teachers about,” Nathan said. He has talked to her about safe sex, family problems and getting beaten up for leaving a gang, he said.

“I was jumped out of a gang two years ago. It ain’t easy. Sometimes the homeys (gang members) try to kill you.”

Ortiz said she has to remain non-judgmental, even when it comes to gangs. “Sometimes their only place for support and identity is in the gangs. There is some good that comes from it, but I want to show them that there is so much more they can do,” she said.

Nathan went with the Ortizes on a weekend trip to the mountains to see snow for the first time. They also have taken students to Raiders games, amusement parks and museums--all at the couple’s expense.

Things get stolen from the classrooms. Vials and other equipment disappear, and so have Ortiz’s credit cards, but she does not get frustrated, she said.

“I guess I’m one of those Pollyanna types who is stuck in the ‘60s and thinks I can save the world,” Ortiz said, smiling. “I can’t allow myself to give up.”

A problem child herself, who drove her parents and teachers crazy, Ortiz said she understands headstrong adolescents.

Lou Zucker, co-director of the Long Beach Cities in Schools program and a former principal, said Ortiz “identifies the talents in kids. Sometimes I don’t know how she does it.”

For Ortiz, it’s simple. “They’re always told what’s wrong with them, but some things are right. I listen and don’t try to make judgments.”

HOW TO HELP

* Volunteers who want to help with the Long Beach Burger King Academy Cities in Schools program may call (310) 422-8486.