Last Chance Grads : 800 Troubled Students Caught by Continuation High Schools’ ‘Safety Net’ Get Their Diplomas

Marlowe Jackson did not wear makeup to the Temescal Canyon High School graduation Thursday.

It was foolish to bother, she said, because she knew she would be crying. The tears welled up when she went to the mall last weekend and bought her son Jameel, 18, cq a card that said simply, “You did it!”--and she’s been crying off and on ever since.

“It’s a mother’s dream come true,” she said of Jameel’s performance at Temescal Canyon High, one of 51 cq alternative schools set up by the Los Angeles Unified School District as a last resort for troubled students.

At a time when the district’s dropout rate is double that of high schools statewide, Temescal Canyon and other continuation schools have managed to hold on to thousands of young people.

About 800 cqtkof them picked up their diplomas during Thursday’s 6/29ceremony on the football field at Palisades High School, where they lined up in robes of blue, green, white and scarlet for an afternoon of speeches under a sunny sky.

Many of them had been no angels at the crowded traditional schools they attended--intermittently--before washing up at tiny refuges like Temescal Canyon, a three-room enclave of bungalows on the ocean end of the Pali High football field.

They were stoned, bored or distracted, wounded by divorce or death in the family, working full time or frequently out sick, hassled by gangs or freaked out by crowds; unable, generally, to deal with the demands of teachers with little time for those who could not keep up.

“This is the second and last chance for a lot of these kids,” said John De Paolo, principal at Cheviot Hills High School, which is located on the Hamilton High School campus.

At schools such as Cheviot Hills and Temescal Canyon, troubled students must overcome the stigma of moving to the margins of the high school world, but they also find a shorter day, smaller classes, a looser schedule and individualized contracts that commit them to as much work as they can handle. Teachers are encouraged to use whatever works to get their message across, one student at a time.

“At first I didn’t think I could do it. A lot of people didn’t think I could,” said Jameel Jackson, who missed large chunks of the 10th and 11th grades because of chronic truancy. Now he is moving on to El Camino College, hoping to land a job behind the scenes in the entertainment industry.

He said his principal, Kay Lachter, was one of those with the most doubts, but he started to tune in after an art class grabbed his attention.

“You had a long way to go,” Lachter agreed with a smile.

“It’s very personal here,” she said. “For students who are different for one reason or another, it’s important to know someone cares.”

Does it work? When you add the 150 graduates who did not show up for Thursday’s ceremonies, “It’s a thousand miracles a year,” said Beth Newman, principal of Central High School. Central has a campus in downtown Los Angeles but also includes a network of classrooms across the city at places such as Penmar Park in Venice.

Principals speak of troubled students who went on to become successful stockbrokers or real estate agents. They are just as proud of alumni who managed to find work as bus drivers.

“It’s all up to you,” said Karla Mazariego, 18, an East Los Angeles resident who graduated from Temescal Canyon and hopes to become a nurse. “They [teachers] do push, but if you want to graduate, you know you do it for yourself.”

Others in the continuation system just don’t get it, for reasons of their own or because their teachers are not up to the challenge of educating the unmotivated.

Although assignment to continuation schools is voluntary, counselors generally recommend it for students who have missed so many credits that they have little hope of graduating with their classmates.

With about 6,000 students enrolled in the continuation schools at any one time, thousands more cycle in and out in the course of a year. Some of them catch up and go back to their original schools. Others dropping out for good.

“It’s a safety net,” said Terry Duncan, a science teacher at Temescal Canyon. “Of 100 who fall, we grab 15 to 20, or at least slow them down so the next net can catch them.”

The dropout numbers are fuzzy because the options program lost its central office in budget cuts two years ago, and no one keeps track. But one statistic--the number of diplomas granted--has been going up faster than the increase in the student population.

“We note [this] with some degree of satisfaction and pride,” said Richard Browning, director of high school instruction for the district. “Initially, the idea was more to get the kids to go back to regular school, and now there’s more of a feeling [that] if a kid doesn’t want to, that’s OK. They can stay there and graduate.”

Perhaps most important, class sizes are smaller in the alternative schools, which average 27 students for every teacher compared to a ratio of 36 to 1 districtwide.

Although teachers’ lives are complicated by having to keep track of each student’s individually tailored program, at least they do not have to deal with up to 200 students a day, as they might at traditional high schools.

Sunshine Sepulveda, a social studies teacher at Temescal Canyon, said this means she has a chance to get to know her students.

She pointed to a tall, lean young man who made loud and occasionally rude remarks in class.

“Regular teachers would say he’s a troublemaker,” she said. “They don’t understand his sarcastic sense of humor. Here, he’s my classroom helper and a positive individual.”

Almost uniformly, dropouts say high school was too impersonal for them. At continuation schools, they have the ability to focus on a limited number of subjects, “and that makes sense to them,” said James S. Catterall, a professor of education at UCLA.

The downside is that most students--hobbled, in many cases, by learning disabilities that may have been overlooked since elementary school--leave with no more than basic skills. But they do have a sense of having finished, of not giving up.

“There’s no miracle cure, but they did come to school, earn credits, leave school with a diploma and grow emotionally,” said Joan Rich Golden, a psychologist who studied a suburban continuation school for her doctoral dissertation.

“The pivotal point was bonding,” she said. “If they could bond with teachers, that started the healing process.”

And the diploma is good enough for employers as demanding as the U.S. Marine Corps, which sent a sergeant to the Cheviot Hills continuation school last week for the transcript of a graduate who is about to join the ranks of the few and the proud.

“We think it’s pretty good,” said the recruiter, who asked not to be identified. “What other alternative is there--to leave with no diploma?”

Marlowe Jackson was not about to accept that alternative, rousing her family at dawn so her daughter could ferry Jameel from their home near Crenshaw Boulevard and 39th Street to the distant Palisades while she went off to her job as a secretary.

“Continuation [school] made it possible for my baby, and I’m really grateful,” she said.