Season of Hope : A Look at the Future Through La Quinta’s Students

Sea gulls gather like storm clouds in the sky above La Quinta High School’s quad, circling and shrieking in anticipation of lunchtime leftovers.

You could set your watch by their arrival here 7 1/2 miles from the ocean, on a tidy little campus where surfers and brains and jocks gather and mostly get along.

Snoop Doggy Dogg’s rap ends. With the bell, a thousand students scatter toward combo lockers, classrooms, their future.

So much is different in high school--this school--from 17 years ago when I was a student. Starting a freshman with braces and class vice president and ending up a homecoming queen nominee and class ditcher, I was as twisted up as any teen-ager over all the usual romantic and academic crises and terminal boredom.

Nobody worried then about a classmate in civics drawing down on them from a backpack. Nobody worried about AIDS or tuberculosis. We didn’t have a shooting in the parking lot. We did have a drunk driver who fatally plowed into the parking lot’s fence. We had more smoking and drugs.

In the mid-1970s, the student population was vastly white, with only 79 of 2,000 kids of Asian or Pacific Island descent--and they were primarily Japanese American kids whose families farmed strawberries one could still buy from the fields. Last year, filmmaker Oliver Stone’s company conducted open casting calls out of the La Quinta cafeteria for his Vietnam movie, “Heaven and Earth.”

It’s a very different place, La Quinta.

Family income levels have dropped. Only five students got free lunches when I attended; today 40% of the campus population does. Test scores have gone up. Enrollment has declined; so have electives such as metal shop. Students now complain that they can’t enroll in more classes in a day.

Changing values and cultures are shifting much of what was high school tradition. Fewer than 40 class rings sold this year. Nobody wants to work on the yearbook anymore. For all the concern over teen sex, couple-dating sometimes seems as outdated as Ken and Barbie.

In some ways it might be a hint of what’s in store for Southern California.

Although the image lingers of bedrock white Orange County, 17 years ago it was even more so: 86% of the people living here were white. Today, the 2.4 million population--dramatically affected by an infusion of immigrants and a changing economy--includes 23% Latinos and 10% Asian and Pacific Islanders. In the high schools alone, the numbers rise to 35% and 13%.

Hoping to take a snapshot of ordinary teen-age life in this rapidly changing world, we spent most of the school year at La Quinta High School. Maybe, we thought, we might also catch a glimpse of our own future.

Here at La Quinta, where 27 languages are spoken, where dark hair and distant relatives are the norm, the so-called minority is the majority, and diversity and multiculturalism are not talked to death but lived out every day.

“It’s about time Americans realize we are part of the whole world,” world history teacher Rita Corpin remarked one day outside her classroom. “Kids at La Quinta get that every day.”

*

We start with fall, that season of beginnings and possibilities on a campus where students are more likely to feel hopeful about their future, and about themselves. Their dreams for big romances and small waists haven’t yet faded like summer tans.

By October, it seems, the big news off campus is La Quinta’s TB scare. After it becomes public that a 16-year-old student is still contagious with the disease, screenings are expanded to the entire campus. Headlines go on and on about the scare. Teachers and administrators fret that the bad news will discourage parents once open enrollment commenced.

School officials monitor the situation and hold meetings to arm teachers with facts and assuage fears.

For La Quinta students, it is one big yawn.

At weekly appointments, students who had tested positive for TB trudge from class to Nurse Sheryl Reyes’ office, where they line up for their mandatory medication and then return to their desks.

In Barbara Henry’s art class one day, a girl is called to the nurse’s office to a few chants of “TB, TB.” But everyone, including the girl, laughs. There is not much obsessing about TB and, like AIDS, maybe it is just teen-age denial. But the kids talk more about the news coverage of TB--they think it’s sensationalized--than about who has it on campus.

*

Marching band member Amber McCammack, all school spirit and freckle-faced innocence, was a mother by her junior year.

One day after “narc watch,” which involves her standing guard outside the girls bathroom while her friends smoke inside, she welcomes me to campus and wonders why I’m here. She agrees to meet later for a chat.

