COLUMN ONE : Garfield High Grads Return and Deliver : With Principal Maria Elena Tostado as the force, 33 alumni have been lured back to the school. The teachers are living proof that a rough start in life doesn’t rule out success.

Garfield High School burst into the national limelight seven years ago with a tale made for Hollywood: underachievers mastering calculus, stunning educators with top scores on the Advanced Placement exam.

The film “Stand and Deliver” made a virtual legend of teacher Jaime Escalante, whose success at turning lackluster students into mathematical wizards drew throngs of admiring visitors to the aging campus in the heart of East Los Angeles.

Escalante is long gone. But now a dramatic story of another sort is quietly unfolding at Garfield.

The school has drawn dozens of its graduates, including some of Escalante’s former students, back to teach in its tattered classrooms. Thirty-three alumni have returned, most of them in the last five years. They now account for almost a quarter of the teaching staff. Twenty more Garfield grads still in college are in the pipeline, working as teaching assistants and hoping to land coveted jobs at their alma mater.

The numbers add up to an inspiring sense of community at one of Los Angeles’ most storied campuses. Garfield now has more former students working as teachers than any of the 48 other high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The newcomers include a former football player who is living the dream of coaching his beloved Bulldogs, a young woman who traded a career as an insurance executive with its promise of a six-figure income, and a bright-eyed 23-year-old who says she feels old when her students address her as “Miss.”

Principal Maria Elena Tostado, an East Los Angeles native whose parents taught in local schools, is the force behind the change. Tostado has actively recruited Garfield graduates, urging each class of seniors to return in her graduation speeches and passing the word among the close-knit teaching community that qualified alumni are hungrily sought.

“I always tell them, ‘When you finish college, you’ve got a job waiting for you,’ ” said Tostado, 55, a former nun who proudly displays resumes and cover letters she receives regularly from graduates of USC, Cal State Los Angeles and other schools who want to come back. “I guess it’s worked. I’m never without a pool of teachers.”

Students say the Garfield grads bring a sense of home and family to a crowded campus of 4,000 where it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. Students speak their minds among these teachers, some of whom are regarded as trusted brothers and sisters.

“I say, ‘Oh man, I wish I could be just like them,’ ” said senior Nancy Sanchez, 19. “That’s me in the future, hopefully.”

Virtually all of the returnees are bilingual, an essential skill in a school where a fifth of the students speak little or no English.

The teachers say they bring another vital ingredient to the job: an understanding of life in the barrio. They grew up in the housing projects and blue-collar neighborhoods of the Eastside. Their parents struggled to put food on the table, and they helped pay family bills by hawking fruit on street corners after school or shining shoes on the weekends.

“I walked the same streets, and I made it to Columbia University and Pitzer College” in Claremont, said Fernando Arias, 37, a biology teacher whose mother worked as a seamstress and father as a janitor. “That’s got to mean something.”

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When Arias, a ’75 graduate, decided to shift from teaching elementary school to high school, Garfield was his only desire. “This is where my skills could be put to their best use,” he said.

Teachers like Arias believe their very presence in the classroom sends a message that young people from humble beginnings can make something of themselves.

“We are all living proof that education works, regardless where you come from,” said Dolores Munoz, a 23-year-old teaching assistant and a ’90 graduate. “I tell my students, ‘If you don’t want to be like your father, breaking your back from sunup to sundown, then listen up.’ ”

Adam Casas, who teaches English as a second language, makes a point of telling his life story to his classes at the beginning of each semester in hopes of inspiring his students.

At 14, Casas arrived in Los Angeles as an undocumented immigrant from a small farming town in central Mexico. His family, which had lived a simple life tending cows and pigs and making ccheese, had traveled north in search of a better life.

Here, Casas encountered unexpected troubles, including racism. American-born Latino students would chase him after school, picking fights and taunting him with slurs such as “wetback” and “beaner,” he recalled.

He mastered English, finished high school and at the urging of a friend got a job as a teaching assistant at an Eastside elementary school. He used his salary and student loans to pay for tuition at East Los Angeles College and Cal State L.A.

“When I tell my students I went through this, they’re shocked,” said Casas, 34, who became a U.S. citizen about six years ago. “I tell them, ‘All these good things--a home, a car, nice clothes--can all be yours if you take advantage of the opportunities. First and foremost is finishing high school.’ ”

Students say Casas’ story has made them reflect on their own situations.

