The Faces of 1994 : From the Twentysomething Mayor Who Stayed Home to the Eightysomething Photographer Who Returned There, We Catch Up With some of These Pages’ Most Interesting Personalities : CHAUMANIX DUTTON : ‘She Hasn’t Missed a Step . . . ‘

Chaumanix Dutton had a good year at Berkshire School, the prep academy in western Massachusetts where she won a $21,000 annual scholarship (“A Shared Success,” Jan. 4, View).

“She’s opened up a little; she’s not nearly as shy and it’s working for her,” said Melissa Livsey, head of the dorm where Dutton lives. “The kids like her and the faculty like her.”

“It’s like everybody knows each other,” Dutton said while home in South-Central Los Angeles for the holidays. “I’m friends with some of the faculty. I’ve pretty much always been on speaking terms with my teachers, but now I can talk to them about anything and they talk to me.”

Chaumanix, a 15-year-old sophomore, has also participated in sports and discovered that she likes basketball and cross country. And despite a tough academic load, she’s maintaining straight A’s.

That performance pleases her mother to no end.

“She hasn’t missed a step in terms of her academic achievements,” says Sophia Berkley, an administrative assistant at a resource and referral agency for child care. “. . . And there have been no social problems. She’s still able to mix with kids and people on all levels, and she’s still not a snob. That’s extremely important to me.”

Nevertheless, Berkley misses her daughter. “Each day it becomes more and more evident that she’s really left home. . . . She went to New York with a friend over Thanksgiving and didn’t come home. That was very difficult. It was the first time the entire family (Dutton has two younger brothers) hadn’t been together.”

Meanwhile, Chaumanix--a true Californian--contends with what she calls one of her main problems: the snow.

“Walking all the way across campus in the snow isn’t appealing,” she said. “. . . It was cool at first, but after a while you get tired of it. . . . Where is the sun? Where is the warmth?”