What is it like now to get through high school?, I ask. Over a banana split after school that day, she licks chocolate off her spoon and talks about things so private and painful it is hard not to wince.

Amber, 17, freely dissects why she thinks she had herself a baby. As she does this she is such a collision of girl and woman, cynical wit and crushing vulnerabilities. Her father died when she was 3; her mother then married a man Amber did not like. She thinks she clings to her boyfriend for the male protection she was denied.

Her grades suffered after her 16th birthday, when she learned she was pregnant. Her family was, of course, not pleased, she says. She says she never considered abortion. She felt oddly admired by other girls for seeing the pregnancy through. “They told me, ‘I could never. I would just get rid of it.’ They felt the disappointment of their parents would be worse than anything else that could happen to them.”

She jokes that the one class she has done especially well at--besides band, of course--has been Life Sciences, specifically the chapter on reproduction.

*

The excitement of homecoming is in the air--or is it just a free period for a gym assembly where everyone gets to yell and show school spirit and sport the Aztec blue and gold? The script for this ritual brings alumni back to the big football game and a frilly-dressed queen to be crowned at half-time.

In looking at the football game program, I realize that the four princesses were born the year before I graduated. Ouch! Princess Aileen Rose has a 2.0 GPA and these plans: “Go to a two-year college, then to a four-year. Get married and have three kids (one girl, two boys). Go bungee-jumping.”

Princess Mina Nguyen has a 4.1 GPA and four favorite teachers. Her plans? “Harvard and major in law, international relations and political science.”

That old chestnut, football, has taken a hit on this campus with the changing student population. Asian-born kids generally don’t have the size and years of practice in Pop Warner that past graduates had, coaches say, and their parents largely resist any activity that might detract from schoolwork.

Success, the coaches say, can no longer be strictly defined by winning.

“We’re better because of it,” Jim Perry, athletic director and basketball coach, says one day after school in the gym, where expandable bleachers are tucked beneath the gray Aztec Empire painted on a wall.

In his striped warm-up suit the coach saunters along the sidelines as young boys run up and down the court.

This is the start of Perry’s 13th year as a teacher and coach, and he has changed as radically and surely as have his teams.

Coaches get as personally involved with their students’ future as anyone on campus. They cajole students to stay out of trouble; they needle them about schoolwork; they nag them to kick butt for the greater good of their team; they referee family battles, they size up a kid’s commitment and character and vest his future if deemed.

Perry has attended weddings and birthday parties and other milestones of his long grown-up charges. He is that kind of guy.

At some point after foreign students became a sizable presence in the school’s sports programs, Perry took a year off “to regroup and rethink”--to decide whether he could go on coaching. His conflicts reflect much of how other teachers and students have adapted to their changing world.

He visited campuses where friends of his coached, places such as Alhambra High School, where there is “a huge Chinese population going through the same thing” in athletics. Same thing in Wichita, Kan.

He helped a friend teach basketball at a Mexican clinic where they had not much more than a hoop in the village common. He rediscovered what it was like to share the pure love of a game and, he says, “the true meaning of teaching: the commitment to the value of kids doing the best they can,” no matter how many jump shots they missed.

“It really changed me personally,” he says as the players wander toward the locker room, “and I think we do a better job now.”

Being as close as he is to a lot of the students and former students who return as assistant coaches, Perry watches the nuance of student relationships.

“There have been racial tensions over the years,” Perry says, “but they tend to be between Hispanics and Asians rather than with whites, because the whites are such a minority here. It’s over stuff like culture, language, ‘why do you think I’m different?’, stuff like that.”

More subtle social problems play out on campus as well, Perry and other teachers say, things like how females are viewed in their culture versus their standing in America.

The backgrounds of many of the kids born in Vietnam are sometimes stunning, he says, when you think about what they bring to school with them mentally.

“These kids have had members of their families involved in guerrilla activities; they’ve been floating in the South China Sea on a rickety boat for three to five weeks; they’ve seen people dumped overboard, they’ve watched pirates kill people.” Perry shakes his head.

It’s a different kind of lost youth than gang bloodshed, but it is nonetheless innocence lost to violence.

