Then, in the End : As the School Year Winds Down, Students Face New Challenges

New black parking lots have given La Quinta High School a crisp look, just in time for the national education inspectors. Word is in that campus has passed with flying colors. Oh, that all 1,300 students here would.

Inside the student store, overseen by popular Spanish teacher Larry James, the mood is jocular, the talk of graduation and summer jobs. In this teen-age community called high school, the place functions like the town general store.

During lunch and between classes, students drop in to buy sodas and snacks. James makes change and small talk. When he’s coaching volleyball and advising student leaders, the talk can get more personal. He has been a confidante since I was a student here.

Regrettably, I divulged nothing to him before I graduated in 1977, barely surviving in his Spanish class. I spent more time that year aimlessly driving around in my friend’s car smoking cigarettes, or making out with my boyfriend.

Ditching school was my escape from grief and the responsibilities inherited as my mother’s body slowly surrendered to cancer. Back then I just felt like a failure, even as senior class treasurer. James treated me no differently for my absences, and I used to thank him for giving me extra credit for painting a poster: Seniors are Numero Uno.

It’s easier to see now why many students--boys and girls--have entrusted James with their triumphs and fears. He and his wife have taken some students into their home while parental battles were worked out. That has not changed, even as the student population in the past 17 years has shifted from mostly white to mostly Asian, from comfortably middle-class to 40% of the campus being enrolled in the subsidized lunch program.

“Kids are kids,” said James, who was briefly stranded after school one day after loaning his car to a student. “Culture and language are the only differences over the years. Interracial dating is on the rise, and we sell (Vietnamese) grass jelly drink in the student store now. But the kids’ concerns are the same as they ever were: boyfriends, girlfriends and grades.”

*

Trouble is more often what we hear about teen-agers, but high school life here is far more ordinary--certainly less dramatic--than crime reports and TB scares. And there is far more good news than bad at this modest campus.

A camera panning school life would reveal snapshots of both on some days.

The Class of ’94 is noticeably more academic than others, and five students have tied for valedictorian. Only one gave the commencement speech at exercises for about 300 blue-robed seniors Monday because “otherwise,” principal Mitch Thomas says with a laugh, “we’d be there all day.”

Prom Queen Lynn Phu, the well-liked co-president of the Vietnamese Club, has been accepted at and will attend UC Davis in the fall. This is thanks to her grades and application essay citing her community service and quotations of author Pearl S. Buck. Some kids are takers. She is a giver. Charming and helpful, she hopes to become a schoolteacher.

Thanh Tang, student body vice president and son of restaurant owners, has reached his goal of earning a 4.0 grade point average as this semester ends and will major in business law at UCLA come September. He plans to share a nearby apartment with three other La Quinta classmates.

His dream of Harvard was abandoned because Massachusetts is so far from his family, and the cost is too high. But he has already earned a $1,500 scholarship and has applied for more.

Amber McCammack, 18 on Father’s Day, is trying to find a job, hopefully a full-time clerical position, until she can save enough to move into an apartment. Then, she says, she will reconsider college.

Pregnancy and childbirth in her junior year caused her grades to drop. A clarinet player, she wanted to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, but audition tapes were due the first of November, and she missed the deadline due to marching and concert band demands.

“College is on the back burner until I know what’s going to happen with work and the money situation,” she says. “But I’ve got a real hope to be something in music. It’s been in my life since I was born.”

She has spent her senior year attending adult-education classes to pick up office skills and recently took a typing test for an employment agency looking for a law office clerk.

“They were seeking someone who types at least 40 words per minute, and I stunk on the test,” she said one day after school. “Normally I can type 47 to 50 words per minute, but I did 39--I guess because I was nervous.”

She hasn’t heard back.

Her grades are pretty good, and she is getting along well with family and her boyfriend, who got kicked out of La Quinta for swearing at a teacher and then didn’t get enrolled at a continuation school. He plays in a rock band but, Amber says, he will start looking for a job when he is 18. She sees him almost daily after school.

Two things are weighing most on her mind now, flattening her voice to a dull pitch.

“I dunno,” she explains. “Once I turn 18 my mom’s (medical) insurance doesn’t cover me anymore, so I’m kinda screwed there. I worry about that a lot. It’s been on my mind.”

Was there anything else making her blue? She sighs heavily and gives it up.

“I was supposed to get the pictures of the baby last month, and I didn’t, so I’m kind of pissed. Every three months (the adoptive mother) sends them, but she hasn’t.”

