Jeepers! Beepers? : Parents love ‘em. Teachers hate ‘em. The tiny pagers keep teen-agers on an electronic leash. But disruptions in class and concerns about drugs made them unpopular with school officials

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

You would if they had beepers.

First it was doctors. Then it was drug dealers. Now it’s upwardly mobile high school students--who, despite decent grades, may be failing at parent-child communication.

“I once went to a kid’s house after school and stayed till 10 p.m. without calling home,” says Max, 15, a student at West Los Angeles Emerson Junior High School, where beepers are banned. “My folks had no idea where I was. They were furious.”

His parents bought him a beeper and so far, they’re all living happily ever after.

“When they want me, all they have to do is beep and I find a phone and call them. We have a code. If it’s a real emergency, they leave their phone number and 911.” That doesn’t mean Max’s parents are calling the police, he says. “It means ‘phone home now or you’re grounded.’ ” For non-emergencies, they leave the code 411. “That means call when it’s convenient.”

Max turns his beeper off and hides it while in school, because “my teachers will confiscate it if they see it.”

Mustafa Said Naim, a Capistrano Valley High School senior, has worn a beeper for two years, because he says his parents “are overprotective. My brother got hit by a car, and after that I couldn’t go out. If I wasn’t home by 10 o’clock sharp, they’d get worried,” said Naim, who was born in Afghanistan. “Having the beeper has been a lot better. Now, if I’m not home, they page me. At night, they page me a lot.”

Beepers are emerging as the latest high-tech tool for parents to track offspring.

“Beepers are the next step--this generation’s answering machine,” says Tanis Harris, assistant principal at Beverly Hills High School. “Parents buy them so they can contact their children at any time--but the kids use them to contact other friends.”

“It’s quite common,” says Orange Police Lt. Timm Browne, .

“It’s a high-tech security link . . . a sophisticated, reasonably acceptable method in society to stay in touch,” Browne says. “When I was a child, parents would lean out a window and whistle, and you would come home. . . . But this is California, with more cars than anywhere else, and you’re not going to be able to lean out your door and call your kids home any more.”

Since 1988, beepers have been outlawed on California high school campuses, partly because the noise they make is disruptive in class, but also because they are associated with drug dealers who are paged by customers.

And their reputation wasn’t helped by Amy Fisher, the Long Island high school student who pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault for shooting the wife of her alleged lover and auto mechanic. During the trial, it was alleged that Fisher prostituted herself and wore a beeper to class so customers could reach her.

Still, scores of teen-agers say they hide beepers in purses or inside waistbands and turn them off during classes, when parents and friends know where they are anyway.

At Brea-Olinda High School in Brea, administrators say they’ve only confiscated two beepers this year from students wearing them at their parents’ request, and haven’t noticed many of the devices on campus. But several teen-agers interviewed said they just leave their beepers in their cars during class.

“My dad bought (a pager) for me for Christmas,” said David Rigney, 15, a Brea sophomore, “but my mom is totally against it. She won’t even call me on it. I have at least four or five friends who have beepers. Some parents like them because it helps them reach their kids. But, a lot of parents are against them because they say they provoke drugs.”

Matthew Paladino, now a student at ITT Technical Institute in Van Nuys, says he started wearing a beeper while attending Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino.

“That’s how my Dad used to get hold of me if it was late and he didn’t know where I was. A couple of kids at Crespi also had pagers; others thought it was a weird idea. I think it’s sort of like a leash for parents. They don’t have to stay up till 2 in the morning wondering whether their kids are safe.” Paladino says he recently went back to visit a Crespi football coach and “while I was there, one of the players’ pagers went off. We all had a good laugh about it.”

Living with earthquakes and teen-agers made Lew Morales consider beepers for his whole family. Now he, his daughter, 16, and son, 19, never leave home without them.

If the Big One hits, he figures, phone lines may go out but the satellite carrying a pager signal won’t. If one of his kids is in trouble, they can beep him 24 hours a day and tag on a special 911 code at the end of their phone number.

“It gives me a lot of peace of mind. I feel so much better that I’m able to reach her,” Morales said of the black beeper his daughter discreetly carries in her purse daily to Brea-Olinda High.

“She’ll be at a party and I’ll page her, and she’ll get upset and say, ‘Ah, that’s my dad checking up on me,’ ” Morales said. “But she’s gotta put up with it. It’s the ‘90s, and kids are out in that strange world. I want to be able to reach my daughter.”

Antoinette Morales says people see her pager and think she might be selling drugs: “It doesn’t bother me, but it happens all the time. They say, ‘Oh my God, she has a beeper, I wonder what she needs it for?’ ”

That stigma cast a swift and long shadow earlier this year over the slaying of Foothill High School honor student Stuart Tay. Beyond disbelief over the viciousness of his beating death, there was surprise and, briefly, suspicion, at the news that the 17-year-old wore a beeper. Police said his killing was planned by five youths with whom he had allegedly conspired on a computer theft after they grew concerned Tay might turn them in. But some wondered if the pager meant he was also involved in drug sales too.

No, police concluded. Tay merely wore the baby-blue beeper so that his mother and girlfriend, Jennifer Lin, a cheerleader who also wore a beeper, could reach him easily.

When Tay disappeared on New Year’s Eve, it was his lack of response to his mother’s page that first signaled trouble.

“A little after 6 p.m., I started beeping him to say dinner would be ready soon,” Stuart’s mother, Linda Tay, said in an interview nine days after the youth’s body was discovered. “I do that quite frequently.”

At first, Linda Tay thought maybe her son had gone to a movie and could not get to a phone. By 9 p.m., though, she knew he had to be in some kind of trouble.

“Stuart has never not answered his mom when his mom beeps him,” said Alfred Tay, Stuart’s father.

The device was found in Stuart’s pocket, crushed by the blows he suffered and buried with him in a shallow back-yard grave.

Tay drove an expensive car with a cellular phone, and students and police believe beepers are more commonly seen in affluent communities.

But parents like Lew Morales say it has little to do with money.

Beyond the initial purchase cost of up to $140, the monthly service fee--usually under $15 and as low as $7--is affordable to most.

“I know 10 of my son’s friends who have them, so parents can reach them and to communicate with each other,” Morales said.

The family’s phone bill has dropped by half since he bought the beepers six months ago, he says. It costs 4 cents per call to page one of his kids anywhere, but could be a $2 toll call to track down one of them in Newport Beach.

Most of the students at Capistrano Valley High School who wear beepers, says Naim, “wear them as status symbols. They aren’t even activated. You ask them for their number and they don’t have one. If you don’t pay your monthly dues, the beeper doesn’t work.”

“We have seen an increase in kids using them,” says Charles Walker, general manager of L.A. Central Cellular. “It’s a fad. The majority of them don’t need them, but it’s a status symbol.”

Denise Jay, vice principal at Brea-Olinda High School, said the school bans beepers for the same reason it prohibits cameras or radios in class: They are distractions.

“We don’t want kids being beeped and having to go to a phone and leave class,” she said. Students found with pagers the first time have them taken away, to be reclaimed at the end of the school day. That’s only after school officials call the home “so the parent is aware that the student is carrying a beeper.” The second time, Jay said, the beepers are confiscated until semester’s end.

“They were made illegal on our campus because of the disruption in class and the concern that it would be for drug deals,” said Trisha Ginsburg, a senior at Los Alamitos High School. “But (at) the Orange County High School of the Performing Arts, a lot of students wear beepers because they have agents.”

Staff writer Jodi Wilgoren and student contributors Hallie Kim and Julie Kim contributed to this report.