For L.A. Class of ‘93, Pomp and Tough Circumstances : Education: High school diplomas represent triumph over personal obstacles as well as the school system’s.

Here they come, the hip-hop generation, witnesses to riots and campus shootings, survivors of budget cuts, the perseverant ones, 27,000 students in all, the Los Angeles Unified School District high school graduating class of 1993.

The graduates take their first steps into adulthood this month, leaving behind a much-maligned district, the nation’s second-largest public school system.

“I think it’s an accepted point of view among the Class of ’93 that we were pretty cheated by our education,” said Nkechi Obioha, an 18-year-old graduate of the district’s Center for Enriched Studies and editor of LA Youth, an independent citywide newspaper. “We deserved better.”

Nearly 4 in 10 of their fellow students districtwide dropped out and did not graduate. Those who did earn their diplomas often faced overcrowded classrooms, outdated textbooks, and the unsettling and growing presence of weapons on campus.

For some, earning the diploma also meant overcoming great personal adversity.

Lilian Rafael, a Guatemalan immigrant, conquered the obstacles that prevented six of her seven brothers and sisters from finishing high school: They had to work to support the cash-strapped family.

Honor student Carolyn Davis, 17, graduated nearly two years after giving birth to her daughter, Zoe.

For ex-gang member Robert Vargas, graduation from Roosevelt High School means a ticket to a new life, far away from the Aliso Village housing project in Boyle Heights and the gunfire that claimed the life of his best friend.

Even now, Vargas hears the taunts of “sellout” from the gang members who don’t understand his decision to attend the University of San Francisco in the fall.

“They don’t understand that I’m just trying to make life better for myself and for my family,” Vargas said. “Just last week, they killed another guy, one of my ex-homies. . . . I prefer change to dying.”

Violence spilled onto campuses this year in two highly publicized events--fatal shootings at Fairfax and Reseda high schools. The tragedies only served to fuel a heightened sense of crisis in a school system ravaged by budget cuts.

In the time it took the Class of 1993 to complete junior and senior high school, administrators cut more than $1.2 billion from the district’s $4-billion budget. In their senior year, the graduates saw their teachers take a 10% pay cut.

Once the Class of 1993 joins the work force, it will have to cope with similar economic hardships, including a tight labor market--the teen-age unemployment rate in Los Angeles County stands at 18%, double the overall rate.

“Not since the Great Depression has a graduating class looked forward to so few opportunities,” said Mike Davis, urban critic and author of “City of Quartz.” “They’ve inherited a downsized education system and an employment market that offers them jobs in theme parks and as security guards.

“This is a super-smart, prematurely wise generation of kids,” Davis added. “I just feel they’ve been betrayed in such a terrible way.”

The voices of four graduating students, from widely varying backgrounds and communities, provide insights into the aspirations and struggles of the Class of 1993. They tell the story of graduates unwilling to give up, even when faced with the most daunting of obstacles.

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Carolyn Davis was 14 years old and an honor student at Birmingham High in Van Nuys when her world began to collapse around her. First, a fellow student fell down a stairway and died in a campus accident. Traumatized by the tragedy, she began, by her own admission, to run with a “bad crowd.”

Heavy-metal types became her new friends. She started dating a 21-year-old high school dropout. “That was when I thought I’d be immortal,” she says. “I thought I’d live forever.” Then she became pregnant.

“It took a while to hit home that I was really expecting,” Davis says. “I really didn’t think about it. Then it hit me that my life had to change. I didn’t always run with the best crowd. But that stopped. I said, ‘OK, I’m getting my life in order.’ ”

The first step was a transfer to McAlister High School in Reseda, a continuation school for pregnant teen-agers.

Stella Grant, a teacher at McAlister, says that pregnancy is the principal reason young women quit high school. “They’re tempted to drop out of school to find jobs to support their child,” Grant says. “Sometimes their child-care situation falls through, so they have to drop out.”

Davis, however, decided that she would graduate, no matter what the cost.

In just nine months, as her small body grew and stretched with the weight of the unborn child, she completed the second semester of the 10th grade and most of the 11th. She even took time to enroll in classes at Pierce College.

“I did it for my daughter because I wanted her to have a better life,” she says. “And I did it for myself.”

After the birth of Zoe, Davis took just five weeks off before returning to the classroom.

“It was a very difficult time,” she says. “I was in a bad relationship with my child’s father. There were all these things going on at once. It’s a lot of responsibility, to be 15 and taking on a baby and school.”

Last week, Davis strode to the podium in cap and gown to accept her diploma--she graduated with honors. An articulate 17-year-old with a confident bearing, she plans to continue her studies at Pierce. Eventually, she hopes to transfer to the University of California and major in psychology or education. She is thinking of becoming a teacher.

She says she won’t forget the poor learning environment at McAlister, where “the questions are so remedial you have to be half dead not to answer them. And the books are kind of an insult to one’s intelligence.”

Previous generations, she says, have done a poor job of providing good schools to the city’s young people. “They’ve made us bankrupt. They’ve made education so hard to obtain. It’s only for the wealthy.”

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There is absolutely nothing about Robert Vargas that suggests violence or anger. He is a soft-spoken 18-year-old, persistently optimistic about his future, proud to be a member of the largest graduating class in the history of Roosevelt High.

“Everyone at Roosevelt has ganas ,” a desire to succeed, he says with a smile. “Everybody is starting to wake up.”

