SANTA ANA : Festivities Capped by Serious Note

As a high-ranking Mexican education official watched from the audience Wednesday, about 80 students at Edison Elementary School celebrated Cinco de Mayo with colorful costumes, songs and dances.

Javier Becerra, Mexico’s sub-secretary of education, who was visiting the school to learn about its Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, interrupted his schedule to watch the children perform.

During the 20-minute performance, Becerra told the students, parents and teachers that Cinco de Mayo is an important holiday for Mexicans and that being able to see the students perform was “a very pleasant coincidence.”

Kindergarten, third-grade and special education students also sang along to a skit called “The Hungry Caterpillar,” in which one student wearing a worm-like green suit bit holes into paper fruit and eventually transformed into a butterfly.

Afterward, Becerra took his seat in the back of a fifth-grade DARE class and listened as Santa Ana Officer John Reed warned students about the dangers of alcohol, steroids and PCP.

Reed explained that youngsters often try drugs out of curiosity, to look cool, or because of peer pressure. People with low self-esteem turn to drugs to make them feel better about themselves, he said, emphasizing to the students the importance of being kind and considerate to others.

The highlight of the class came when Reed, an accomplished ventriloquist, reached into his black duffel bag and pulled out a dummy known as “Shortstuff,” a brown dog wearing a badge and a police uniform.

Reed said Shortstuff would refuse to join the class until Becerra and his aide did something to bolster the police dog’s self-esteem. On cue, the two men called out: “We like you, Shortstuff!” Then, Reed’s flop-eared sidekick amused the students with banter about how to say no to drugs.

Students giggled and laughed throughout the performance, which ended with a song: “Users are losers and losers are users, so don’t use drugs.”

Later, Becerra said through an interpreter that Mexican schools are developing their own fledgling drug abuse prevention program modeled after DARE. The program he witnessed was exceptional because it involved the children, he said.

Becerra said that although gang and vandalism problems in Mexico are not as prevalent as they are in Southern California, his government is trying to keep them from growing.

“We’re trying to establish a healthy environment,” he said.