Full Mental Jackets

Michael Kalid swaggers onto the senior lawn at Westchester High School, wearing the colors of a big man on campus: a red-and-white letterman’s jacket.

He is, to be sure, the starting place-kicker on Westchester’s football team. But that’s not what this wool status symbol is for.

It’s for his prowess in the classroom--for keeping his grade-point average above 3.5.

“This is the one I wear,” Kalid said, proudly tugging at his academic letterman’s jacket. “I worked harder for the academic jacket than the one for football. This one is four years of hard work.”

Awarding academic letterman’s jackets has been a long-standing tradition at Westchester High, located next to Los Angeles International Airport, and at a scattering of other schools such as Hemet High in Riverside County and Banning High in Wilmington.

But the jackets have only recently started to catch on in a big way at all sorts of schools--spurred by interest in the Academic Decathlon and other efforts to reward classroom performers in a manner once reserved for athletes.

“It makes so much sense,” said Bob Chicca, a letterman’s jacket salesman in Southern California for 28 years. “Everyone knows who the jocks are, but not the academic stars.”

So while Westchester High held a foot-stomping pep rally for its basketball team, which won the state championship this year, it did much the same for 55 seniors who earned academic jackets in October.

The place known as a “jock school” assembled hundreds of its students in the auditorium as the jazz band played. Then the seniors with the requisite grades were shepherded onto the stage. School officials read a short biography highlighting each student’s accomplishments before fitting each one in a jacket bearing his or her embroidered name.

“This meant more to me than getting a varsity jacket, because I didn’t think I was going to get it,” said Eric Chu, captain of the school’s tennis team. “That day was pretty neat.”

Though many educators worry about anti-academic influences among students--especially in inner-city areas--he and others did not fear that they would be belittled as nerds for sporting garb that signaled that they cared about school.

In the first few months, said senior Kieu Smith, “you wore it every day, whether it matched what you are wearing or not.”

At Banning High School in Wilmington, where 54 of the 605 seniors got academic jackets this year, the ceremony became almost too big an event--and not because of the pomp from the school band and drill team performances.

The problem? The overwhelming emotion as one by one, the honored seniors would be handed the microphone on stage to publicly thank their parents, many of whom are poor Latino immigrants.

“They would say how much their parents meant to them and how they helped them succeed,” said college counselor Joan D’Amore. “Everybody would be in tears. I said we couldn’t have that. So now we have them do that at a coffee, cake and punch reception afterward.”

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At Westchester, the jackets are mostly on display in the cooler months, as might be expected. But even as spring brings warmer weather, they come out again on Fridays, the designated “jacket day.”

Then the lawn reserved for seniors is awash in red-and-white jackets, as it was on a recent morning break in classes.

Jason Mickelson, one of several dozen seniors hanging out on the lawn, clowned around in his uniform: black baggy pants, a wallet attached by a chain and his academic jacket.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal, but my girlfriend is a freak about this,” Michelson said.

“It’s really not a chick magnet,” Labina Ula interjected.

Ula, who was awarded a jacket herself, confided that there are other advantages to being dressed as one of the school’s academic elite.

“It’s a universal pass,” she said. “You just put on your jacket and you can get out of any class. You have this awesome respect.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been stopped by security,” agreed Kalid, the only member of Westchester’s football squad to get an academic jacket. His other letterman’s jackets--he was a varsity volleyball player as well and captain of the soccer team--have not worked as well, he said.

Unlike varsity sports jackets, the ones for academic accomplishment are given to the students for free.

Westchester’s Academic Booster Club shells out the $85 for each one, raising about $5,000 every year from bake sales, carwashes and other events, said Terry Marcellus, the booster club’s president. He has two daughters at the school he hopes will be wearing the jackets in coming years.

“When we started it, we didn’t know how it would be received,” Marcellus said. “Would it be accepted? Would the kids want it? Would there be prestige?”

The real force behind the 14-year-old jacket program is Esther Hugo, the school’s college counselor, who spends part of her free time during the summer calculating students’ grade-point averages.

Hugo tells how a ninth-grader recently ventured into the school’s college and career center and asked, “Mrs. Hugo, how do you get one of those jackets? They’re really cool.”

She explained that he needed a 3.5 or higher average in grades nine through 11.

“Do you get more credit,” he asked, “if you take honors and AP [Advanced Placement] courses?”

She told him yes.

“If you can get a ninth-grader to think about these things,” Hugo said, “your battle is won.”