Role Models Teach a Valuable Lesson : Santa Ana High students spend an hour a week at the neighboring elementary school emphasizing the importance of education.

Jacqueline Rangel stands before her second-graders, patiently explaining today’s lesson, while her partner, Miguel Oyoque, goes from child to child, making sure that each one understands what to do.

For the next hour, Rangel and Oyoque perform like pros who have been teaching for years. But they are not teachers. They are high school students.

As volunteers in a new Junior Achievement elementary school program, Rangel, 18, and Oyoque, 17, both seniors at Santa Ana High School, spend one hour a week conducting classroom activities and serving as role models for kids at Heninger School.

Children at the elementary school, which is across the street from Santa Ana High, idolize the two, says Kathy Sabine, Heninger principal.

“The role models they make are just wonderful,” Sabine says. “And they encourage our kids to stay in school.”

Santa Ana Unified School District has one of the highest dropout rates in Orange County. Keeping kids in school and showing them the value of education--especially as it relates to the world of work--are two of the many goals of Junior Achievement, according to Tracy Harper, director of operations for the Orange County/Inland Empire program.

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Although Junior Achievement has offered in-class programs since 1975, this project, involving primary grades, is new, Harper says.

“We haven’t offered anything in the first, second and third grades. Next year we’ll even offer something in kindergarten too.”

Harper says that the elementary school program shows pupils, through a variety of classroom activities, the relevance of education in the workplace.

Both Rangel and Oyoque are part of Junior Achievement’s high school economics program and are among 10 students at Santa Ana High involved in the Heninger presentations.

“One of the main things our materials focus on is education and the value of education,” says Harper, who trained the 10 students how to teach second-graders a lesson called “How Does a Community Work?”

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The lesson is designed to introduce the elementary pupils to basic economic concepts and to help them become aware of the wide range of jobs open to them. Judy Brunhober, the teacher who turns her class over to Rangel and Oyoque for an hour each week, says the younger kids look forward to each lesson:

“They love it. And it gives them a good feeling for the community and enriches their social studies curriculum. I think they are going to remember this.”

Brunhober also says she has been impressed by Rangel’s and Oyoque’s classroom preparation and the professional way they present each lesson.

“You can tell they have really researched this, and their enthusiasm shows through. And it’s nice for the kids to know they go to Santa Ana High.”

Other Heninger teachers share Brunhober’s view of the program, according to Principal Kathy Sabine. “Our teachers really like it. It’s a good motivator.”

It helps, Sabine says, that the program and all materials are provided by Junior Achievement free of charge.

A recent presentation by Rangel and Oyoque involved a simulation of the commercial production of doughnuts. Kids were given crayons and perforated, pre-glued sheets with cut-outs of doughnuts.

They learned to “mix” the doughnuts by gluing a dot representing ingredients to the back of the doughnut. Then they “shaped” the doughnut by tearing it from the perforated sheet. Next, they added filling by coloring in each doughnut, and finally performed a quality control inspection.

Because all the children in that particular class were Spanish-speaking, Rangel and Oyoque, who are bilingual, conducted the lesson in Spanish.

“While the majority of our Junior Achievement classes are taught in English, these children are a lot more comfortable with a presentation in Spanish,” says Harper, who points out that many Junior Achievement volunteers are bilingual.

“Our educational demand far exceeds our volunteers,” says Harper, who says the local Junior Achievement program reaches about 15,000 students at various grade levels.

Both Rangel and Oyoque are recent volunteers and are unusual, Harper says, because they are still in high school. Most Junior Achievement volunteers, especially in the upper grades, are corporate executives, managers, professionals, small-business owners or parents.

“It is unusual to have a high schooler accept this amount of responsibility,” Harper says.

But accepting responsibility is not new for Rangel and Oyoque, both of whom learned to be responsible for themselves and others at an early age. Both say they used to live in “bad neighborhoods” in Santa Ana, where there was a lot of gang activity.

Rangel, whose 5-year-old brother attends Heninger, says, “Lots of gangsters would hang around, and my little brother would look up to them. It’s good to teach them there are alternatives.”

Oyoque agrees. “The young ones, it is good if you can make them feel wanted. If we can give these kids that now, then they will have more self-esteem and stay out of trouble.”

Both Rangel and Oyoque, who are seniors, plan to attend college. “I will be the first in my family to graduate from high school,” says Oyoque, who hopes to become an engineer.

Sabine says the role models are a boon for the 870 kids at Heninger.

“We’re a new school, just opened last April,” Sabine says. “People say, ‘I can’t believe they’d build an elementary school next to a high school,’ but it’s really been a positive experience. We’ve had absolutely no problems. The high school is a wealth of resources, and we are still seeing how to involve more of the high school students.”