7th-Graders Reach High-Stakes, Pivotal Year : Balboa: Teachers and parents view the middle school experience as crucial in heading youths down the right path.

It has been almost two months since seventh-graders returned to Balboa Middle School, and they have been hard at work learning about the fall of Rome and the rise of advanced mathematics.

But really, that’s the easy stuff. At Balboa, like middle schools everywhere, the seventh grade is about so much more than what goes on in the classroom.

In many ways, it marks a coming of age, a time of great physical and emotional change straddling the golden age of childhood and the often rocky road of adolescence.

It is a time when the siren’s song of sex and drugs can be more alluring than ever. It is a time when the dangers of the real world--gangs and guns and other dark influences--can seem more real than ever.

For some parents, it is a nightmare time awash with visions of kids giving up, caving in or dropping out.

“It seems like everything happens at once,” said Chris Castellanos, whose 12-year-old daughter, Katie Scroggins, is a Balboa seventh-grade student.

“Their bodies are going through changes and you worry about that. You wonder how much drugs are around campus. You really worry about what direction they’re going to take, because now is the time they are going to decide.”

Standing her ground against the tide of middle school madness, veteran seventh-grade teacher Beth Pallares knows the stakes.

Seventh grade is a pivotal year academically and socially. And she knows that if she can’t get students to care about school, or anything else for that matter, they could be lost for good.

Those most at-risk may not drop out until high school, Pallares says, but the idea really starts to take root in the seventh grade.

“Generally the ones you lose, you lose because they don’t care,” said Pallares, who is in her 14th year teaching seventh grade--longer than any other teacher at the east Ventura middle school. “And the ones you can retrieve are the ones you can get to care. It’s kind of a watershed time for kids. It’s a time when faking it can’t get them by anymore. It’s a time when a lot of the third and fourth chances that they float through school on kind of end.

“I don’t care if I’m the most popular teacher they have ever had. I don’t care if I’m the most hated. But I do care that when they are 25, they say, ‘I remember the seventh grade, I really learned something that year.’ ”

*

Before the first bell on the first day of school, the rumors swirled about the teacher in Room 14. Kids were saying that Pallares was mean. They said she assigned loads of homework. They said she assigned just as much after-school detention.

“I heard that she was strict and that she yells at you,” said Carmen Silva, a smart and funny 12-year-old in Pallares’ first- and fourth-period classes. “That’s all I knew.”

Pouring into Room 14 on Day One, wide-eyed seventh graders--wearing shorts, T-shirts and new backpacks--met a teacher who meant business, a no-nonsense disciplinarian with zero tolerance for carrying on or mouthing off.

When a boy came through her door casually calling another student an obscene name, Pallares immediately took him into the hallway and laid down the law.

“That is unacceptable language in this school and especially in my classroom,” she lectured, her face just inches from his. “Don’t you ever make that mistake again.” The boy checked out of her room a short time later.

The 47-year-old Santa Paula resident, who started with the district in 1969, is one of seven, seventh-grade core teachers at Balboa. As a core teacher, she has three groups of students for two periods a day, English and world geography.

After setting her seating chart, Pallares went on to set the tone for the rest of the year.

Students learned that when Pallares was speaking, all eyes should be on her and all mouths should be closed. They learned that if they were late to class once, they would be forgiven, but that if they were late again, they would serve detention.

And they learned that if they needed to leave while class was in session, they had to take with them a stuffed armadillo, a trademark Pallares hall pass.

“This is not necessarily an entertaining 45 minutes they spend in here. That is not the purpose,” Pallares later explained. “Their time in here is important to me. I have them for 45 minutes. I have them for 180 days. Their time in here is really crucial.”

Students quickly caught on to the rhythm of Room 14. And most say now that they know Pallares, they know better than to believe everything they hear.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say she’s really mean, but she’s really nice,” said Katie Scroggins, a friendly and energetic seventh-grader whose older sister, Serena, was in Pallares’ class a few years ago. “She cares about her students. She wants you to be the best student you can be.”

“It’s fun being in her class,” said Jeremy Walters, a redheaded 12-year-old who earns mostly Bs and who enjoys playing video games at home. “This is the best school I’ve ever been to. The work is harder this year but you learn a lot.”

“She’s pretty nice,” added 12-year-old Jennie Trego, who plays baritone horn in the school band. “You just have to do what she says, when she says, and do it how she says it.”