Ask her how old her daughter is, and she asks for the date, then does the math in her head quickly. “She’s one year, two months and seven days. I last saw pictures of her in February. She’s got my blue eyes, and she’s getting curly hair, which her father is pretty happy about. It’s got red in it. She looks a lot older than she is.”

Amber knows that to see the child in person is unlikely.

“Hopefully, when she turns 18 and it’s legal to look for her, I will. It’s funny. I can be in the worst mood, and I come home and the pictures are sitting there, and I am the happiest person in the world.”

She is excited about graduating and detects a strong case of “senioritis” on campus as the school year closes.

“This is how school works: As freshman you are scum; you are nobody, you are nothing. As sophomores you move a step up the ladder: You still don’t know much but you’re learning. Then you are juniors; they know everything, they’re always on the ball. And seniors--all they can think of is graduation.

“But my junior year I was more worried about having my baby. Wouldn’t you know it? My peak year.” She giggles. “Oh, well.”

*

Students such as Eric Sizelove seem to have lived several years’ worth of turbulence this semester. The promising water polo player we met a few stories ago was kicked out of La Quinta on March 23 for knocking out a fellow student with two punches, ruining what coaches expected to be a successful swim team season, possibly even a CIF bid.

His dream had been to work out an athletic scholarship and attend a four-year school, maybe Cal State Long Beach. But his dismissal, he says, has ruined all that.

He feels sorry for himself, puts the rap on the school.

“I went from going somewhere to going nowhere. I blame La Quinta, because La Quinta knew that was going to happen.”

When pushed, he concedes: “I should have backed away. You know how it is; it was a stupid mistake on my part. If I would’ve known what would happen. . . (but) I wasn’t concerned about that. The guy made me mad, and that was it.”

A bright student who excels, Eric has the potential to be somebody. But his father dying young and his mother ailing now have left him angry at everyone, says his mother, Elaine Sizelove, 41, starting to cry.

“He hasn’t dealt with me dying,” she says with difficulty. “He’s mad at me for that, but we never talk about it. He says, ‘Mom, you used to be able to change the oil on a Harley (motorcycle) yourself. Now you can’t do anything.’ ”

Eric has struggled through school with a learning disability. Recognizing the strikes against him, principal Thomas, teachers and coaches kept a tight rein on him. When he would start to slip, they would grab his hand.

So it was with particular sadness that they sent him away after the fight.

He was allowed to attend the Garden Grove Unified School District’s Lake Continuation School, where all he met were students he deemed losers. So he resumed hanging with the gang members from his neighborhood, near Westminster Avenue and Edwards Street.

Deciding he needed a fresh scene, Eric drove each Tuesday to adult education classes in Riverside, where he earned his final credits toward a high school degree.

But in May he was arrested on a felony charge after a fight in which police pulled up to find him clutching a Club car security device. Gang members showed up and broke his car windows outside a florist, he said, and he chased them. The charges were dismissed, his mother said.

He has also been arrested again, this time for carrying a concealed weapon--a sickle--in his car. The “grim reaper thing” belonged to a friend, he said, along with a toy gun also found beneath his spare tire.

Until he sorts out his problems, he is restless and spending considerable time in his room, where the walls are covered with his pencil drawings and graffiti. Sports trophies cover a dresser top.

The good news: Eric says he sees now that he is bound for prison or a path of failures if he does not change course. He is a bundle of contradicting remarks, though, from one conversation to the next. I tell him I will call before this story runs to make sure he is not behind bars.

He laughs a little, but he knows I am only half-kidding.

For now he and his mother are getting along, they both say, talking tough but honest with each other, painful as it is for both.

“He punches walls in his bedroom, and I say, ‘It’s your bedroom but my home.’ It’s hard to watch your kid take his lumps, but you have to,” his mother says. “But he’s trying now. It’s cool.”

“I’m so scared of going to jail,” he says, “but if something happens now that I’m driving around Orange County now, I’m gonna have to take care of it, and if I get caught and go to jail, I do.

“But I’m changing my life,” he says, saying goodby for now as yet another friend pages him on his beeper. “If I want to do this, I can do this.”

*

By last week, the La Quinta campus was pumping with passion about two big news events: the baseball team’s ride to glory and a new TB scare.

Senior Debi French, who relapsed into a highly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis late last year, had part of her lung removed in late May to stop the disease after first-line medications failed.

Her case attracted a horde of reporters to the school. The attention had students outraged--not over the disease, but over media coverage. They found it for the most part sensational and misleading.

“We’re tired of being ‘TB High,’ ” said civics teacher Doug Mercer.

