PEOPLE : Happy Ending for a School That Teacher Depicted as Bizarre in Book

Imagine walking into an elementary school class where children urinate in the corners of the room and students yell obscenities at teachers. Where third-graders are caught having sex in the bushes outside the room and violence is commonplace.

Such was the mayhem chronicled by Long Beach teacher Sherry Meinberg in her book, “Into the Hornet’s Nest,” which was released this summer.

On one day, 25 elementary students kicked, hit and spat on a mentally retarded sixth-grader, the book says. On another day, a sixth-grade boy ripped open another student’s jaw with a nail file.

The action takes place at Walt Disney Elementary School, a pseudonym for the inner-city Long Beach school where Meinberg taught.

She declined to use the school’s name, she said, because “even though it’s all true, I didn’t want to be sued.” She chose the Disney name because “everyone referred to the school--without affection--as ‘Looney Tunes.’ ”

Meinberg said she waited to write the book until she could tell a success story. As a consequence of teacher and parent “empowerment,” she said, the school underwent such significant changes that it recently won a distinguished school award.

And that makes Long Beach Unified School District Supt. Carl Cohn very happy.

“I couldn’t be more pleased with how the book ends,” Cohn said. “The story she tells she approaches honestly from her perspective. And the epilogue is strong endorsement of school, of rolling up sleeves and improving public education. It’s a story with an incredibly happy ending.”

The book, published by R & E Publishers in Saratoga, Calif., has sold nearly all 3,000 copies of its first printing, Meinberg said, and a second printing is scheduled for the fall. Most of the book’s publicity has been by word of mouth, from teacher to teacher.

“I’ve gotten hundreds of fan letters and calls, plants, flowers, candy, books, mostly from total strangers who have had similar experiences, some of them knocking on my door until 10 at night,” she said. “I heard the same thing so many times: ‘Finally, someone is courageous to tell it like it is.’ The first question they ask me is, ‘Have you been fired?’ The second question is, ‘Have you ever taught at my school?’ ”

Meinberg wants the book to do two things: “To prepare new teachers for the chaos they will encounter” and to “alert parents to a growing crisis that will leave millions of students unprepared to succeed.”

Meinberg places much of the blame for the turmoil in the school on parents. “We come from the roughest area in Long Beach. The parents are hookers, gang members, drunks and druggies. Lots of druggies. We were supplying alarm clocks to kids because parents couldn’t get out of their drug stupor to get them to school.”

Meinberg, who now is the literacy specialist and librarian at Signal Hill Elementary School, has taught at 11 schools in 34 years. Fifteen years ago, she was transferred from a suburban to an inner-city school. She said she read “everything available on the ghetto,” but it failed to prepare her. Her shock was so profound she vowed to write about the experience.

From that promise came “Into the Hornet’s Nest.” The book chronicles one week in the life of a second- and third-grade combination class, but also looks at incidents that have occurred over the many years she has taught.

“It’s 300 pages and I’d already cut 308 pages,” she said. What’s left are “experiences so bizarre,” she said. “We’re talking guns, knives and sex in elementary school. Third-graders having sex in the bushes outside the classroom. A second-grader pulled a knife on a kid--his pen pal from another school.”

Meinberg, 53, a Long Beach native and the daughter of educators, has degrees from Cal State Long Beach and Brigham Young University.

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Long Beach businessman Joseph Ponepinto has been appointed to the board of directors of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. Ponepinto, president of Long Beach Jaycees, owns The Printed Word, a downtown graphics company.

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Lakewood resident and cinematographer Douglas Mazell was nominated for a Los Angeles Emmy for his work on the drama “About Love,” which follows a battered woman from the hospital to the courtroom. The all-volunteer project encourages women to leave violent relationships. *

Daniel A. Cutrone, a chemistry teacher at St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower and Keith W. Miller, a biology teacher at Lakewood High School, were among 95 high school science and mathematics teachers nationwide who won 1993 Sci-Mat grants.

The $3,500 grants were awarded by the Council for Basic Education to teachers pursuing independent research.

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South Gate resident Robert Gonzalez graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School in June and has recently begun a residency program in emergency medicine at Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix. A graduate of St. John Bosco High School, Gonzalez received his undergraduate degree in biology from Abilene Christian University in 1988.