Still, during those early weeks, it seemed as though at least some of those rumors about the hard-nosed Pallares were true.

So when she decided to kick the school year into high gear, she pulled out a hammer and started smashing clay pots. She was not driven by a fit of anger. It’s just that after 26 years on the job she has learned a trick or two.

The pot smashing is part of a geography lesson on tracing ancient civilizations, one where students screech in mock horror as Pallares pulverizes 89-cent flower pots they had spent half a period painting with the symbols of a long-lost culture.

“I was real nice,” she said, wielding the hammer and an extra-large grin. “Most of the time, archeologists don’t have all the pieces.”

More important, it’s the first real glimpse that the seventh-graders get at a different side of Pallares, an educator still passionate about her craft and still dedicated to squeezing the most out of her students by whatever means necessary.

“I think it’s really important for kids to see a human side of teaching,” she said, skeleton earrings dancing from her lobes as she spoke. “It’s important for them to see that life, that knowledge and that learning are multidimensional, that they involve passion. Those are the things that capture our imagination and stay in our memories.”

*

With 1,233 students, Balboa is the largest of the four middle schools in the Ventura Unified School District. And with 427 students, seventh grade is the largest class on campus.

Bordered on the east by a spectacular windrow of trees, the sprawling east Ventura campus is tucked behind a row of condominium complexes and a tract of single-family homes just east of Buena High School.

Balboa draws students from only a small portion of the neighborhood directly adjacent to the school, from the recently incorporated enclave of Cabrillo Village and from the community of Saticoy, a small unincorporated area between Ventura and Camarillo.

But mostly it draws students from Ventura’s east end, a sea of single-family homes that have sprouted up over the past 30 years to replace the open fields and citrus groves that once dominated the area east of Victoria Avenue.

Balboa’s ethnic makeup nearly mirrors that of Ventura County as a whole at 68% white, 25% Latino and 2.5% black, according to district records. It is an extremely stable school population: Last year only five students left Balboa.

The school building itself is a one-story structure painted battleship gray and streaked with blue trim. Students circulate rumors that it once was a women’s prison, but there is no truth to that.

“It’s not pretty,” says physical education teacher Bill Bragg. “But it’s earthquake proof.”

Posted at the entrance to the school is a sign warning against bringing firearms on campus and another advertising a toll-free number to report those who do. There is a single pay phone outside of the office that draws a long line of students during breaks.

The classrooms and the cafeteria form an uneven square around a central open-air courtyard, papered with banners promoting upcoming events. Before and after school and between classes, the courtyard and the hallways flood with students.

The decibel level skyrockets. Metal lockers squeak open and slam shut. The moving mass of pre-adolescence is broken only by an occasional slow-moving couple, holding hands and in no hurry to get where they are going.

Such romantic notions are frowned upon at Balboa, and a team of radio-wielding administrators prowls the halls on the lookout for such mischief and more serious problems.

Often, the hall patrol is joined by Principal Helena T. Reaves, who came to the Ventura Unified School District nearly 20 years ago from the Los Angeles city school system.

Now in her second year as principal, Reaves is proud of her school and of its image as a safe place. Just this year, Balboa beefed up its dress code to further restrict gang attire and other clothing deemed inappropriate. Aside from an occasional fight, Reaves said few major problems occur on campus.

“We live in interesting days,” Reaves said. “But Balboa parents are so willing to help us maintain a safe climate and I’m so grateful for that. I can’t believe the level of support.”

*

Usually around this time of the school year, Beth Pallares reduces a few of her students to tears.

Since the start of the year, she has been guiding her English classes through “The Cay,” a novel which depicts the relationship between a blind white boy and an older black man shipwrecked on a Caribbean island.

But as the story raced to a climax last week, Pallares added a dramatic twist. Her voice cracked with emotion and her eyes welled with tears as she revealed how the man dies shielding the boy from a powerful storm.

Moved by the tale, 12-year-old Maureen Villegas wiped her eyes. Several other students blinked back tears. The first-period class, usually buzzing with the energy of 31 seventh-graders, sat stone silent, genuinely troubled by what they had just learned.

“Why did Timothy have to die?” asked Carmen Silva, breaking the long silence at last.