All 1,300 students were tested this month for TB. Preliminary screenings showed that 97 additional students and nine staff members have tested positive for the bacteria that can later cause the disease (there is a 10% chance of contracting it in the lifetime of a person testing positive).

But there are only 17 active cases detected since the problem emerged in 1991.

Hundreds of understandably unnerved parents called or visited the principal’s office, where they were mostly calmed with the assurance that officials were doing all they could. Parents were told what the students by now had learned: TB is difficult to contract and easy to treat.

Those on campus who tested positive for TB have been interviewed by the county health department and the Centers for Disease Control to track all the people with whom they have had the close contact necessary to transmit the virus. Follow-up work will stretch well into summer.

Rather than distance the students, the notoriety has spawned a circle-the-wagons mentality on campus, with students bound together against what they think are ill-informed media and other outsiders. They seem to spare me this wrath because I haven’t covered the daily new stories.

“It’s drawn us all closer, not apart,” says senior Deanna Del Monte, 17.

At an assembly June 10, Debi French, who has not returned to class, was presented with a signed ball by the CIF-winning baseball team. She took briefly to a microphone for a few tearful words to her schoolmates.

“ ‘I’m sorry this happened, and I put you through this,’ ” Deanna recalls her saying. “Everybody was crying and hugging each other.”

The administration served cookies and punch that day as a morale booster, and it further created a We Survived the Scare bonding.

In a 10 a.m. history class last week, the students seemed knowledgeable about TB. They seemed to accept the testing interruptions and extensive questioning about their associations with people. But they have suffered most, they say, from the subsequent stigma.

“The kids who tested positive are still negative for (active) TB, and you don’t get that feeling from the newspaper,” said Amber Jones, 15. “But even so, my best friend’s father didn’t want to be near me. He made my best friend wash all of my clothes that she had at her house.”

At a CIF baseball game at La Quinta, the parent of an opposing team player wore a surgical mask in the bleachers.

“I walked by their bus that day,” Deanna says with amazement, “and the players were, you know, being guys (translation: flirting). And they said, ‘Do you go to this school?’ And I said, ‘Would it matter?’ ” So they knew, and they were saying . . . ‘TB’ ”

Getting summer jobs is a major worry for La Quinta students, who say they have been asked by some prospective employers for proof that they have tested negative for TB.

“They treat you,” Amber says, “like they treat people who have AIDS. Now we know what that feels like.”

Not surprisingly, the principal and others are concerned about any impact the TB situation may have on enrollment come September, when parents will be allowed for the first time to decide which district school their child attends. But since the first case of TB among La Quinta students was detected, enrollment has actually risen slightly.

Students are otherwise calm about the outbreak--the nation’s largest at a school--and understand that most cases can be treated if addressed early and diligently.

*

Attention is far more intensely focused on this week’s graduation and a future outside the home of the La Quinta Aztecs.

A sea of royal blue gowns and caps fill 357 folding chairs seating La Quinta High School’s Class of ’94. Most of the seniors are wearing sunglasses; others squint into the bright sunlight beating down on the grass football field of Bolsa Grande High School, the closest campus with a stadium big enough for Monday’s graduation ceremonies. American flags flutter beside the rows of students. Coincidental to this momentous occasion, a pink inflated King Kong floats in the air above a car dealership across the eastbound Garden Grove Freeway that flanks the field.

Both light-hearted and brimming with profundity, the commencement speakers quote Henry David Thoreau, poet Robert Frost, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, former New York Mayor Ed Koch and U2 lead singer Bono.

Introductions are made by a girl-boy team of Naheed Simjee and school newspaper editor Chris Dutton, both of whom refer to the year’s major news events--on and off campus.

“We’ve been through floods, fires, riots,” Chris recalls, “ . . . or what about the earthquake that shook school second period?” He reassures his classmates that if they made it through the TB spotlight, “we can make it through the times ahead.”

Lynn Phu, the aspiring teacher bound for UC Davis, soon takes the podium, urging the people with whom she has spent four pivotal years to always have a dream to chase. She reminds them that they have lived harmoniously inside their campus community in a way many neighborhoods have not yet managed.

“The greatest lesson I’ve ever learned in school came not from a textbook but from all of you,” Phu tells her classmates. “You’ve taught me to understand, accept and appreciate each other’s differences. La Quinta itself is a multicultural society, one that is still in its infant years but has already proven to have the potential of becoming a model for the rest of the world.

“It is my belief that every generation that rises in this world brings with it a new culture that is irreplaceable. . . . No matter how much has been said that history repeats itself, I can promise you that there will never be another Class of 1994, especially the one that you and I know.”