LOS ALAMITOS : Teacher Succeeds After Others Fail

Jay Hills remembers one of his very first students at Laurel High School.

A diabetic, the student had been kicked out of Los Alamitos High School for habitual absences and just wanted to stay home with his medicines.

Somehow, his parents persuaded him to enroll at Laurel High.

On his first day, without saying a word, the teen-ager suddenly rode home on his bike.

But the boy came back to Hills’ class and stayed. That was about 10 years ago.

Now, Hills said, the boy, who didn’t have the self-confidence to stray from his home, is making good money as a male model.

“We’re small enough to make him feel it was like home,” Hills said of the boy’s dramatic turnaround.

For his success with that at-risk student and hundreds of others in the years since, Hills, 47, was recently named Teacher of the Year by the Los Alamitos Unified School District.

“It’s an honor, but there are lots of good teachers in the district,” Hills said when the district board presented him with a plaque last week.

Hills said student successes are not uncommon at Laurel, a seven-classroom campus on Bloomfield Street in Los Alamitos with a small staff and about 120 students.

The school serves students who have either been kicked out or have dropped out of regular high schools, who are referred by the juvenile justice system or who are homeless.

One of the school’s founding teachers, Hills said Laurel’s flexibility and limited class size are a prescription for success.

An average class at the school is 18 students, small enough to give the teacher more one-on-one contact with students, Hills said.

“We have the flexibility to pay more attention to the students, the flexibility to start a student on the middle of anything, which can’t be done in a comprehensive program,” Hills said.

David Bishop, the school’s principal, said Hills offers a fatherly figure and a role model for the kids.

“The students have a lot of needs. It takes a special kind of person to relate to them. Jay possesses the temperament and the sense of humor for the job,” said Bishop, who nominated Hills for the award.

Hills, who is also the school’s liaison with the Regional Occupational Program, said many of the 16- to 18-year-old students have drug or alcohol problems.

Others come from abusive or broken homes.

“These kids are given another chance here, in a different environment. By and large, they have been successful,” he said.

One of Hills’ current students is 17-year old Kiyomi Shioji of Garden Grove.

A senior at Cypress High, Shioji was already getting bad grades and falling behind when she had a baby in February.

To catch up and graduate this year, she enrolled at Laurel High.

“By coming here, I got better grades. In regular high schools, you don’t really get the help you need because of the large classes,” she said.

Hills said Laurel is structured so that students study various subjects together in a single classroom. Each works at his or her own pace with individualized help from the teacher.

“It’s exciting. I like the variety,” said Hills, who taught social sciences at Northview High School in Covina and Los Alamitos High before coming to Laurel.