“When he told us about his life, it made me think I could get a profession also,” said Alejandro Aguilar, 18, a senior who arrived from Mexico two years ago and plans a career in the Army after he graduates this month. “He was just like me. I used to live in a little ranch, also, taking care of the cows.”

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Garfield was not always flush with a home-grown corps of teachers. Until Tostado’s arrival eight years ago, the school had less than a dozen graduates on its staff, about the same number as several other high schools in the district.

Tostado, a politically savvy woman who worked alongside Cesar Chavez in the labor movement of the 1960s, recognized the importance of building pride among her Latino students. At Garfield, she discovered an untapped pool of bilingual students who spoke with a reverence for their school and their heritage.

She decided to hire graduates as teaching assistants, thinking they would bring their enthusiasm and their language to the classroom. Eventually, she began urging them to return as teachers and wrote letters to the school district, which assigns teachers to schools, requesting that the graduates be placed at Garfield. District officials, who routinely accommodate principals, have done so as long as there is room; over the years Tostado has had to turn about 10 graduates away because there were no open slots.

The principal, who expects five more graduates to join her staff in the fall, speaks of building the Garfield contingent one alum at a time.

“Who loves the school more than they do?” Tostado asked. “It’s their alma mater. Why wouldn’t they want the best for their community?”

The same sort of philosophy has allowed Roosevelt High, Garfield’s Eastside rival, to garner nearly as many graduates--28--on its staff. (Garfield would have 35 graduates working as teachers were it not for the deaths of two teachers this year, one in a traffic accident, the other in a domestic dispute.)

The math classroom of one of Garfield’s youngest returnees is filled with posters that offer encouragement to students. One depicts the “good life”--a mansion with a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Corvette and other sports cars parked out front. The caption reads: “Justification for Higher Education.”

Maria Faccuseh, 23, who is completing her first year at Garfield and still getting used to hearing “Miss,” said that because of her age she can relate to her students’ fears and confusion about the future.

“I tell them I was in their shoes not too long ago,” said Faccuseh, Class of ’90. “I say, ‘I was a student here and I made it. You can too.’ ”

Football coach John Aguirre hopes to leave his players with other life lessons.

As a child, Aguirre lived in the Estrada Courts housing project in nearby Boyle Heights before moving to a tiny apartment above a bakery near Garfield.

His school years were spent playing wide receiver and defensive end on Garfield’s football team and becoming, as he now says, a “C, D and F student” who had scrapes with the law.

Aguirre, a 1972 graduate, now counsels his football players to avoid such mistakes, urging them to turn their energies to school, football, family and God.

“I’ve become father, mother, counselor, referee,” said Aguirre, 41. “A lot of these kids come with a lot of baggage.”

Aguirre has made an impact on several of his players.

“He knows how hard it is not to get into gangs,” said Andy Lopez, 17, a defensive lineman who said he hopes to use football to get a college scholarship. “He taught us there are other ways. He says, ‘Put your mind to it.’ ”

For these teachers, returning to Garfield has also meant committing themselves to their roots on the Eastside. Some who left to attend college have moved to homes just blocks from Garfield and now walk to work.

The teachers speak with pride about East Los Angeles. They boast of the Latino culture that has thrived for decades and the stability of a community where three generations of families have lived on the same block and attended the same schools.

“This is home,” said math teacher Anna Macias, 27, who left a promising career as an insurance actuary--and the potential for a $100,000 salary--to pursue her dream of teaching at Garfield.

Macias had worked at Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance in Downtown for six years, including a period when she was getting a math degree at USC. At Transamerica, she held a variety of positions, among them a research job in which she calculated salaries for the company’s agents.

She found the work challenging but impersonal, little more than a way to pay her bills. Meanwhile, she was staying in touch with Garfield, where eight brothers and sisters had also gone to school, tutoring math students there. Two years ago she decided to make a change in her life and left Transamerica for USC, earning a teaching credential and a master’s degree in education. The idea that she had been toying with since the 11th grade--going back to Garfield--took hold. She obtained an emergency teaching credential that allowed her to return to Garfield as a teacher immediately.

The career change required her to take a $7,000 pay cut. She now earns about $28,000 a year, with a future maximum of less than half of what she might have eventually made at Transamerica.

“I only regret not coming sooner,” Macias said. “I found what I wanted to do. I see my career here. I don’t intend to leave.”