We were surprised by the diversity and occasional intensity of the stories.

One of the duties of adopting a school, I learned last week, is to sit in judgment on the expressions of young minds.

The Times “adopted” Mulholland Junior High School in Van Nuys this year, forming a relationship that has been challenging, and sometimes awkward, as both sides explored its meaning.

When two classes at Mulholland produced the school’s first batch of Young Authors books this spring, English teacher Manette Stanton came up with an assignment that The Times was presumably well qualified to take.

I was among six employees loaned to Mulholland to read the books and choose the few that would advance to the districtwide Young Authors’ competition.

The panel included a former teacher, an expert in education and several parents of adolescent children.

If we had a deficiency, it was that most of us had probably all but forgotten what it is like to stand at the threshold between the fantasies of childhood and the painful realities of the adult world.

The books reminded us. They also educated us in some things we didn’t know as children.

We were surprised, first, by the diversity and occasional intensity of the stories.

In the sixth grade stack were several ABC books, a collection of riddles and some works of clever fantasy, such as a long, typewritten story about toys that had human lives and emotions.

How quickly children change. The works of the seventh graders erupted unexpectedly in violence, struggle and death. Several books were about gang jumps, knife fights and hypes in the street. Pets, siblings and parents died.

I was happy to see those troubling thoughts still softened by dreams of good fortune. Several stories ended with young people getting rich, whether by hard work, the device of the treasure map or, in one case, a lottery.

Most of the authors struggled with language, and sometimes we found ourselves laughing at ambiguities.

“I dedicate this book to my loving parents who stood by me until I finished this book,” Sharon Shamoiel wrote at the beginning of “Rags to Riches.”

We could see the loving Shamoiels standing by, possibly late into the night.

Judging turned out to be a heavy charge, particularly concerning the poetry. Here is part of one winning entry:

“I have a big racecar. / It can go far. / One day it hit a bar. / It ran into the tar . . . “

We found several superior poems. One of them began:

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain

Beats upon my heart.

People twist and scream in pain . . .

Unfortunately, they sounded familiar. We traced one to Emily Dickinson and several, including the one above, to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Even though we understood that the exercise was meant to reward appreciation for poetry as much as the ability to write it, we did what we had to do. The books were disqualified.

Prose raised its own questions. Should we grade down for grammatical errors? How much had parents helped? Some of the most compelling stories were prone to misspelling, run-on sentences, switched tenses and disagreement of subject and verb. Others were almost too nearly perfect.

As it turned out, we let most of those doubts drop and rewarded inventiveness, narrative force, sensitivity and clarity.

Our choices seemed to follow Kathrine Anne Porter’s definition the writer as a person who can climb one mountain halfway and write about it the rest of her life.

Prizes went to Rachel Berkey for writing skillfully about her mother’s life on a farm, to Jennifer Nutter for retelling her mother’s story of “a day of exploration and deceit” sneaking out to the polluted Nashua River against grandmother’s orders and to LaToya Mason for poignantly describing her grandparents’ lives in Louisiana.

Romane Martin’s romance about “a boy who is poor and a girl who is middle class,” charmed us with directness and humor.

Its hero, Chris, “has only one pair of shoe’s and they are holey.” He gets nowhere with Gwen “until his mother win’s a lot of money.”

I liked an illustrated and minutely detailed guide to drag racing, but it didn’t inspire my fellow judges. Even so, I wanted to tell its author, Michael Williams, that his self discipline will serve him well and he’ll learn how to interest the world in what he likes.

Our toughest decision concerned “A Hard Way to Freedom” by Jacob Troung. It told of his flight from Communist Vietnam on a crowded boat.

I pick up the narrative with Thai pirates boarding the vessel:

“Later they took the women into their cabin and rape them. When they try to grab my mom I kicked him and he fell back. He stood up and slap me in the face before he left. I was the luckiest one on the boat because when another kid tried to protect his mom he was thrown of board.”

Troung’s score, based on a point system we had been asked to follow, left him out of the running. We decided to change his score.

At an early age Troung has climbed more than halfway up the mountain. Whether he can write about it for the rest of his life, or will want to, remains to be seen.

But I’ll stick my neck out now and say that’s good writing.