Renaissance Kids

Atop the highest hill on Harvard-Westlake High’s sprawling 26-acre campus, Leo Benitez is creating his own artistic masterpiece.

Soothing, serene a cappella voices fill the campus art studio as Benitez holds a brush in one hand and a tray of oil paints in the other.

“I like doing a lot of political statement painting,” he said. “I want to show something more than just figures.”

Benitez’s large canvas painting provokes discussion on the atrocities of war. There are images of three soldiers, a child, the pope, a chessboard and a bleeding pawn.

“I just want people to be aware of the violence of war and how people destroy each other,” he said.

Whenever Benitez practices artistic meditation, he forgets the other great love of his life, soccer. Every school day, he practices soccer. There also are demanding academic obligations and social activities.

Somehow, he never runs out of time, never stops exploring, never tires of learning.

“I try to do everything I can,” he said. “I don’t want to limit myself to one thing. There’s my soccer, my academics, my painting, my social life. I try to be a Renaissance guy.”

Benitez is not alone in his multifaceted pursuits. If there is a Fountain of Success for high school education, Harvard-Westlake has discovered it.

The average Scholastic Assessment Test score for Harvard-Westlake’s 1998 graduating class of 266 students was 1366. Ninety-eight percent of the graduates are attending four-year schools. There are 26 enrolled at California, 19 at Columbia, 18 at Pennsylvania and 11 at Stanford.

Michael Eisner of Disney, Peter O’Malley, Meryl Streep and Gil Garcetti, the Los Angeles district attorney, sent their children to Harvard-Westlake. So do Steven Spielberg and top executives of CBS and NBC.

There is a $36 million endowment. Tuition is $13,500 per year. The high school has an enrollment of 800 and the middle school near UCLA has 725 students.

But Harvard-Westlake is more than a school for Los Angeles’ rich and famous. It has become an academic and athletic powerhouse.

Which high school in the region can match Harvard-Westlake’s 19 Southern Section team championships this decade?

Headmaster Thomas Hudnut, who arrived 12 years ago, aspired to create an extracurricular program as large as any public school and an academic program equal to a private academy.

“I believe in stretching people so they can find out what their potential is,” Hudnut said. “The kids who come here want to do well, and we do everything possible to enable them to.”

Athletes aren’t only athletes at Harvard-Westlake. They’re musicians, dancers, actors, painters, photographers, journalists, scientists, animators, cinematographers, playwrights, singers, sculptors.

The options and opportunities to excel are stunning.

“I don’t know how much real life it is, but it’s preparing me,” said Becky Rauth, a senior track athlete who’s interested in ceramics. “It’s not often you’re going to find this many talented kids in one place. You can find somebody who’s involved in anything here.”

Consider the interests of volleyball player Will Curtis, who signed a letter of intent with Stanford in November. This month, he starred in a school play and participated in the winter dance concert. He also practiced volleyball, maintained a 3.6 grade-point average and did it while commuting from his home in Whittier.

“I love it,” he said. “You deal with so many different personalities. With my dance class, you’re with the female perspective. Then, when you go into the acting arena, you get into a different mind-set, putting on different masks and personalities. When you get into the volleyball arena, it’s full-on sports, aggressive and competitive. To bring all those elements together is fun and lets you relate to so many different people.”

David Coben, a lineman on the football team, is the school’s preeminent saxophone player. He missed the winter jazz concert when it was scheduled on the same night the football team played in the Southern Section Division VII championship game. Also missing the concert was lineman Matt Loebman, who plays guitar.

“It was touch and go what I was going to do,” Coben said. “We had been practicing months and months.”

Coach Dave Bennett marvels at the many conflicting activities his football players must juggle during the school year.

“Sometimes I wonder how many hours in the day these kids have,” Bennett said. “We don’t infringe on their free time.”

Said Coben: “You just want to collapse and can’t because you have all these other things to do. But somehow, you do it. It’s kind of amazing.

“Someone who’s a three-sport athlete who plays an instrument is also into poetry. It’s normal. The kids are exceptional. There’s no other word to explain it.”

Basketball player Charles Gillig achieved a 4.4 GPA last semester while also playing the clarinet in the jazz band and serving as a managing editor for the campus newspaper. He usually spends 2 1/2 to three hours on homework assignments after he arrives home from practice.

“I’ve had this kind of workload for six years,” he said. “If you don’t work hard, you get burned.”

Not that all Harvard-Westlake students aspire to win the Nobel Prize.

“You do what makes you happy and try your best,” Rauth said. “I guess it’s kind of like a bubble we have with such bright kids. Not everybody is going to grow up to be a brain surgeon and not everyone is staying up to 2 a.m. to study. That’s a myth.”

The freedom to choose from a variety of artistic options is empowering. There are sophisticated computer, animation and video labs that enable students to make their own movies.

There are actors working to be discovered. Jake Gyllenhaal, star of the movie “October Sky,” graduated from Harvard-Westlake last year.

Dance director Cynthia Winter wishes more athletes would follow Curtis into her classes.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “They’re really dancers and don’t know it.”

Two years ago, there were 1,200 applications for 250 spots at the middle school, and 243 accepted on the first enrollment offer. Ever since the school merged with Westlake girls’ school in 1991, the school’s application pool has expanded. Half of the student body resides on the Westside, and 15% receive financial aid.

“Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, when the application pool goes up in number, you’re going to find more kids who stand out in performing arts, academics and athletics,” Hudnut said.

As Gillig observed, “We have kids excellent in endless areas. It really is amazing.”