SUNDAY STORY:On a fact-finding mission

EDITOR’S NOTE: In response to readers’ assertions that TeWinkle Middle School is chaotic and gang-infested, we sent reporter Michael Miller to spend a day on the campus. He wrote the following account of his day there.

COSTA MESA — It’s a good school, the boy was telling me — a far cry from the one he attended in Mexico just a year or two ago. The students acted up less and the teachers paid attention to them in class rather than just assigning them work and dozing off. Best of all, they provided locker rooms, which were a blessing after gym class.

“You don’t have to wear your PE clothes all day,” David Flores said, taking a break from his language class at TeWinkle Middle School. “You don’t have to pay for lunch. Most of the teachers speak Spanish too.”

David, 13, is an eighth-grader and an English-learner. I rounded him up with two of his friends Wednesday to ask what TeWinkle looked like to someone who had never set foot in an American school before. The answer I got was that, for all practical purposes, it looked great. David’s friends talked about the cramped classrooms they had studied in back home, the teachers who disciplined students by smacking them with rulers. After that, they noted, Costa Mesa was no big deal.

“Here, you don’t have a lot of problems,” said Jonathan Guerrero, 13.

Innovative. Gang-infested. Nurturing. Terrifying.

I had heard TeWinkle called a great many things, but I had no problem believing that for some people, it felt like a dream come true. Every school has different sides, and that’s why I had forfeited an entire day at the office to visit TeWinkle up close. After three weeks of anonymous online postings, I wanted to see for myself.

SEEING IT FIRSTHAND

TeWinkle, where 40% of students are English-learners and 40% of parents lack a high school diploma, had become a center of contention in Newport-Mesa over the last month. On March 4, parent Robin Benham wrote a scathing op-ed piece in the Daily Pilot accusing the school of lacking discipline and shortchanging its gifted students. PTA President Vicki Snell published a letter denouncing that, and then the reader comments began online.

From an anonymous poster named LPT: “It’s a failing and lousy school that is robbing citizen kids of a good education. It’s full of gang members.”

From a mother who declined to give her last name: “No boundaries from some of these kids. No response to attempts to discipline. Jumping from desk to desk, standing and screaming, etc.”

And a challenge from someone called The Big A: “Fact is it’s a miserable mess and the numbers prove it. If you go to the school look around, it’s right there under your nose.”

I have no idea who The Big A is, but I decided to take his challenge. One phone call later, Principal Dan Diehl had honored my request to spend an entire day at TeWinkle. We set a date for Wednesday, and I brought a full pad of paper, expecting to furiously scribble details of bandannas, brawls, teachers cowering under desks.

By the time the last bell rang, I was underwhelmed.

TeWinkle undoubtedly has its rough days and its troublemakers. Nearly every student or adult I talked to had some negative story to impart. The eight hours I spent on campus, though, didn’t offer much in the way of fireworks. Touring the school from end to end, I saw quiet classrooms and noisy ones, veteran teachers and new substitutes, kids who walked in the commons and kids who had to be reminded not to sprint.

I might have gotten a different picture on another day, but on Wednesday, at least, TeWinkle looked pretty commonplace.

MOSTLY POSITIVE

I started the day by perusing the campus. It was half-past seven and most of the students had arrived. A few dozen sat at the tables outside and ate breakfast — one of two free meals they’d get at school that day. I walked up to Ed Anthony, the security guard watching the area, and asked him if he’d read the online comments about TeWinkle being overridden by gangs.

He had.

The only security guard on campus some days, Anthony knows the school’s at-risk students as well as anyone. He described to me the tagging that occurred from time to time, the kids who wrote insignias on the poles or the bathroom walls. Over the years, he’d intervened in his share of fights. Still, he shook his head at some of the anonymous postings.

“Some of the kids may have older brothers who are gang members,” he said. “But in terms of ‘overridden,’ not even close.”

The bell rang, and I started my tour of the classrooms. I had agreed to let Diehl shadow me most of the day, but I took every measure to catch the school off-guard, picking classrooms at random and stepping in unannounced. For the first stop, I opted for an English-learner class.

