Experimental School Hails First Graduating Class : Education: All 114 seniors at Academy of Mathematics and Science, many of them minority members from low-income families, are going to college.

On a brilliant mid-September morning in 1990, the small faculty of a bold new public high school waited anxiously in a parking lot at Cal State Dominguez Hills for the five buses that would bring the diverse group of ninth-graders chosen to be the first students of the California Academy of Mathematics and Science.

“We were as nervous as the students,” Principal Kathleen Clark said. “We kept asking ourselves, ‘Will this school work?’ ”

On Saturday, as those same students--now the seniors who made up the school’s first graduating class--gathered in the college gymnasium for commencement, the answer was clear.

All 114 of the students, recruited from eight school districts in Los Angeles County, are entering college in the fall, some bound for such prestigious universities as Stanford, Brown, MIT, Caltech, UC Berkeley and UCLA. Many of them, by taking Dominguez Hills courses as electives during their junior and senior years, have enough university credits to begin as sophomores. About 70% have chosen careers in math, science or technical fields.

Together, they have racked up more than half a million dollars in scholarships and won scores of national academic prizes.

More than half the graduating seniors are women, and 85% are minorities, a reflection of the academy’s goal of increasing their numbers in science and technical professions. Some live in poverty, and many are the sons and daughters of immigrants.

Gov. Pete Wilson, who delivered the keynote address and then stuck around to shake each graduate’s hand when diplomas were handed out, told students: “Your success is something we want to see replicated across this state. . . . Each of you has the potential to do extraordinary things.”

The seniors’ achievements have helped earn the young academy accolades as one of the nation’s most successful experiments in public school reform, and many of the ideas are being emulated in other, more traditional California high schools.

The academy began as a partnership of the state Department of Education, local school districts, the Cal State University system and several corporations. With the high school housed on the college campus, the students receive a demanding curriculum and have full access to university facilities.

In addition, students get mentors--volunteers working in math- or science-related careers who counsel and advise them. There are internships, summer enrichment programs and tours to visit colleges nationwide, most of it paid for from grants or from the $4.5 million in private support the academy enjoys.

Although each student chosen for the 500-student academy showed promise in math and science, they were not all from the ranks of the academically elite.

“We look for more than just the top math students,” Clark said. “We are looking for kids who are really motivated, who really want to be here.”

By accepting at least two students each year from 60 schools in the participating districts, the academy gets a strong ethnic mix--28% Latino, 28% black, 29% Asian American, 14% white and 1% Native American. They come from the Long Beach, Compton, Los Angeles, Inglewood, Torrance, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Hawthorne and Lawndale school districts.

New graduate Marsha Sargeant, 17, who will enter New York University in the fall and wants to become a doctor, said the personal attention she received was most important to her.

“Everybody here is really caring--the teachers, the counselors, the kids--we’re all very close-knit. I don’t think I could have had any better preparation for college,” said Sargeant, of Long Beach.

Jose Aguiar, 18, who had been headed for Jefferson High in his South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood when he got accepted to the academy four years ago, said he felt some pangs about no longer going to school with his childhood friends.

“But I made new friends,” said Aguiar, who will become a premed student at Columbia University in the fall. “I liked our group projects, taking college classes, learning to be organized. . . . It was tough, but it was worth it.”