Just a few years ago, Vargas’ chief ambition was to be a gang member. He was a ninth-grader and, like many youths in the Aliso Village housing project, he already knew how it felt to hold a gun in his hand.

“It’s just people catching fever,” he says. “A lot of my friends went into gangbanging. I caught that fever once.”

Vargas tried to model himself on an older gang member named Hector, a.k.a. “Flaco.”

“He was sort of my mentor into the gangs,” Vargas recalls. “He would sort of take care of me, lead the way, teach me. I really liked him a lot.”

Hector was sitting on his front porch, recuperating from a bullet wound to the stomach, when he gave Vargas one last piece of advice: Get out of the gang life. “You’re not in too deep,” Hector told him. “You should cut it out. Calm down.”

About an hour later, Hector was killed in a drive-by shooting, one of more than 2,000 people killed in gang violence in Los Angeles County in the past three years. Vargas saw his friend bleed to death. At one point, he nearly attacked a police officer who tried to keep him away from the scene.

“I still had the gangster attitude in my head,” Vargas says. The attitude carried over into high school. “I wasn’t going to let teachers tell me what to do,” he says. “I was sort of like a troublemaker. Basically, ditching, being rude to the teachers. I always wanted to learn, but I had to be funny, the class clown.”

Vargas credits his 10th-grade English teacher with turning him around. “She helped me out a whole lot. She was like my mentor. Everybody offered to help me, but she sort of led the way.”

Soon Vargas will move to a dormitory at the University of San Francisco, far away from the small apartment in the projects where his mother raised eight children.

“I’m looking forward to that day that I leave,” he said. “As soon as I leave, that will be a big accomplishment. I haven’t even done anything yet, but I feel that I’m a success in life by getting out of Aliso.”

He has other bad memories of the place, including the time his 8-year-old niece was shot in the foot while she sat in their apartment.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t like it here,” he said. “In my room, there’s at least four bullet holes.”

*

With a circulation of 100,000, LA Youth is one of the largest youth newspapers in the country. As editor, Nkechi Obioha believes it is her job to make the pages of LA Youth reflect the concerns of her teen-age readers.

The cover story of the most recent issue asks the question: “If you saw a gun in your friend’s backpack, what would you do?” Obioha said she assigned the story in response to this year’s campus shootings and the decision by officials to begin random checks for weapons on campuses.

“When students don’t feel safe at their school, when they don’t have a sense of belonging, it takes away from the quality of education they receive,” she says. “We’ve been searched during class. They bring in scanners and check our backpacks. . . .

“School is no longer a place where you just come to hang out with your friends and go to class,” she concludes. “Now you have to worry: Will I be shot when I go down this hallway?”

LA Youth staff also found themselves worrying about budget cuts and the persistent threat of a teachers strike, an action that could have derailed the college plans of graduating seniors. In December, Obioha wrote a story that pleaded, in a front-page headline: “No More Cuts!”

Seeing so many crises has led Obioha to adopt a Mark Twain saying as her new motto: “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.”

The truth is, however, that Obioha received a better education than most students in L.A. Unified. She attended the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, a mid-city magnet school that students have nicknamed “Disneyland High” because of the easygoing atmosphere.

Obioha has been accepted at Yale, where she plans to study English or medicine.

“I really want to help my country and this world,” she says. “But I just don’t know how to do that yet. I haven’t worked out the details.”

What will the Class of 1993 accomplish once it goes out into the world? “I’m not sure,” Obioha says. She worries about the apathy and narcissism of her generation. “If we ever wake up out of this trance that we’re in, we will have something significant to contribute.”

*

Hundreds of Jefferson High students line up outside the auditorium, waiting in emerald green caps and gowns to receive their diplomas. Spanish-speaking parents focus video cameras. Teachers hug parents. It is a moment of great pride and hope.

Somewhere toward the middle of the line stands Lilian Rafael, the youngest daughter of Guatemalan parents who moved to this country when she was 3. She smiles, adjusts the tassel on her cap and poses for a photograph. She is the first of eight brothers and sisters to attend a high school graduation.

Rafael flunked the 10th grade. She confesses that she didn’t take school seriously at first. The social scene--a rich and varied one at the multiethnic school--sidetracked her for a while. There was the hip-hop crowd and the banda music crowd, Latino youths who dressed in boots and cowboy hats and took pride in their Mexican heritage.

“I was so excited to be in high school I got caught up in things,” she recalls. “You’ve got all these friends and you just worry so much about the social thing instead of doing the education thing.”

Eventually, she turned things around. “I just opened my eyes and said ‘I’m going to do it.’ I wanted to make my family proud of me. I want to give them some hope.”

Rafael’s mother is a seamstress in a garment factory. Her father works as a cashier at a gas station. She and her brothers and sisters were raised in a one-bedroom apartment in an old brick building on Vernon Avenue.

Their neighborhood is not always safe. Rafael often hears gunfire at night. “I have this fear that I’m going to die by a bullet for some reason,” she says casually. “The thought gets into my head.”

Just the other day, she saw her father mugged at gunpoint just a few feet from the entrance to their apartment building. During the riots, a crowd looted the Church’s Chicken next door, breaking into the refrigerator to steal armfuls of frozen chickens.

For now, Rafael plans to enroll at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. Later, she hopes to transfer to a university and study journalism.

The long battle to finish high school was worth it just to see the expression on her father’s face when she came home with her cap and gown in hand.

“He was so happy,” Rafael says. “He just hugged me. And that’s what it’s all about for me: To see him happy. He looked so proud.”