‘Teen Files’ Shows the Truth Is Inside

Most teenagers today deserve a diploma just for surviving the pressures of high school. It’s now estimated, for example, that 75% of teens have been either bullied or harassed by their classmates. Eighty percent of teenage girls say they are unhappy with their body image and 45% of teen males are equally displeased with theirs. Depression is also taking a firm hold of teenagers, with 1 in 8 adolescents suffering from the affliction. And more and more young people are contemplating suicide, with current research indicating that every minute, a person under the age of 24 tries to end his or her life.

The latest edition of producer Arnold Shapiro’s award-winning series of specials, “The Teen Files,” looks at just how teenagers are trying to cope with high school. In “The Teen Files: Surviving High School,” which airs Tuesday on UPN, filmmakers follow 11 students struggling to fit in at a Northern California high school.

Previous installments of “The Teen Files” have covered such hot-button issues as drugs, violence and smoking, but with “Surviving High School,” producer-writer-director Allison Grodner wanted to examine the everyday pressures teenagers deal with.

“A lot of kids looked at the drug show and the violence show and said, ‘That’s not me.’ We wanted to do something that everyone could relate to--just trying to find where you fit in in school and dealing with those pressures,” recalls Grodner. “I said, ‘Let’s go into a school and see what the average high school student really deals with and let’s break it down and look at those issues.’ ”

Grodner and her staff then set out to find an average American high school. “We had considered high schools across the country,” she says. But Yuba City High School in Yuba City, Calif., a suburban town of more than 27,000, east of Sacramento, quickly emerged because administrators in the school district were so open about talking about their problems.

With a student body of 2,900, Yuba City High was small enough, Grodner says, that they “weren’t caught up in a lot of bureaucracy. They were really open to try something a little more radical. It happens to be the only high school in the city which was interesting to me.”

The school also had the diversity “Teen Files” wanted--53% of the student body are white, 23% are Latino, 18% are East Indian, and the remaining 18% are African American or from other groups.

“The other diversity we offered, which really ‘The Teen Files’ played upon, are our groups,” says assistant principal Joan Zappetini, who was the liaison between the students and “Teen Files.” The cliques included, among others: the jocks, the scrubs, the cowboys, the skateboarders, the prima donnas and the cheerleaders. Intermixing between the groups is practically nonexistent.

“If a kid comes on campus they can connect up with somebody,” Zappetini says. “But then that also divides the campus. You can’t go out and see a real division, but those are the lines that divide us.”

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Grodner and her staff tried to get a cross section of these groups in the 11 students they selected. The students were brought together over time and presented with a series of situations that would encourage interaction, with Grodner’s crew filming the process.

Melissa, a 16-year-old junior at Yuba City, got involved in “Teen Files” because it sounded like fun. “But it ended up a lot of crying,” she says.

Overweight, Melissa used to dress entirely in black and was an outcast at the high school before “Teen Files.”

She says the main reason students are intolerant of other groups is immaturity. “People can’t get past the fact that we are actually human--that there are humans here,” Melissa says. “This high school society that we have--they can’t get past that.”

Grodner acknowledges that at first she worried about tensions within the group. “They weren’t [allowed to be] on their own a lot,” she says. But the group pleasantly surprised her. “After a couple of weeks of this, they really started to bond. What was probably my bigger concern was that I didn’t want them to pretend to be friends or do the phony getting along. I wanted them to look at the truth at how they look at each other.”

Over the three months, the 11 were brought face to face with the consequences of their actions. Two of the most popular students learned how it felt to be outsiders when they spent a day attending another high school. The students went to San Francisco where they talked with a fashion model who had battled bulimia and then visited a suicide prevention clinic. All wrote letters to their parents about their problems at home.

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But the biggest bonding experience took place when they spent a weekend in the wilderness, where they had to rely upon each other to accomplish physical challenges. “You can’t beat taking them out of their environment and simply facing each other or having to work as a team with each other,” says Grodner.

“We did this with two other shows. The weekend away really brought it down to the common denominator among them and they really opened up. It was amazing. I was amazed that they trusted us to do that. They began to look at each other and deal with the truth of why I exclude you, why I don’t want to associate with you on campus, why I hate you.”

The show concludes with a “Challenge Day,” in which two adult facilitators lead the 11 students, several of their peers and teachers in a series of exercises in which the groups were forced to confront, as well as learn to accept and deal with, each other. Since “Teen Files” left, there have been more “Challenge Days” at the school, with several more planned.

“What ‘The Teen Files’ and now ‘Challenge Day’ has done is begin to break down [the groups],” says Zappetini.

“I can say from the kids who participated in ‘Challenge Day’ last year and now this year, I have not only seen significant changes within them, I have seen a continued significant change. I see a real change in the openness of the kids.”

* “The Teen Files: Surviving High School” airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on UPN. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).