Garcia State : 4 Degrees Earned by a Family That Put the Home in Homework

There’s one family that won’t have trouble finding a place to sit today when an audience of 22,000 crowds into the Cal State L.A. football stadium for commencement ceremonies.

The Garcia family of Monterey Park will have reserved seats--in the graduates’ section.

Four family members--Lupe Garcia, 49, daughter Lupe Marie, 27, and sons Daniel, 30, and David, 32--will receive degrees at the 9:30 a.m. event.

The Garcias’ diplomas will probably prompt sighs of relief around the stadium--certainly from the in-law who typed term papers and reports for the clan over the years. And assuredly from the 14 faculty members who struggled to tell the two Lupe Garcias apart in classes the pair shared.

Cal State officials say this is the first time that four members of one family have graduated together. About 3,800 students will receive degrees today.

A jovial and close-knit family, the Garcias have been gearing up for today since Thanksgiving.

“We were having dinner when we realized we all might be graduating together,” said Lupe, the mother of six.

“It was between a drumstick and a wing,” said Daniel. “I had the wishbone,” said David.

Actually, family members say the pressure was on Daniel, not David. Daniel heads the special education department at Lincoln High School and was leisurely pursuing his master’s degree. He decided to speed up his course work to graduate with the others.

“There is more unity than rivalry in this family,” said David, who along with his sister and mother will receive bachelor of arts degrees. All three are aiming for careers as special education teachers.

But there was still plenty of friendly competition when mother and daughter found themselves enrolled in the same classes. The pair never dared to cut corners by sharing textbooks, for example.

“I think she tried to pick up my papers on purpose to look at my grades,” Mom said with a laugh. “I’d joke, ‘I hope the teacher didn’t think I was you ‘ when he graded our tests,” retorted her daughter.

“In one English class, three of us were in there together. Mom and I have the same major, so we were in eight or 10 classes together.”

“Fourteen, in fact,” corrected Lupe Marie’s husband, Armando Farias. He ought to know--he’s the one who typed the family’s school papers.

School has always played a central role in their lives, family members said.

The patriarch of the family, Robert Garcia, is a painter for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Lupe has assisted in disabled elementary students’ classrooms for 18 years. Lupe Marie has done the same in junior highs for seven years. She met Farias while workingat Belvedere Junior High School: He is a school police officer.

David has worked as a classroom assistant at a school in Ramona Gardens for 11 years. Daniel taught history and economics at Lincoln High School for eight years before heading its special education department.

After starting her family, Lupe Garcia returned to school in the early 1980s. She graduated from East Los Angeles College in 1984--during the same ceremony in which son Daniel also earned an associate of arts degree.

Robert Garcia said today’s graduates are waiting for three other family members to enroll at Cal State L.A. They are sons Robert Jr., 24, also a school painter, and Eddie, 31, also a teaching assistant, and 8-year-old daughter Lisa.

The third-grader ignored the banter as she did her homework next to a back-yard swimming pool at the family’s hillside home while the graduates tried on their caps and gowns.

“We go together to places like the park and you turn around and the books have popped out,” said Robert Sr.

“I admit I held my wife back when the kids were younger. But when she went back to school, all of the kids were encouraged by what she’s done.”