Just Call It Rock-Solid Education

No piece of real estate in the vast expanse of Los Angeles County is more evocative of the Wild West than the natural stone sculpture that seems a constant surprise on a drive out the Antelope Valley Freeway between the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. Once a hide-out for the notorious 19th century bandit Tiburcio Vasquez, the Vasquez Rocks have appeared in countless westerns and sci-fi flicks, plus the movie version of “The Flintstones.”

But none of that is exactly news. Vasquez Rocks and their lore are known to many. Now allow me to share the tale of the Vasquez Rock (singular, not plural), a talisman of L.A. County’s smallest public high school.

That school is Vasquez High, founded in 1993 and christened in the spirit of local pride, more than a conventional notion of political correctness. Unless you count robber barons, few schools have been named for criminals. Vasquez High is surely the only one whose namesake’s last word, delivered to a hangman, was “Pronto!”

Now as for the singular Vasquez Rock, we must begin on the athletic field of High Desert School, the junior high which has shared its campus with upperclassmen, pending the much-delayed construction of a permanent Vasquez campus. “We grow rocks there,” Steve Pinkston, Vasquez dean of students, says of the field. “Whenever it rains, rocks come up.”

Lower your gaze from the vista of snow-frosted peaks and notice how the grass is indeed speckled with pebbles and small rocks. Here’s a larger one, about the width of a brick, just breaking the surface. Coaches routinely kick at these stones, loosening them from the turf before moving them aside.

One such stone wouldn’t budge. Finally a coach went for a shovel. Eventually, it required the brawn of three coaches to carry this little iceberg of a boulder from the field.

Inspiration struck. Soon the stone was painted purple and gold, emblazoned with the name “Vasquez.” The Vasquez Mustangs started patting their rock for luck. A tradition was born.

*

Why Mustangs? Why not the Vasquez Bandits or, for the sake of alliteration, the Villains or, better still, the Varmints?

Betsey Levering, who was Vasquez High’s first principal and is now principal of High Desert, remembers that the founding freshman class seriously considered Bandits (and Scorpions and Bears) before Mustangs got the nod. But prior to graduation, members of the Class of ’97 did see fit to dub themselves the Bandits.

This was the sort of nugget I’d come to mine. As a student of political correctness--not to mention a proud graduate of Herbert Hoover Elementary School and Frances E. Willard Junior High (named for the educator and founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union)--I’d long been intrigued that a community would choose to name a school after a convicted murderer, no matter how colorful. The christening of a school is no trifling matter.

Consider the controversy that recently embroiled Riverside when the school board decided to name a new high school for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And remember how the little town of Lindsay would come to regret its novel decision to name a junior high for then-Dodgers star Steve Garvey, long before those embarrassing paternity suits?

But a school named for Tiburcio Vasquez? Do desert folk really want young people to look up to a dirty, low-down, thievin’, murderin’ nogoodnik who, incidentally, was also a notorious womanizer? OK, so some modern Chicano scholars now lionize Vasquez as a kind of Robin Hood. Other historians say that’s more P.C. revisionism than truth.

I wondered whether Vasquez High students walk past the bandit’s portrait. Would that lead to criminality? Then again, I can testify that Willard’s stern gaze did not lead to temperance.

I did not find a Vasquez portrait, but neither, I confess, did I look very hard. One thing I did learn, however, is that the school is not, and never was, Tiburcio Vasquez High, but simply Vasquez High, a fine point that may suggest a bit of community ambivalence.

But talking to students and teachers and administrators, I grew less interested in the outlaw’s legacy and more curious about Vasquez, the school.

Vasquez High was established so teenagers in Acton, Agua Dulce and such back country locales as Sleepy Valley and Bootlegger’s Canyon wouldn’t have to take the long bus ride into the Antelope Valley. It started with 89 freshmen in 1993. It has grown to 500 students, from 9th to 12 grades.

“This is The Quad,” Pinkston says as we walk on to the dirt emergency access road that separates bungalows east of the modern High Desert facility. There are no lockers, so students just drop their backpacks near classroom doors. Tiburcio might be dismayed to learn theft is not a problem.

The school’s biggest problem, administrators say, is “inappropriate displays of affection.” Lunchtime on The Quad, they suggest, is not the time and place for kissing.

We enter an art classroom that is a gathering place at lunch. A couple in a romantic embrace ignore us and about 40 classmates. The school may be small and only in its fifth year, but students John Burgeson, 17, and Garrett Devereux, 16, suggest that it is developing interesting traditions, such as the progressive “Mr. Vasquez” contest.

Nobody tries to look like Tiburcio. The swimsuit competition, Devereux explains, required each contestant to wear a grocery bag over his head.

Devereux dreams of someday moving to New York to study acting. Burgeson says he plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a general contractor, but he is something of a ham himself. “I’m the Voice of the Mustangs,” he boasts. This means he reads official school announcements every school day.

I ask him if he ever read a bulletin concerning the problem of inappropriate displays of affection.

“That’s not a problem as far as I’m concerned,” he says.

About this, Tiburcio would have approved.

*

But back to Vasquez Rock, totem of a rugged pioneer spirit that leaves Pinkston in grateful awe.

Pinkston, a 1990 Cal State Northridge grad, had been Glendale High’s head football coach when he started thinking about making the move to Vasquez. He was impressed by how big prep football was in remote desert towns, drawing crowds that far exceeded Glendale’s. Schools are the focal point of the community. At Vasquez High, he says, parents eagerly volunteer time and labor.

“Anderson Field” says a sign on the baseball backstop, honoring the family of Richard Anderson, a local resident and Los Angeles firefighter who toiled long hours erecting the dugouts and fences. At another corner of this grassy, rocky rectangle is a new softball infield, which the school board president carved out with his tractor. Another man, Pinkston says, drops by every Saturday to pick up trash along the front of the campus.

There are hopes that, come next fall, Vasquez High will leave behind High Desert School and move to new temporary quarters on the permanent site just off Red Rover Mine Road. The little school will be staking a new claim. Some Vasquez High traditions will follow them. Some won’t.

Vasquez Rock, for example. After the Mustangs finished the season with eight losses and just two wins, the coaches decided to dig another hole and return it to mother earth.

“We’re now hoping,” Pinkston explains, “that the rock gods will bless us.”