Long-Awaited Day Here for New Schoolteachers : Education: They begin jobs in O.C. filled with energy. But low pay, challenging conditions will drive many away.

ROSSMOOR —  With piles of color-coordinated paper clips, a drawerful of scented markers and brand-new plastic organizers, Jenny Watson is just about ready for fourth grade.

She has picked out a red dress with white and blue stars for the first day. She has put matching purple-and-gold contact paper on her clipboard and a coffee can cum pencil holder. And she’s been brushing up on astronomy and oceanography, key units for the year.

This will be Watson’s second stab at grade four. Back in 1980, she was an eager student sitting in a small plastic chair. Now she is one of California’s 10,000 new public-school teachers, heading to the front of the class for the first time.

“Last night was my first restless night. I’d been waiting for that,” admitted Watson, 23, as she sat in her empty Hopkinson Elementary School classroom on a day before her students were scheduled to arrive. “I’m looking forward to it, but you have those nightmares about your alarm clock not going off. . . . It’s almost like your first day of school when you’re a little kid.”

Brimming with bright-eyed enthusiasm, Watson is typical of first-year teachers.

Most come fresh from college and a one-year credentialing program, shunning better-paid professions out of an altruistic desire to help children. Others change jobs mid-career, seeking a schedule more conducive to raising a family. A growing number are veterans of California’s ever-shrinking aerospace industry.

Almost all begin their new careers bursting with ideas and energy. But meager pay, overstuffed classes and an increasingly complex and needy student population drive them away in droves.

According to the state’s teacher retirement system, at least 20% of new teachers in California quit within the first two years. A 1990 study by the National Center for Education Statistics showed about 10% of teachers leaving after one year, and 37% after five.

In response, local districts are unveiling intensive stay-in-school programs for new teachers this fall to curb the high dropout rate.

But even before the first bell rings, the recruits have started slaving.

Watson filled two days clearing cobwebs and scrubbing cabinets in her classroom, and another week decorating it. She has already spent about $1,500 on school supplies, money she saved from a spring job as a substitute teacher and by living with her mother instead of renting an apartment.

And she still has a lot to learn.

“Do you know all the events in California history? Do you know how deep the ocean is?” Watson said laughingly as she sat in her empty classroom, once again perched on a tiny plastic chair.

“And bladder control--that’s a must,” Watson notes. “The teacher’s credo is ‘Hold it, shove it’: You have to hold it in, and you have so short (a time) for lunch, you have to shove in the food.”

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There are other lessons they don’t teach in graduate school.

How to run dittos without getting ink all over your hands (the number of photocopies is limited to save money, forcing the use of old-fashioned crank machines for daily work sheets). How to write straight on a chalkboard. What to do with high schoolers who cannot read.

What if teen-agers develop a crush on you? Or if students don’t like you at all?

“They say don’t worry if your kids don’t like you, but that is important to me, because that’ll get them to listen to me more,” admitted Jose Luis Poveda, a soon-to-be math teacher at Century High School in Santa Ana, who already wears his royal blue school jersey.

In a small Costa Mesa apartment decorated with Star Trek posters and a collection of baseball caps and trophies from his own high-school days, Poveda, 25, spent many summer days perched in front of his Macintosh. He has designed umpteen computer programs for his classes: games like Jeopardy! and animated geometry demonstrations designed to make math more fun.

Once an engineering major, Poveda was derailed by high-intensity physics courses. Teaching seemed a way to combine his love for math and the Macintosh with a desire to serve his community.

The Spanish he learned fluently at home made Poveda an attractive job candidate. It also helps in class. Though most students at Century speak English, many are more comfortable chatting in their native language. Last year, Poveda said, while student-teaching there, he spoke Spanish about 60% of the time in class, and even more often in the hallways.

“I was offered a job at Uni High. I turned it down,” Poveda said, referring to Irvine’s University High, which consistently posts top scores in Orange County on standardized tests. “They really don’t need me. These kids in Santa Ana, they need me.

“High-school age, a lot of kids have dreams that they have futures,” he added. “I was pushed by my teachers to go after that. Maybe I can push my kids to their dreams and maybe make a difference to them.”

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This desire to make a difference, experts said, is sparking new interest in teaching. “People are going into teaching who could choose any profession in the world and are going into teaching because they believe it’s one of the ways they can affect change,” said Ted Mitchell, dean of the UCLA School of Education. “People are combining great intellectual talent with a spirit of altruism.”

Last spring, more than 1,000 people showed up for a job fair in south Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District.

Mitchell and other teacher-educators said the 1990s have brought an increasingly diverse and qualified crew of candidates to graduate schools of education. This includes a new breed of teacher: people who once chose money-making careers and are now fed up with number-crunching and ladder-climbing.

Witness Kimri Vella and Ray Schmidt.

Once vice president of a bank, Vella, a 36-year-old mother of two, has traded pin-striped suits for a kindergarten teacher’s jumper. Having children made Vella yearn for more time to watch them grow. It also revealed her deep fascination with the learning process.

Her new job as a part-time teacher at Lee Elementary School in Los Alamitos allows Vella to use her mothering skills in a second career.

“The self-fulfillment of helping others is really a great motivation,” she said. “When you’re helping someone and they just light up and you see the excitement of what they’ve just discovered, there’s nothing more exciting than that.”

After three decades of engineering at Rockwell International Corp., Schmidt felt he was ready for a change. He retired last year on a comfortable pension, but decided that if he sat at home he’d “be tearing things apart.”

