A Belated Welcome to the Real World of Tough Choices

Was anyone in Orange County not jarred after reading of the New Year’s Eve murder of Foothill High student Stuart Tay? Didn’t we cringe again just a few days later when police arrested five high school students from the affluent Sunny Hills High School area in Fullerton and charged them in connection with the slaying?

Here’s another story about today’s teen-agers--one you probably don’t know about.

Elizabeth Bangs, a senior at Sunny Hills, heard about the arrests on the late news. As editor-in-chief of the Sunny Hills newspaper Accolade, Elizabeth had some decisions to make.

“I didn’t have names, I didn’t know who it was, but my immediate reaction was, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ ” Elizabeth said as we talked yesterday in a quiet room of the school library. “I tried to figure out who it was (who had been arrested), but that didn’t work, despite the fact that Robert (Chan, one of those arrested) had been pulled out of my English class earlier and had disappeared off the face of the earth. I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t expect someone I knew had been arrested for murder.”

The Accolade isn’t in the business of covering murder. Like most high school papers, it covers campus scholastic news, sports and school productions. Its hottest topic of the year had dealt with students leaving campus over the lunch hour.

Against that backdrop came the Tay murder.

Elizabeth tried to detach herself, emotionally. “I had to,” she said, “because especially as the weeks went on (there were three weeks until the next scheduled issue), it gave us a lot of time to think about what we were going to do. In order to keep my emotions under control, I had to think as an editor. I had to look at it as a journalist, and not as someone who was a student in class.”

Tension was thick on campus after the arrests. Teachers gave up regular lessons and devoted class time to open discussions. Reporters camped outside school grounds, and students were discouraged from talking to them. No one--parents, administrators or fellow students--wanted to give the arrests any more attention than necessary.

That inherent pressure was not lost on the Accolade staff, but by deadline week, word leaked that the paper was planning full coverage, including running the boys’ photographs--and not just yearbook photos, but shots of them in custody.

On Thursday of deadline week, Sunny Hills administrators formally raised questions. Unhappy parents also objected, as did fellow Sunny Hills students, including some on the Accolade staff.

That last night before publication, Elizabeth said, the staff felt as if “we were up against the entire school.”

Elizabeth held firm on the pictures. “People are always talking about how teen-agers think they’re invincible,” she said. “There’s an important message in those pictures--that if you break the law . . . you’re going to get caught and get punished and end up in handcuffs in a courtroom. Yeah, it’s painful to look at them and painful to look at friends and classmates sitting in handcuffs, but there was a very important message, and it’s a message I think teen-agers need to know.”

Elizabeth co-wrote the main story instead of assigning it to someone else. “It wasn’t that I could do it better than anyone else, but it was more of a responsibility, that it was mine to deal with.”

To its everlasting credit, the Sunny Hills administration let Elizabeth and the staff make the final decision. The staff voted to stick to its plan: Not only a Page 1 story but facing pages inside the paper that contained four other stories. In addition, the editorial page included a student editorial on the murder and letters from students. Another full page was given to a teacher’s essay and pro-and-con opinion pieces about media coverage of the incident.

“For the most part, we didn’t put our emotions in it. We wrote the facts, and we were totally honest and straightforward. We didn’t try to sugarcoat it. We know we hurt the families of the kids who had been arrested, and we know we hurt their friends and we hurt ourselves because we were their friends, but sugarcoating it is essentially the same as not telling the truth.

“We have a tendency as human beings to cover up things that hurt and that we don’t like. But then they just sit under the surface and fester and get worse and worse and worse. Dealing with it is the first step in getting on with things. This is what happened, this is the truth, and we have to accept it as it has happened, and it’s ugly. Being in court is ugly, but this is the reality of what’s happening to our classmates.”

Life at Sunny Hills has returned to normal, Elizabeth said. “It’d be nice if all I had to cover was the prom. It would make my life a lot less stressful. But it’s not as challenging and not as interesting and not as much like real life.”

Perhaps I make too much of this, but I see this whole episode as one of those quiet acts of courage that seldom get attention.

The Accolade staff could have taken the easy way out and pleased everyone. That Elizabeth and her staff chose the tough way--but unmistakably the right way--deserves cheers.

And so, as I sat chatting with this daughter of Margie and Bill Bangs of Fullerton, I drew comfort in knowing that even as adults are rightly frightened by what today’s teen-agers are capable of, we shouldn’t forget that remarkably eloquent, bright and principled young people like Elizabeth Bangs also walk in our midst.