All Good Things End, Including Vacation : School: Students in five O.C. districts resume classes, and those in 22 others will soon follow.

By DIANE SEO and LESLEY WRIGHT

Sept. 6, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

On the first day of classes Tuesday at Fullerton’s Troy High School, freshman Kelly Valeriano learned just how tough it is to be the new kid on campus.

During an opening day rally, the cheerleader said, older and bigger students good-naturedly jeered the ninth-graders, chanting “Go back to junior high” as Kelly and her classmates entered the room.

Valeriano, a petite 14-year-old with braces on her teeth, said she didn’t take the ribbing too seriously. But neither did it help her opening-day jitters.

“I just want to be cool, and I’m worried that I won’t be cool if I look like a loner,” she said. “Overall, my day went OK. It’s just like junior high school, except there’s a lot more people and they’re all tall and big.”

Tuesday was the first day of school for students in five North County school districts--Fullerton Joint Union High, Anaheim City, Fullerton, Buena Park and La Habra City. About 900 students at Santiago Middle School in Orange, the county’s first charter school, also headed back to class Tuesday, while students from 22 other districts will kick off the new school year later this week or early next.

Looking relaxed and happy to see their friends, many of Tuesday’s back-to-school bunch sported new hairstyles and trendy clothes as they returned from summer vacation. With backpacks slung over their shoulders, they gathered in school courtyards, looking for their friends and checking out the new kids on campus.

“I’m kind of happy to be back because I missed my friends,” said Eddie Ayala, a sophomore at Troy High. “It feels good to be back here, but there’s too many freshmen. They look like small, little kids.”

Troy senior Nancy Lopez, however, was less enchanted about being back on campus.

“It’s kind of frustrating to come back because I had so much fun over the summer,” she said. “All the seniors I know pretty much dreaded coming back.”

In Orange, teachers, staff and a group of elected officials hailed the opening of Santiago Middle School as a “fantastic journey,” while students had trouble getting past the one new thing that will most affect their lives: uniforms.

“I don’t like it,” 13-year-old Jill Collins said of the school’s uniform--navy shorts with white, gray or teal polo shirts. “You can’t express your personality.”

For the staff and students at Santiago, Tuesday marked the culmination of two years’ work it took to secure a special charter that releases Santiago from what many consider a bureaucratized approach to education.

Free of the rules of the state Education Code, teachers and administrators have created their own curriculum, and the school is even empowered to hire teachers without California credentials. A 13-member board of parents, teachers and staff will draft the school’s rules and regulations. Parents are required to volunteer at least 12 hours a year at the school.

“Santiago has been called a semiprivate school,” Principal Mary Ann Owsley said in her opening statements. “It is not quite a part of the Orange Unified School District but not completely removed. . . . It is boldly going where no Orange County school has gone before.”

The district’s seven school board members, who have supported the charter concept from the beginning, are now considering setting up a multischool charter, despite criticism that they are using the charter concept to advance their political views.

No such criticism was apparent Tuesday at Santiago Middle School.

“This is exciting. This is very exciting,” said history teacher Robyn Tunstall, who instigated the charter idea at the school. “We have gotten so much support, because it is community-based. The people who started it are the ones who are implementing it, so what’s not to succeed?”

Students also seemed eager to launch the new year with completely new rules.

“I think the school is going to offer us some privileges that we don’t know about yet,” said Larisa Rex, a 13-year-old eighth-grader.

While students and staff at Santiago Middle School kicked off the start of the school year with great fanfare, nothing out of the ordinary occurred at other Orange County schools that opened their doors Tuesday.

At Gordon H. Beatty Elementary in Buena Park, moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas clustered in front of the school several minutes before the end of the school day, anxiously waiting to see how their youngsters had fared on their first day.

Charles Kanu took the day off from his job as a manager for Pizza Hut to make sure things went smoothly for his 6-year-old daughter, Victoria, a first-grader at the school. Kanu said Victoria had been a little worried that she wouldn’t like her teacher, but she told him after school that things went well.

“She was a little nervous, so I wanted to make sure everything went OK,” Kanu said. “My son is also starting preschool, so it was a big day for our family.”

Linda Lanning, whose daughter Katrina started first grade at Beatty Elementary, said the girl had no trouble getting through the first day. But Lanning, who volunteers at the school, spent part of the morning consoling another child, who had a rockier start.

“I saw her over in the other room and she was yelling and crying,” Lanning said. “She was shaking and she kept saying, ‘I want my Mom.’ I felt so bad, I went over there to make her feel better.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

School Openings

Orange County’s schools get back to the business of educating students this week. Although classes are already underway in some districts, many are about to begin:

TODAY

* Brea Olinda Unified elementary and junior high schools

* Huntington Beach City

* Huntington Beach Union High

* Laguna Beach Unified

* Ocean View

* Orange Unified

* Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified

* Westminster

THURSDAY

* Anaheim Union High

* Brea Olinda Unified high schools