LAGUNA BEACH : Students Tag Along for Career Insight

About 100 high school students spent Friday with city officials, business owners, police officers and firefighters, eager for a peek at careers they may someday select as their own.

In City Clerk Verna L. Rollinger’s office, 15-year-old Emily Moore assembled an agenda packet for Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

“You want to see how real people spend their lives,” Moore said.

The project, set up by Laguna Beach High School, also allowed five students to act as “student City Council members” alongside elected officials Tuesday night. The program is an observance of National Leadership Week.

Under the Student Day In Government program, teen-agers were matched with role models in an exercise that allowed them to show their leadership skills and see how complex issues are resolved.

Laguna Beach High School activities director Dawn Mirone said she began looking for mentors for the students several weeks ago. About 40 local agencies responded.

“We keep getting calls from business owners,” she said earlier this week. “The idea has really caught fire. . . . I have one orthodontist who rescheduled all his appointments on Friday so they’d be real interesting things for the kids to see, including tooth extractions.”

Students and mentors began Friday at a breakfast meeting at the Hotel Laguna, then headed off to their assignments.

“I’ve always been fascinated with helping people,” sophomore Shawn McDonald said as he sat in Fire Chief Richard Dewberry’s office. “I want to do something exciting when I grow up.”

But one lesson the teen-agers learned as they “shadowed” their mentors was that jobs which appear glamorous from a distance may be less exhilarating up close.

After sticking close to police investigator Jim White for an hour or so, Lawrence Bammer, 15, found that filing and typing take up much of White’s day.

“It seems with investigations there’s a lot of paperwork,” Bammer said.

In the city’s Planning Department, Nicole Osmanski, 15 observed a request for an outdoor display permit, and seemed surprised by the invisible bureaucracy that city workers--and residents--wrestle with daily.

“It’s really amazing what goes into it,” she said.

For White’s shadows, Bammer and Bulfrano Hernandez, the action picked up slightly when the teen-agers accompanied White as he asked a local businessman to identify a suspected thief from a photo lineup. When he couldn’t, the disappointed investigator and the two students headed back to the Police Department in an unmarked car.

“I was hoping he’d pick him out and you guys could see a detective get excited,” White said.