The story had tapped the well of emotion that Pallares had been aiming for, but she wanted more. She asked students to describe how they were similar to the younger character, a boy named Phillip who undergoes tremendous changes during the course of the novel.

From the head of the class, Pallares scanned the hands shooting up across the six neat rows of desks. Not seeing enough, she frantically waved her hands, as if cooling herself off, coaxing others to join the discussion.

“Some people are prejudiced like Phillip was,” answered Lance Coert, 12. “He’s a kid like we are,” said Melissa Wilson, also 12. “He lost someone that he loved,” 13-year-old Brett Sinkovich said.

On any test, those answers would have gotten a passing grade. But for Pallares and other educators, they also miss the obvious.

Like Phillip, the seventh-graders in Room 14 are at a critical period in their lives, facing the kind of hard choices that could set them up for a lifetime of success or a lifelong series of failures.

Educators say that it is a pivotal academic year, a time when students are deciding whether school is important enough to stick with for the long haul.

And it is a time of fledgling independence, a period that propels kids farther away from the cloistered world of elementary school and closer to the free-wheeling universe of high school.

“They are changing, their emotions are changing,” said Mary Ann Overton, a middle school consultant with the state Department of Education. “Seventh grade is the one where they are beginning to feel like they are bigger, a little more important. But it’s also a time where they have all the self-doubts, where they think they’re ugly, where they feel their parents don’t understand them.”

Pallares knows that it’s her job to lead kids through this tough time, to boost their confidence and stimulate their curiosity, to push them just as far as they are capable of going.

“It’s my favorite age to teach,” Pallares said. “They are kind of in this nether world, neither fish nor fowl. That’s what really is kind of neat about teaching them. You can have a real impact, you can really make a difference.”

*

Of course, Pallares doesn’t do it alone.

Backing her up is a team of teachers and administrators who also have a hand in preparing middle school students for the challenges of high school and for the years beyond.

For Carmen Silva, that team includes zoology teacher George Maguire, who is introducing students to the scientific process. For Jennie Trego, it includes band teacher Julie Werth, who is busy preparing her kids for a Dec. 7 school concert.

And for 12-year-old Michael Guerra, a soft-spoken boy who counts among his biggest problems Balboa’s no-gum policy, it includes physical education teacher Bill Bragg, who is in his 27th year at the middle school.

Supervising a blur of seventh- and eighth-graders burning off a morning’s worth of pent-up energy, Bragg acknowledged that he and the others are on the front line of a daily battle to win the hearts and minds of students.

*

But he’s quick to point out that a lot of other people have a stake here too. After all, public school performance is a direct reflection on a community as a whole.

“If you don’t do any planting,” he said, “don’t complain when weeds come up.”

At the heart of successfully navigating the middle school maze are parents who care about their kids, who give some thought to their education and to their future.

“I’m always concerned, I’m always looking for any signs of any changes,” said Kim Baldwin, whose 12-year-old daughter, Diana Miller, is in Pallares’ first- and fourth-period classes. “But at this point, I feel everything is OK. I have confidence that she has been raised where she knows the difference between right and wrong and that if something comes up, she’s going to know how to handle it.”

For Chris Castellanos, the same holds true for her daughter, Katie. But that doesn’t stop her from worrying. She knows that the year is still young and that the seventh grade can be a minefield.

“I don’t want her to be perfect. I’m just looking for her to grow up to where she becomes a little more independent and learns to think things through,” Castellanos said. “Thankfully, we have a teacher like Mrs. Pallares who really cares about these kids.”

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Profile

NAME: Beth Pallares

AGE: 47

BORN: Pasadena

CURRENT RESIDENCE: Santa Paula

OCCUPATION: Seventh-grade teacher at Balboa Middle School in Ventura.

ANNUAL SALARY: $45,000

EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree in English from Cal State Long Beach, a master’s in curriculum from Chapman University in Orange and a master’s in public adminstration from the University of La Verne.

CAREER: Pallares has taught her entire career in the Ventura Unified School District, starting in 1969 at Saticoy elementary school. She also taught at Anacapa Junior High and Portola elementary school before coming to Balboa Middle School in 1982.

QUOTEABLE: “I sometimes think that kids think, and some parents think, that it’s us against them. That’s not the point. We’re all on the same side. We want kids to succeed. We want them to have the highest point of success they can achieve.”