‘Not Like Other Schools’ : Education: Credit a neighborhood effort for the success of Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet. Its demanding program prepares students for health-care careers.

Carlos has given up. After two years at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School, it’s his last day.

“It’s too hard,” the 16-year-old says, smiling and shrugging as he stands by the pay phones in the school’s hallway, his T-shirt untucked and baggy pants sagging.

He’s heading back to a high school near Echo Park, where classes are crowded, maps outdated and, he says, teachers and gangbangers play tug-of-war for a student’s attention.

Down the street, Medina Muhammad, 17, putters with test tubes and petri dishes in the craniofacial molecular biology lab the University of Southern California shares with Bravo students.

For her, Bravo is one of those rare strands of hope Los Angeles offers its children. Once she latched onto it, nothing could shake her loose.

With about 36,000 students enrolled in 105 schools, the magnet system is, by most accounts, the most effective part of the budget-battered Los Angeles Unified School System.

Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet is, to the relative few who know about it, a glowing success story among such schools--an impossible dream home grown right there in East Los Angeles.

Magnet programs blossomed in Los Angeles in the ‘70s, as a way to encourage voluntary integration in the face of court-ordered busing.

With white enrollment dropping in the district, the program didn’t always achieve its integration ideals. But the schools--which, like magnets, draw students from anywhere in the district to “learning centers” concentrating in subjects ranging from the performing arts to business and law--were a hit.

During the system’s formative years, activists in one of the city’s ubiquitous grass-roots acronyms--Parents Involved in Community Action--looked for ways to boost more Latinos into the professions. County-USC Medical Center was right there in Boyle Heights. Wasn’t there a way to tap into all that talent?

Traditionally, such eager activists would watch recalcitrant bureaucrats’ eyes glaze over and only later notice their own enthusiasm deflate.

But the magnet program had momentum. And the state’s integration program had funds.

In 1981, the PICA parents wrangled from the district a commitment for a modest 61-student health sciences program on the campus of Lincoln High in Lincoln Heights.

Rosa Maria Hernandez, a Roosevelt High biology teacher working on her Ph.D. in curriculum development, joined the project as a consultant. Under her guidance, the magnet expanded to 250 students and moved in 1984 to a cluster of bungalows on a piece of district land adjacent to County-USC.

USC was itching to build a private hospital for its faculty, and National Medical Enterprises, a private hospital-building firm hired by USC, approached the school district with an offer to buy another parcel of district land near County-USC medical center.

“What’s in it for the community?” asked school board member Larry Gonzales, a Roosevelt graduate who shared Hernandez’s enthusiasm for the magnet.

According to Gonzales, USC and NME initially resisted his unusual demand that USC build and support a medical magnet school in exchange for the right to buy the land.

NME officials suggest that the deal was a mutually agreed upon effort to help the community’s children, with no arm-twisting needed or exerted.

Regardless, cooperation came quickly. In exchange for the coveted land, NME’s builder helped the district find private financing, which the district is paying off with a long-term lease. Los Angeles’s first new high school in 17 years was built in less than half the usual time. The facility opened in 1990.

Latino architects and engineers designed the school and Hernandez worked with the district and USC to create the curriculum. She then took over as principal, a position she still holds.

The facility that resulted from this complex cooperative effort is the kind of place you’d expect adults to build for something they take seriously--like a corporate headquarters.

Wedged into the sprawling USC-County medical complex of laboratories and hospital buildings, Bravo’s five-story building occupies only a fraction of a standard high school’s 30 or more acres. (In another deal, the school persuaded the city to let students use playing fields at adjoining Hazard Park.)

A fleet of 32 buses begins picking up students at 6:30 a.m. from as far away as Encino, San Pedro and West Los Angeles. An hour later, 1,393 students--about 56% Latino, 15% black, 16% Asian, and 8% white--pour into the gleaming red and gray glass and steel structure.

Down the hallway of the main floor, windows on either side of the narrow building offer glimpses of the sort of environment most Los Angeles kids inhabit. From one side, you’ll see where “Boom” and “Pink” and “Doper” have spray-painted their names on a weed-rimmed wall across the street.

On the other side of the hall, beyond a body shop, Boyle Heights is visible through a window riddled with holes from four bullets that strayed in over the weekend.

Classrooms, though, are undoubtedly among the newest, cleanest and best accessorized in the district.

In one class, science teacher Joe Cocozza scribbles on the blackboard the formula for blood’s glucose concentration, while students’ hands sway like windblown palms.