*

It’s 9 a.m. Monday, and Rita Corpin’s world history honors class is under way.

“We’re just starting the Middle Ages,” she says, as a video on what it’s like to live in a castle plays. No big surprise here. Some kids are yawning with their heads down in the dark. Corpin is unfazed. She’s been teaching here three decades.

The class is an interesting microcosm on some days. One of the things Corpin tells her students is that she is impressed that they know more than one language. But shortly after she noticed groups of students speaking languages other than English in class, she saw a problem emerging. If she felt left out and excluded, how must other students feel?

“I require everyone to speak English in class, because that puts down walls, and I tell them, ‘We need to speak a universal language so we can all communicate and understand each other.’ ”

Some days Corpin has her students group off by color of their clothes, or by first letter of their name. One day, she had her students line up by country of birth. America was a small group--six out of about 30. “The rest were born in Pakistan, Iran, Vietnam, Romania, all around the world.” Corpin let her own observation sink in. “There may be riots and problems in L.A., but it’s working here, the melting pot. And it’s not a class thing either.”

World history in Corpin’s class is delivered with a cultural point of view--not just a drone of dates and names but the music, foods, religions, values, social welfare system, art and literature, men’s and women’s roles and economics.

“We’ve got the United Nations on this campus, and I think its great,” Corpin says with pride.

But do the kids?

“That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot more understanding. At first I felt there were walls. One thing I have noticed: There has been some white flight, but the students here now--by and large get along very well, because we see that there’s understanding and respect.”

“You have to remember, students are young and open-minded. Students are very open to change, and very positive. When students break into study groups, you don’t see big breaches between races.

“Now guys and girls in the same group, that ‘ s an even rougher mix,” she says with a laugh.

*

Flames are devouring entire neighborhoods in Laguna Beach and Malibu and Sierra Madre, monopolizing television news for days. There is not a peep about a drive-by in La Quinta’s senior parking lot Oct. 27, except a few graphs in the back of the local news pages.

According to Principal Mitch Thomas, a student booted out of La Quinta a year ago and a male friend pulled into the senior parking lot after school that day, and one of them jumped out. He pointed the barrel of a .25-millimeter automatic toward the campus and sprayed five or six shots, apparently at random. There were not many students around, although volleyball team members, lined up for a group photo, would later say they heard pops but did not immediately realize bullets were flying nearby. Fortunately, nobody was hit, and somebody recognized the guys in the car that peeled out onto McFadden Avenue.

Arrests are made and a motive suspected--girlfriend-boyfriend hassles--but never established.

It is a tough blow at a school that prides itself on security and the principal’s zero tolerance for even fistfights among students. During job interviews Thomas conducted, he drilled campus supervisors such as Dominic Palumbo, a towering Texan, and Pat Faulkner, a solid, no-nonsense mother of five, with questions like: How fast can you run the 100-yard dash? How fast can you scale a 10-foot fence?

“One of the things I looked for by asking that was a sense of humor,” Thomas says. “It’s essential. Pat’s response was great. She says, ‘It depends on what’s on the other side.’ You need to know does this (campus worker) have a sense of humor? . . . Because if they are hard-nosed with those kids all the time, they’re not going to make it.”

The levity and vigilant attention to problems seem to be working. Unlike my years here, the entire perimeter of the campus is gated, and the three open entrances are under routine watch by the walkie-talkie-toting paid supervisors and three administrators. Visitors must be checked in by staff and given special sticker badges. Both parking lots are closely watched.

The October shooting episode scares the heck out of her, supervisor Faulkner admits, but it is an exception. Mostly the challenge is the day-in, day-out mouthing off or rebellion that she tangles with.

“They test you,” she says, smiling and shaking her head. “But what else is new about kids? I got my own. I should know.”

*

The continual complaints of campus budget cuts are an evergreen among faculty, parents and students. Today’s spokesman for the issue is school newspaper editor Chris Dutton.

“So much has been cut,” says Chris, 17, a blond senior staffing the lunchtime bake-sale table to benefit La Quinta’s Students Against Drunk Driving chapter. He also co-captains the mock trial team, edits the Aztec Sun and works on the yearbook.

