School’s New Name Opens Old Wounds

Some Antelope Valley residents think a local school board showed poor taste in naming a campus after R. Rex Parris, a personal-injury lawyer known for his big billboards and back-cover advertisements on telephone books.

Charles Henry, a student at the continuation school campus, says Parris already has a high-enough profile. “He’s already got those billboards,” he said.

Lancaster attorney Lawrence Hales says Parris deserves the honor, but the timing is odd. “The custom, I might point out, is to name things after people after they’re dead,” he said.

And Palmdale Mayor James Ledford said that Parris contributed to the election campaigns of two board members who voted last year to place his name on Desert Winds Continuation High School’s south valley campus. The change took effect this semester.

“I always thought there was a conflict,” Ledford said.

As perhaps the most admired and disliked attorney in the Antelope Valley, Parris is used to such reaction. He’s used to the criticism that he’s too flashy and too self-aggrandizing. And frankly, he says, he doesn’t care.

Antelope Valley Union High School District board members say they named the 600-student campus for Parris, 49, because he is a role model for struggling teens.

The decision last year came at the same time that the board voted to name a future high school after state Sen. William “Pete” Knight. The board also drew fire for the Knight tribute because the Republican lawmaker was the author of Proposition 22, which outlawed gay marriages.

In the past, critics said, the district’s schools had geographical names. They contended that a powerful, politically conservative clique was scheming to get its players enshrined on school campuses. Parris, who has been active in GOP circles for years, shrugged off the criticism.

“If they named every one of these schools after someone who could help them, my God--think of what we could accomplish,” he said.

School board President Brett Nelson dismissed critics of the decision. “Quite often, those are the people who complain about a lot of the stuff we do in the district. The man deserves it.”

Nelson said Parris is supporting his reelection campaign this year by hosting a fund-raiser.

Before Parris had money and influence, the Antelope Valley native had a lot in common with many of the students at the Palmdale continuation campus that became R. Rex Parris High School this fall. He was a welfare kid from a broken home who bitterly recalls the family TV set being repossessed, a social misfit who dropped out of school in the 11th grade and went to work in a plastics factory. He eventually found his calling in life, only to fight--and win, he says--a long battle with drugs and alcohol.

Today, he says, he is happy that the school’s new name ties him to the project permanently.

A burly man who wears cowboy boots to court, Parris in recent years has used his wealth to back conservative Republicans in local political races. Although he says he’s sworn off the rough stuff, his political attack ads and mailers remain legendary.

“In court, I’ve likened him to a gladiator,” Hales said. “He goes in there and destroys. He does the same thing in politics . . . he’s a slash-and-burn kind of guy.”

Parris said he gave “small amounts” of money to the election campaigns of two of the four members of the school board who voted for the name change. But he says he also gave money to the one board member who voted against the change.

“The criticism isn’t fair,” he said.

The campus is a cluster of trailers behind Littlerock High School. Board members have decided to build a separate, permanent Parris continuation campus at 6th Street East and Avenue Q. The location of the second campus has angered neighbors, who say the land may be contaminated and worry that the campus will be too close to railroad tracks. Marta Williamson, president of the Old Town Homeowners Group, said the school also seems like an advertisement for Parris’ law practice.

“A lot of people in this community do not believe he does anything out of the goodness of his heart,” Williamson said. “We believe he’s self-serving.”

Parris shrugs off such arguments. People like Williamson, he said, are just scared to have kids from the wrong side of the tracks near their homes.

Though his four children attend private schools, Parris last year coached a team of continuation school students in the district’s mock trial competition. He said he immediately recognized himself in his students.

“You just see potential where other people don’t,” he said. “They’re tougher kids, and they’ve got a street sense to them that the kids born with a sense of entitlement don’t.”

Parris invited the team members to his palatial home. He showed them the Lexus, the pool, the well-appointed kitchen. He told them that this was what they could achieve.

“It was cool,” senior Diana Rodriguez said. “He got this far, but he didn’t do well in high school. It gave us a real hope that we can do well, even though we don’t come from a regular high school.”

The team took second place in the districtwide competition, but Parris contends it was robbed of the blue ribbon. He blamed the loss on the other local lawyers who judged the competition.

“I told them that with me being the coach, they have a higher standard because the lawyers in the community . . . wouldn’t mind seeing me lose,” he said.

Last year, Parris promised to donate at least $5,000 annually in scholarships for 10 years to continuation students who want to attend college. He’s paid out $10,000 thus far.

In recent weeks, he’s been trying to form a partnership with Six Flags Magic Mountain that would reward improving readers with trips to the amusement park. He also has been planning practices for this year’s mock trial competition with Diana Rodriguez, a gregarious, college-bound student he counts as one of his successes.

“She couldn’t talk when I met her,” he said. “Now look at her.”

To earn money for college and law school, Parris said he ran a rough-and-tumble Palmdale nightclub with his brother. Breaking up fights there sent him to the hospital twice.

Along the way, Parris said, he developed addictions to drugs and alcohol that he kicked 15 years ago with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

After working for a firm in Bakersfield, Parris moved back to the Antelope Valley in 1986. He immediately broke an unwritten no-advertising rule among local lawyers and became a rich man.

He says breaking that rule was the kind of experience that allows him to take his lumps over the school issue with a chuckle.

“There’s this view of ‘Oh, we don’t do things that way,’ ” Parris said. “But most things I do people don’t do that way.”