Cocozza, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience, has done research on the biochemistry of vision at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute. Like most of his colleagues, he was personally recruited by Hernandez to teach at Bravo.

“What I’m teaching here, I taught in college,” he says. “I’m not watering anything down.”

Most afternoons, he says, some students migrate over to the Doheny Eye Institute, where they work closely with doctors, doing experiments on the eyes of medical mannequins, calculating prescriptions on each other or taking ocular pressures.

After learning such fields as tonometry and lensometry in his course, students are qualified to begin a one-year internship in ophthalmology and then take a national exam that will certify them to assist ophthalmologists.

Bravo has several such programs, which give low-income students the choice of embarking quickly on a health science career or using that career to finance additional education, such as medical school, says Elias de la Torre, Bravo’s magnet coordinator.

Still, as it goes into its third year, Bravo has many of the same problems as other district schools. Its teachers are facing another pay cut and are likely to go on strike. The school gets the same $2,000 to spend each year on science supplies--a paltry amount even at schools where students take the normal load of a single science class a semester, rather than the two or three they take at Bravo, teachers say.

Conversely, at least in theory, magnet schools are capped at 30 students per class, while as many as 45 students bloat some of the district’s traditional classrooms.

Also, USC applied for and received from the National Institutes of Health a $750,000, three-year partnership grant that lets teachers at both USC and Bravo develop special instruction projects and pays for community outreach.

It’s almost 5 p.m. and members of the chemistry club still chatter wildly and tinkle test tubes as they prepare to spread the gospel of science at junior highs and elementary schools.

Michael Morgan, a rosy-cheeked chemistry and physics teacher, yaks with the enthusiasm of Mr. Wizard after 30 cups of coffee--indeed, the chemical formula for caffeine is emblazoned on his sweat shirt.

“The difference between magic and science,” Morgan tells the students, as beakers of chemicals mysteriously change colors, is “it’s magic when you don’t explain how it happens, it’s science when you do.”

When Morgan steps away, a cacophony erupts from a cluster of 16- and 17-year-old juniors, girls who represent a range of ethnicities and far-flung hometowns across the district.

“It’s not like other schools racially.”

“We see right away that, academically, we all need each other’s help.”

“Sometimes I catch the late bus and don’t get home till 9.”

“And then we have five hours of homework.”

“But it’s great. You learn a lot about yourself.”

“We’re going to complain, but this is what we want.”

“We’re all, what is it? . . . Overachievers.”

In fact, not all Bravo students are overachievers. While the school weighs an applicant’s race for admission, it doesn’t screen for academics.

The idea is not to launch every student into medical school, but rather to guide students into areas of the health sciences, from lab technicians to brain surgeons, according to their abilities and ambitions.

Although the new school hasn’t been open long enough to track students through college, 86% of the 1992 graduating class went on to four-year colleges, and 12% attended two-year or vocational schools, says De la Torre. That compares to 36% and 29%, respectively, districtwide. And De la Torre puts Bravo’s dropout rate--not counting the students who transfer to other schools--at about 2%, far below the districts’ overall rate of 38% in 1991.

If Bravo students tend to be more motivated, it’s mainly because those who apply tend to have an interest. The early-morning bus ride also weeds out those who aren’t committed, say students and teachers.

And once they’re there, the motivation tends to build in an upward spiral. “I have students here who . . . if they weren’t at Bravo, they’d become so bored they’d be finding less constructive ways of using their energies and talents,” Morgan says.

Many involved with Bravo say the school symbolizes what determined parents and teachers can achieve when public and private sectors cooperate.

“I can see these types of projects happening all over Los Angeles . . . “ says Gonzales, now an executive at KMEX-TV. “What we need are ideas and creativity and a will to work together. . . .”

Medina Muhammad wouldn’t argue. Her Bravo science project last year--characterization of dentene phosphoprotein--won prizes at science fairs from Los Angeles County to the state to the NAACP nationals.

Now a first year-student at USC majoring in gerontology, she comes back to the USC-Bravo laboratory to continue her research. “We’re trying to find the amino-acid sequence and the DNA sequence of the protein. We want to find out whether or not it is related to the dental disease dentinogenesis imperfecta,” she says confidently.

For students who take health science and medicine seriously, Muhammad says, Bravo is extremely competitive--even stressful.

But the school apparently has taught her another lesson that transcends biology and physics.

“If you keep studying, stay positive, stay focused,” she says, “people will see that you want to succeed and will help you.”