Sign of times is a bad one for preps

Sadly, fittingly, as America’s child princes chose their colleges, most compelling was the one who chose humiliation.

Kevin Hart, an ordinary offensive lineman from a tiny town in northeastern Nevada, gathered his friends and family together in Fernley High for a news conference last week to announce his college selection.

Similar gatherings have been happening since then all over America. That’s how it’s done today. The most personal and stressful decision in an 18-year-old’s life is paraded in front of cameras, briefly turning children into celebrities and high schools into shills.

That’s how Hart saw it. That’s how Hart wanted it.

Playfully debating between an Oregon cap and a California cap, Hart finally stuck the Cal cap on his head and announced he would be attending Berkeley on a football scholarship.

Folks cheered. Reporters scribbled. His father cried.

Then, later, everyone gasped when it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax.

Hart made it up. There was no scholarship offer from either team. There was no scholarship interest from any major team.

Hart felt left out, so he faked it.

“I made up what I wanted to be reality,” he said later in a statement.

The reality is, the hoopla surrounding the publicized signings of football players -- culminating in Wednesday’s national signing day -- is an embarrassment to a high school’s mission and an exploitation of a child’s psyche.

“It’s taking away from the point of it all,” said Lissa Gregorio, academic decathlon coach at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills. “It’s not about sports or school, it’s about celebrity.”

Gregorio’s team of nine brilliant kids is a five-time national decathlon champion. They are celebrated around campus like any good football team, with pep rallies and marching bands and status.

Yet when one of her students agrees to attend a top university?

“They might scream it out in the middle of class while wearing the school sweat shirt,” she said with a chuckle. “That’s about it.”

A high school principal does not hand over a gym to an engineering student who is announcing his early acceptance to Harvard.

There is no band playing for the girl with the perfect SAT score who just scored Stanford.

Would any parents of academic achievers even condone their children missing class to make such an announcement?

While I’m usually quick to blame the media, in this case we’re just covering the story.

And for once, you can’t blame the colleges, which are not allowed to even talk about these kids before they sign, much less orchestrate their signing shenanigans.

This is about the parents who encourage it, and the high school officials who enable it.

This is about somebody having the strength to stare beyond the national TV lights and the confidence to step around the giant ego boost.

This is about somebody having the courage to say no.

Try this, parents.

You want to find out where my child is going to college? When he makes up his mind, the school can send out a press release and he’ll talk to you after graduation.

Try this, principals.

You want to bring your TV cameras into my gym to film my star quarterback’s college selection? This isn’t a marketplace, this is a learning place.

“Giving all this publicity to the athletes doesn’t show the other college options available to students,” said Chris Lee, coach of the academic decathlon team at Palisades Charter High. “There are a billion other ways you can get into school, but kids don’t see that.”

Lee’s team, which won its first city decathlon championship in 18 years this week, features a valedictorian named Kevin Gould who earned a nearly impossible early admission into Columbia.

Party? News conference?

“No, he just called me the next day at my house,” said Lee. “And this is a really hard-working kid whose story deserves to be known.”

Instead, signing day makes high school role models out of students who puff out their chests and dramatically toy with their caps and act like the superstars that many of them will never become.

It’s not their fault. They’re just kids.

“The insane pressure of the college application process makes all kind of kids do different things,” said Lee.

Football players aren’t any different.

Jimmy Clausen is, by all accounts, a good and decent kid. But a couple of years ago when the former Westlake Village Oaks Christian quarterback decided to attend Notre Dame, he made the announcement at the nearby College Football Hall of Fame, where he arrived in a white stretch Hummer limousine.

His college reputation will be forever marked by that moment of immaturity. Somebody should have saved him from himself.

Then there was a warm and fuzzy note Thursday about how 13 UCLA recruits signed their letters of intent in front of an Inglewood restaurant owned by one of the kid’s parents.

The signing took place in the morning. The athletes came from as far away as San Diego.

Is it just me, or shouldn’t somebody else have cringed when kids were accepting spots in a highly competitive college freshman class while missing as much as a full day of high school?

“You have to understand, publicizing these signings brings notoriety to the high schools, and that’s a good thing,” said Doug Brown, athletic director at Dorsey. “If I’ve got a press conference with two kids at my place, that will bring attention to us, attention all schools can use.”

But Brown admits he sometimes wonders about the young kids watching these signings.

“It is just another thing that makes kids think athletic ability is more important than academic achievement,” he said.

Kevin Hart of Fernley High is on the verge of completing four years of high school, a great accomplishment.

He has done so while participating in a difficult extracurricular activity, football, another fine achievement.

The saddest thing about his hoax isn’t that he did it.

The saddest thing is that he felt he had to do it.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.