Spelling Out a Graduation Plan

The final bell rang at Grant High School in the San Fernando Valley and students came like salmon through the iron gates out front, where the sign says, “What we are to be, we are now becoming.”

The thing some students are becoming is agitated. They are worked up about a policy that says if they don’t commit to college, a trade school or the military, they will not be allowed to attend their high school graduation ceremony.

Senior Nuritza Sarkisian is going to UC Riverside in the fall, but she still has a problem with the policy, which requires students at eight high schools in District C of L.A. Unified to fill out a form detailing their plan.

“It’s not right,” Sarkisian said. “If you finish all your requirements, you should be allowed to go to the ceremony.”

Hilda Santacruz and Jennifer Lopez, two more seniors, said some students have to work and save money before they can even consider college. Hilda, who works as a sales clerk at a shopping mall to help pay her family’s bills, plans to work full-time when she graduates so she can help out even more.

On the District C Web site, where the policy is posted, work is not an acceptable post-graduation plan. “Work doesn’t mean that education comes to a stop,” reads the manifesto.

“It’s sad. I’m going to talk to my family about it tonight,” Hilda said of not being allowed the satisfaction of walking across the stage, in her family’s presence, to take the diploma in her hand.

“Sad” does not begin to describe it. Draconian, kooky and capricious come closer.

An embarrassing percentage of students are dropouts in Los Angeles. Why punish the ones who crack the books and earn the credits, just because they aren’t headed for UCLA or to the front lines of the next war?

“In many cases, these students are the first in their family’s history to earn a diploma,” said parent Shelley LaFleur, a documentary producer who was livid and has been demanding explanations from district administrators. “We ought to say, ‘Way to go,’ and let them appreciate the accomplishment.”

LaFleur’s daughter is college-bound, but LaFleur said college and the military just aren’t for everybody, and shouldn’t be a prerequisite for participating in a rite of passage.

My thoughts precisely, and so I called the school official who initiated the policy to see what he could come up with in his own defense.

District C Supt. Robert Collins told me he first used the “post-secondary commitment program” in 1987, when he was principal of Grant High. He suggested that ill-informed people like me are missing the point, which is to ensure that students become productive citizens rather than flops and flameouts.

Nobody has complained, Collins said, except well-off do-gooders whose kids are headed for the best schools in the country but think it’s a crime he’s challenging the children of low-income families to do the same.

Look, he said, school is all about rules. Getting to class on time, turning in your homework, keeping quiet.

This is just one more rule, he said, and the result is that many more students have committed to college this year than last.

That is promising, even if it’s too soon to know whether students have lied or produced phony documents to satisfy the requirement.

Look, nobody with a pulse would fault Collins for encouraging students to shoot for the moon. Of course we want more of them going to college and making a contribution. But do we want to blackmail them or inspire them?

Denying a student the small pleasure of wearing the robe and strutting across the stage is cruel and unusual, I told Collins.

“Do you want to know what’s really cruel?” he countered. “To give a youngster a diploma, but you don’t talk to him, you don’t counsel him, you don’t care about him, you don’t have high expectations for him, and you turn your back when he leaves school.”

All he’s requiring, Collins said, is that every student sit down with a counselor beginning junior year to start discussing goals and strategies.

Well excuse me, but that ought to be standard procedure, not the result of some special doctrine. Yeah, Collins said, but it doesn’t happen often enough.

“If you sent your child to a private school for $15,000 a year and got no counseling, and when your child graduated, the school just said, ‘Good luck,’ you’d be outraged,” Collins said. “I don’t think you should expect anything less from public schools.

“What happens to the 40% of students who don’t have any idea what to do when they get their diploma? What responsibility does the school have to them and to their parents? What is the impact on the economy of Los Angeles when we produce youngsters who go into jobs that guarantee a lifetime at poverty-level earnings?”

So he’s a tough guy, yeah, but maybe Collins isn’t quite the eight-ball we might have imagined. The no-graduation-ceremony policy, it turns out, is little more than a prod. Collins probably isn’t going to turn away any student who’s earned a walk across that stage.

When I described senior Hilda Santacruz’s family obligations, Collins said he’d like to sit down with her. Maybe, when she graduates, there’s a way Hilda can help her family while taking classes. He just wants to make her aware of her options, Collins said, and then Hilda can walk across the stage and collect her diploma.

When I asked about a student who might want to take time off and see the world before deciding on his or her place in it, Collins said, “That’s an acceptable plan.” He’d like to at least offer the student some guidance, and maybe a reading list. (Sounds like he must have been every kid’s nightmare when he was principal.) If the student puts a plan in writing, Collins said, then, yes, he or she can wear the robe and the mortarboard.

Sounds fair to me. But either Collins puts this in writing, or I’m going to have to suggest he not be allowed to walk across the stage at retirement to collect his wristwatch.

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Steve Lopez writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.