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A Retreat From Trouble
Monday, March 5, 2001
Valley Edition
Section: Metro
Page: B-1
Schools: Freshmen at Glendale's Hoover High, which has had
problems with violence, attend a camp that seeks to foster a sense of
campus community.
By: MASSIE RITSCH
TIMES STAFF WRITER
ANGELUS OAKS -- The trouble started, as it had before, with a look. Two girls,
two cultures, and one dismissive glance on a school bus.
What are you looking at?
What are you looking at?
It was barely lunchtime--not the way to start a three-day camping trip to
promote peace.
Herbert Hoover High needs more peace. In three months last year, the Glendale
school endured five students' deaths, among them a killing, a car accident and a
suicide. But usually, it is the petty fights that make the campus tense.
"It's small stuff," said Pamela Good, Hoover's co-principal. "But it leads to
people getting killed."
To try to prevent those exchanges--often between Armenian Americans and
Latinos--from escalating to violence, Hoover High recently sent most of its 712
freshmen on retreats to the San Bernardino Mountains above Redlands. The four
trips are being paid for with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of
Education. The federal program was developed after the 1999 Columbine High
School massacre to make large high schools seem smaller and more close-knit.
Some of the teenagers who attended the retreats saw snow for the first time, and
it made them giddy as kindergartners. Others had never spent a night away from
home. Through workshops, late-night talks and some vegetarian cafeteria food,
enemies became friends. Fourteen-year-old boys drew hearts with pink pencils,
and students saw their principals and teachers dance, crack corny jokes and, in
some cases, cry. The girls on the bus made up.
Although two nights in a drafty cabin and some role-playing games will not make
the 2,700-student school safer or raise test scores immediately, it can go a
long way toward helping kids drop their guard, adults at Hoover said.
"As much as we want our kids to do well academically," Good said, "it's not
going to happen until they feel safe and connected." Despite Problems, School Is
Average
Hoover is not a bad school by any measure. On California's academic ranking,
Hoover is in the middle. Average. Its students, judging by the diverse group of
70 who attended a retreat last month, are friendly, typical teenagers. Most are
either Armenian American or Latino. Some talk back to their teachers and have
tragic personal stories. Others have loving parents, confidence and, in the case
of one boy, 16 pet iguanas.
The retreat organizers knew they would not get all the freshmen to the
mountains. Some parents refused to let their kids go. Some students simply had
no interest. One girl said she went because her parents promised her $100.
The camps were designed for freshmen, to foster a campus community that will
continue in the next three years. But senior Krestina Akearian, 17, ended up
benefiting, too. As one of several upperclassmen sent as camp counselors, she
was supposed to be a role model. But one look from a sassy freshman, and
Krestina joined the confrontation between the two girls at the back of bus.
After welcoming the group to Camp Cedar Falls on a snowy afternoon, Hoover
Assistant Principal John Fox singled out Krestina and the girls involved in the
stare down.
"You have too much hate in you!" he told them.
Melodrama ensued. More offending looks were exchanged, doors were slammed and
other girls from the bus pleaded with teachers to smooth things over. Krestina
knew she had to make the first move but it wasn't easy. To keep fighting would
set a bad example for the ninth-graders.
"I can't go up to somebody and say, 'Sorry.' I've never done it," she said. "I
don't even say I'm sorry to my mom."
The staring match stemmed from an after-school fight in front of Hoover two days
before. Krestina was not involved, but her friends were. They are Armenian
American. The other girls involved in the fight are Latina. At Hoover, that is
often all it takes to start a fight.
Last May, dozens of students saw senior Raul Aguirre clubbed with a tire iron
and stabbed in the heart after he tried to break up a fight between a Latino
teenager and two Armenians, who had allegedly flashed gang signs at each other.
"The reason that grant was written is because Raul died," said Linda Maxwell, a
facilitator at the retreat. "And the reason there was money for that grant is
because kids at Columbine died."
Last fall, in part because of the Colorado killings, the Smaller Learning
Communities Program awarded grants to more than 350 schools in 39 states.
Congress has set aside $125 million to continue the program.
"The reason I'm here is [it's terrible] to bury kids," Maxwell told the students
the first afternoon.
Maxwell and Jose Quintanar are known in Glendale as peacemakers who work with
gang members and teenagers. Through their organization, We Care for Youth,
Maxwell and Quintanar have counseled Krestina for six years.
Krestina eventually smoothed things over with the girls on the bus. You're me,
she told them, just three years younger.
"I used to have attitude, too," she said. "It's going to build up, and one day
it's going to take over you."
Her message helped. One of the girls walked up to the microphone as camp closed
and apologized.
Not every moment was so heavy. There was plenty of giggling and hugging, loads
of joking and karaoke.
But there were emotional moments. At one retreat, Alvia Invencion, 14, was the
first to cry. She had witnessed the after-school fight that sparked the incident
on the bus and she knew one of the participants in a fight on campus. She knew
before the fight that her friend had planned to settle some scores that
afternoon but did nothing to stop her.
"I didn't take her seriously," Alvia said. "Maybe if I just listened."
Tears slid down her cheeks. She sniffled and shook. More words came out, but
they stopped making sense. Someone handed her a tissue.
The next day, Alvia used colored pencils and a flowerlike pattern to draw her
mandala, like the Buddhist monks who work for days creating an elaborate design
from colored sand and then sweep it up and toss the sand in a river. Maxwell and
Quintanar have used the exercise hundreds of times with teenagers. The mandalas
tell them about the kids and sometimes alert them to problems.
"I'm very lost, sensitive, hurt, and afraid," one freshman wrote on the back of
her mandala, "but I believe there is hope . . . somewhere. The little white
heart [in the center of a solid black circle] is my little ray of hope."
Maxwell told the students: "If you have a question--a big question, like,
'Should I have sex?'--look at your mandala and see if it fits. This is you
according to you." Student Relations Expected to Improve
The camp motivated Alvia to sign up for some activities at Hoover, she said. She
is thinking about the club for Filipinos, and a few others. "I don't want to
just join my own race," she said.
With nearly all of the ninth grade attending the camps, relations among students
at school will improve, Alvia predicted.
"I know that Hoover will do better," she said. "I just know."
"Bring It Back to Hoover" was one of the slogans drilled into the freshmen
during camp. What good is it if they learn to control their anger, work as a
team and study harder if they apply those skills only in the mountains?
But the students learned at camp that pride and fear are powerful forces. They
can make you snap at someone for looking at you wrong.
On the bumpy return to Glendale, after two nights in the chilly woods, there was
too much fatigue for fighting. At the back of one bus, two girls who had argued
on the way to the mountains were napping on each other's shoulders.
Another student asked on an evaluation of the retreat, "Will this camp make a
change back in Hoover?"
Three weeks later, some students say they have noticed a difference: The
freshmen are talking more and fighting less.
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