Now, at age 56, he’s a first-year teacher of computer technology at Troy High School in Fullerton.

“Everything else you do for yourself,” Schmidt said. “Teaching, you convince yourself you’re doing it for others. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But you can say that.”

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They’re certainly not doing it to get rich.

Historically underpaid, public-school teachers have suffered salary freezes or cuts in recent years as education funds from the state have dwindled.

Last year, entry-level salaries at Orange County’s 27 school districts averaged $26,821. Los Alamitos Unified ($29,463) and Anaheim Union High School District ($29,267) paid the most; the lowest salary, $20,488, was in Saddleback Valley Unified.

In Orange Unified, the district offering the second-lowest salary, pay for first-year teachers rose only 1.1% between 1989-90 and 1993-94.

Low salaries are an expected frustration of the teaching profession, but many other problems only become apparent once new teachers step inside the schoolhouse door.

Because seniority rules the teaching profession, first-year teachers often get the worst assignments--job openings in schools that experienced teachers have left behind.

New teachers carry workloads comparable to those of their older colleagues but work harder on preparation because they have no old lesson plans to fall back on. Meanwhile, they must also learn to negotiate the public-school system’s bureaucracy.

On probation the first year, they face the nerve-racking pressure of being constantly evaluated. In their off-hours, they must take graduate school classes they need to renew their teaching credential after five years.

“Beginning teachers are typically put in the most difficult settings,” said Laura Wagner of the state Department of Education. “It’s very emotionally and psychologically and physically stressful to teach in settings like that.”

To combat the massive burnout, the Department of Education and the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing have launched the Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment project, a network of 15 local programs around the state funded by grants totaling $4.8 million.

This fall, the project is being unveiled at half a dozen Orange County districts in connection with teacher-education programs at Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine. About 150 new teachers will be paired with experienced teachers in their schools to share strategies without the pressure of formal job evaluations.

Pilot phases of the state project show striking retention results: 90% of urban teachers stayed in their districts, compared to 70% in large districts elsewhere in the state. In rural areas, 88% of those in the project stuck to teaching, compared to 50% of other rural teachers.

“No matter how well prepared a person is, they’re never really thoroughly prepared for the many demands of the classrooms of today,” said Carol Bartell, a consultant to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing who is heading the support and assessment program.

“They’re faced with the reality of some kids who don’t want to be there, or a school schedule that’s very difficult, or a workload that’s so demanding they can’t give the kids the attention they thought they’d be able to,” said Carol Booth Olson, who is coordinating UCI’s branch of the program. “If you can get through it, most people tend to find teaching incredibly rewarding. But there’s some obstacles to getting started.”

At the first meeting of the support and assessment group in Fullerton, two dozen first-year teachers sat around a conference table brainstorming about ways the program could help.

“Let’s ask for a year of lesson plans,” one joked.

“Maybe we could get them to grade our papers,” offered another.

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David Lofink has already graded his share of papers.

Lofink’s first year of teaching is well underway at Garfield Elementary, a year-round school in Santa Ana where students returned in July. At 6-foot-4, Lofink towers over his class of 32 fifth-graders, who constantly call out “Mr. Lofink, Mr. Lofink,” peppering him with riddles and requests.

After two months, Lofink has developed a routine. Each morning, one boy picks a trivia question from a book on Lofink’s desk, then presents a prize from the closet to whomever answers first. Girls compete with boys in a race to correct spelling and grammar in a sentence written on the board. Lofink reads a story aloud. There’s a vocabulary quiz.

“You can never turn your back,” said Lofink, 28. “You think you make progress, and you’re all excited: ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ Then you come in the next day and you’re back where you started, and you think, ‘Didn’t I do anything?’ ”

Lofink’s father, mother and brother are all teachers, but he was reluctant to join the crowd. So he majored in political science. Finding no work in the field, Lofink took a job as a librarian at a local school. The district cut his hours. He decided to get his teaching credential.

During his first weeks, Lofink has struggled to fit spelling, math, social studies, science, reading aloud, reading silently, physical education and language development all in one day. The hours are long, especially because he tries to watch his students’ soccer games after school. And the reading levels in his room range from first grade to fifth grade.

“You try to be prepared for anything, but you can’t possibly,” Lofink sighed. “I wanted to have very high expectations. . . . I see after the first month that they’re not going to be where I want them to be.

“What’s really scary is, you have all these kids’ lives in your hands. If you screw up, you mess them up for a year.”

* MONEY DOESN’T COUNT: Annual salaries around $26,000 aren’t what draw teachers. A18

School Days

Here are the start dates for Orange County’s public school districts:

* Thursday, Sept. 1: Brea Olinda Unified

* Tuesday, Sept. 6: Anaheim City*

* Wednesday, Sept. 7: Fullerton Joint Union, Huntington Beach Union, Buena Park*, Centralia*, Fountain Valley, Fullerton, Huntington Beach, Magnolia* and Ocean View

* Thursday, Sept. 8: Capistrano Unified*, Garden Grove Unified, Irvine Unified*, Laguna Beach Unified, Los Alamitos Unified, Newport-Mesa Unified*, Santa Ana Unified,* Tustin Unified, Orange Unified*, Anaheim Union, Cypress*, La Habra and Westminster

* Monday, Sept. 12: Savanna

* Tuesday, Sept. 13: Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified

* Some students in these districts are on year-round schedules; start date is different.

Source: Orange County Department of Education

Researched by JODI WILGOREN / Los Angeles Times