“The school newspaper has been cut back to five editions (a year); Drama 2, 3 and 4 is one class, and there’s no play,” says Chris, who works part-time at JCPenney’s credit department.

Sounding amusingly like an older person always seeing the past better than the present, Chris says students during his underclass years had far more spirit.

He is very ambitious and ready to move on to college--a university in New Zealand where he will study political science and broadcast journalism.

He sometimes seems older than some of his classmates, maybe because he has self-awareness that comes from some painful self-examination. Childhood friends of his were messed up pretty bad on drugs, and Chris had to think hard about his own furtive drinking. In his sophomore year he was scared that it was out of control, so he went clean and sober. Hence his leadership role in SADD.

Though he is only an average student because he often takes on too much and then doesn’t finish everything, teachers sense Chris will succeed.

But in any school of 1,300 kids--any community of 1,300 people--not all will be able to fix their problems--or rise above them. And La Quinta is no different.

Nancy Wride, Times Staff Writer

Wride attended La Quinta High School from fall 1973 to spring 1977 and in those years worked as a reporter for the Aztec Sun. She covered the big stories of the day, from President Gerald Ford’s campaign stop at Mile Square Park to prom expenses. She joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times in 1979 while a student at Cal State Fullerton and has won numerous awards, including the state publishers’s award for feature writing.

Gail Fisher, Times Staff Photographer

Fisher graduated from Garfield High School in Akron, Ohio, in 1972 and earned her BA from Miami University of Ohio. She taught high school woodworking and photography, then left to earn a master’s in photograhpy at Ohio University. In 1980, she joined the San Bernardino Sun and three years later moved to the Times. She has won many awards and was twice named photographer of the year.

Profiling La Quinta High

Good attendance, a low dropout rate and a diverse student body are the norm at La Quinta High School. It was the fifth school to be built in the Garden Grove Unified District, thus the name, which means “The Fifth” in Spanish.

The Basics Enrollment: 1,370 Full-time faculty: 54 Opened: 1963 Mascot: Aztecs Athletic achievements: 151 league championships, 15 CIF finals, 12 CIF championships National Merit Finalists: 14 in past five years

Dropout Rates

La Quinta’s students are less likely to drop out than are those from other schools in the district and county. Rates for 1992-93 school year: La Quinta: 7.0% Garden Grove Unified: 10.8% Countywide: 10.8%

Taking Attendance

Over the 1993-94 school year at La Quinta: * Daily attendance averaged 98.6% * Fewer than 0.5% of students were truant daily * Fewer than 0.5% of students were suspended * There were 277 days of suspensions among entire student population * Three students were expelled for incidents involving either drugs or violence

After School

The breakdown of 1993 graduates’ destinations: Four-year college: 22% Two-year college: 55% Work force: 14% Military, other: 4% Trade, technical: 5%

Scholastic Assessment Test

La Quinta’s average SAT math scores are the highest in its district. Average scores for 1993-94:

Verbal Math La Quinta High School 400 535 Garden Grove Unified 389 504 Countywide 436 523

Ethnicity

Whites and Latinos make up the majority of Orange County’s high school population. At La Quinta, a high percentage of Asian/Pacific Islanders reflects the strong Vietnamese presence in Westminster. Breakdowns for the 1993-94 school year:

La Garden Grove Countywide Quinta Unified Asian, Pacific Islander 57% 29% 13% White 25 28 48 Latino 15 39 35 Black * 1 2 Other 3 3 2

* Less than 1%

Language Barriers

La Quinta’s curriculum in 1993-94 offered 27 English as a Second Language classes. Native languages spoken among the high school’s students: Language: Speakers Vietnamese: 570 Spanish: 131 Korean: 16 Chinese: 19 Arabic: 5 Farsi: 5 Japanese: 5 Tagalog: 3 Thai: 3 Urdu: 3 Armenian: 3 Lao: 3 Czech: 2 Other: 12

Sources: La Quinta High School, Garden Grove Unified School District, Orange County Department of Education

Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times