Inside, 23 students sat at their desks while the teacher, Patrick Herrera, quizzed them on a short story they had just read. The classroom stayed silent during the test. When Herrera began asking the students questions, they shouted out answers in English — the mandatory language in TeWinkle classrooms. After a while, Herrera praised them for honing their skills.

I pushed on. English teacher Denise Newcomer had her class write lists of their dreams; one girl had “go to college” and “graduate from high school” as her top two items. Todd Eversgerd’s social science class worked on an art project about the Chinese dynasties. Anna DeMichei showed a film on tsunamis to her science students, who actually sat and watched the movie.

I hadn’t seen a switchblade yet.

Were students always this well-behaved? Not always, Diehl said. He admitted that some teachers were better at controlling the class than others, that administrators were working with some on discipline. Teachers weren’t allowed to make kids sit outside, he said, because then they would be unsupervised. In extreme cases, teachers could call for security or send a student to the office, but the school preferred them to handle problems in class.

According to Bill Riddell, that used to be a lot harder. Riddell, who has taught physical education at TeWinkle for 23 years, said the school was at its rowdiest in the 1980s. Once, he said, he had four track team captains from different gangs. This year, he hadn’t broken up a fight yet.

“We had some really tough kids back then,” he told me as his students did basketball drills outside. “This is nothing.”

HINTS OF TROUBLE

At lunch, I stood on the blacktop again with Anthony. I asked him if he could point out any of the taggers to me. He motioned to a small group sitting at a table, three boys wearing identically colored shirts and a girl in different garb.

“He’s only been back here for two days,” Anthony said, referring to the member closest to us. “He’s been in juvenile hall. He was one of the major taggers before he left.”

I had seen other hints of trouble around campus. Math teacher Candice Richards had a sign on her wall listing rules for how to treat a substitute teacher, including “No throwing any objects.” Shelley Lang hustled a pair of boys out of her art class when they seemed on the verge of coming to blows. She had a teacher’s aide and could afford to leave the room for a minute.

Still, TeWinkle didn’t look like the chaotic place that a few had made it out to be. I couldn’t hang around the school all week, though, so I decided to talk to some people who did.

After the last bell, I went to the Save Our Youth center on the Westside and sat in an air-conditioned room with a half a dozen TeWinkle students. I quoted some of the reader comments, and the kids laughed at them. A few of their classmates caused trouble, they said, but more with Sharpie pens than weapons. Students occasionally picked on substitutes — throwing a book at least once — but minded their manners around tough teachers.

And the school’s violent reputation, eighth-grader Alex Rubio told me, was mostly a myth.

“All the fights aren’t true,” he said. “The maximum fights in a year is, like, two.”

‘THINGS HAPPEN IN EVERY SCHOOL’

Two days later, I phoned Benham. She admitted that I might have visited the campus on a better day than she had. Her story, she said, mostly rose out of accounts from her son — who attended sixth grade at TeWinkle last year and has since transferred — as well as his friends and teachers. A few times, she told me, she visited his classrooms and found them rowdy and undisciplined.

Benham stood by her story but said she could believe mine as well. Her main goal in writing the article, she said, was to encourage the district to take a closer look at TeWinkle — especially with her younger child nearing middle-school age.

“We had a horrible year,” she said. “I would hope that TeWinkle is better than that. That’s my hope. I want to send my daughter there.”

Diehl, for his part, said he would be happy to take her. And he recommended that parents stop by and visit the school if they are wary of sending their children there.

“Do situations occur? Sure,” he told me. “When I was a kid in middle school, things occurred. We didn’t have 70% of kids getting free and reduced-price lunches. We didn’t have English-learners. But things happen in every school.”

QUESTION

What have been your experiences with TeWinkle Middle School? Call our Readers Hotline at (714) 966-4664 or send e-mail to dailypilot@latimes.com. Please spell your name and tell us your hometown and phone numbers for verification purposes only.

For more photos from TeWinkle Middle School click here.