Continuation Education

She was 17, bright, and from an affluent family in Irvine. Seemingly, she had everything going for her. But she was heavily into drugs, was a high school dropout and seemed to have no goal or purpose in life. Thanks to her recent entry into a relatively new education program, however, a remarkable change has taken place in the troubled teen-ager, Jill Sleeper said. "She has a job now and has already moved up the pay scale.

It's hard to imagine a time when "Our Bodies, Ourselves" didn't take up space in bookstores and sex education classrooms and rankings on bestseller lists. The compendium of articles and essays on women's reproductive health, sexuality and social issues has been a staple among feminists and their daughters for decades. Four decades, in fact. And the 40th anniversary of "Bodies" has prompted release of a new edition. Much about this "OBOS" (as it's known to many of the faithful) will seem familiar to longtime readers.

Iman Gezerse, 15, dips a sheet of plastic into a container of mashed potatoes crawling with worms and empties the mixture into an aquarium of angelfish. The zebra-striped creatures know the splashing in their freshwater tank can only mean one thing--meal time--and rush to feed. Gezerse returns to his seat at the Horizon Education Center, a county-funded continuation high school, and grabs a copy of "Moby Dick," the classic struggle of man, whales and water.

Learning experience -- to a degree In the Dominican Republic, where boys commonly drop out of school at 12 or 13 to play baseball, little importance has been placed on higher education. That's been especially true of major league teams, which have benefited from their prospects' early dedication to the sport. Now that's beginning to change. Four years ago, the Cleveland Indians began sending every player in their Dominican program back to school as many as five nights a week.

Going to college just didn't seem like an option to teen parent Martha Arellano. After all, she was an 18-year-old mother and her 19-year-old husband held down two jobs to make ends meet. So when Arellano found a flier about the Teen Parent Program at Oxnard College on the door of her Pleasant Valley Village apartment, she thought it would be too difficult an endeavor and set it aside. "I kept telling her to go, but she was insecure about the program," said Jose Serrano, Arellano's husband.

Joan Kroc of McDonald's Corp. says she was so moved by a teacher's efforts to educate a boy with the AIDS virus that she decided to donate $234,769 to his school district. Kroc, the widow of McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc, the company's largest single shareholder and owner of the San Diego Padres baseball team, read a news service story about the solitary classes of DeWayne Mowery, who is the only student in a 5-by-7-foot classroom at the Anderson County Gifted Learning Center.

For thousands of Southern Californians, getting a high school diploma or college degree is not the end of their education. The area's community colleges and four-year institutions, as well as a host of smaller learning centers, provide what has become known as "continuing education" for people who aren't satisfied to end the learning process.

Los Angeles Unified students continue to perform poorly on the SAT college entrance exam, scoring well below state and national averages for the sixth consecutive year, according to test results released today. Seniors who took the Scholastic Assessment Test in the spring scored an average of 351 points in the verbal section and 418 in math, more than 60 points below their counterparts nationwide. In 1994, students scored a 353 average in the verbal section and 424 in math.

UCLA Extension, the university's vast continuing-education arm, has long drawn its enrollment from its surrounding Westside population. But changing demographics that point to an increasing Latino population in the Los Angeles Basin have prompted extension officials to reach across town to the East Side to maintain a steady student enrollment.

Learning experience -- to a degree In the Dominican Republic, where boys commonly drop out of school at 12 or 13 to play baseball, little importance has been placed on higher education. That's been especially true of major league teams, which have benefited from their prospects' early dedication to the sport. Now that's beginning to change. Four years ago, the Cleveland Indians began sending every player in their Dominican program back to school as many as five nights a week.

Like many new immigrants to Southern California, Maral Saatjian gravitated toward the familiar. She got a job in a dentist's office in Glendale, where "the whole staff was Armenian. Everything was in Armenian." There was little incentive to learn English. But Saatjian, who studied to be a doctor in her home country, soon decided she needed a better job and a better understanding of life in the United States.

After a five-week hiatus due to winter break, the classroom drama that brought national attention to a political science instructor resumes next week at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Ken Hearlson returns to the campus Monday after being suspended, then cleared in December of accusations by Muslim students that he called them "terrorists" and "murderers" during a heated classroom discussion.

Stretching out his arms and bending in unison with a group of fellow lawyers in business suits, 73-year-old Reese Taylor Jr. was happy to participate in an exercise class offered recently at the State Bar of California convention. The Long Beach transportation attorney said he and his peers were there to reduce stress. They were also there to receive an hour's worth of credit toward the state bar's requirement for continuing their legal education.

Cal State Channel Islands can fairly be called Ventura County's "new economy" university. It's centrally positioned, far more so than UC Santa Barbara is for Santa Barbara County; and the energetic regional economy that it will serve is far more cohesive and comprehensible than that of Los Angeles County. More than its neighbors, CSUCI will be only a local phone call away from many of the businesses and workers it will serve. Our new economy is a puzzling creature.

For every John Elway, Dan Marino or Peyton Manning, there are many more Tommy Maddoxes, Rick Mirers and Dan McGwires. Most NFL quarterbacks don't come with can't-miss, top-of-the-draft pedigrees. Most have to pay their dues, one way or another.

Dawn Ellison was too young to understand it when she was first promised a full scholarship to college. Even after it sank in, there were times when it was hard to see why it mattered. This month, though, as Ellison and a group of her elementary school classmates graduate from high school, they can finally bask in the reality of the promise made when they were 6.

Lawyers who grumble about having to take expensive courses in stress management or bias sensitivity as a condition of keeping their legal licenses lost a fight Thursday in the California Supreme Court, which upheld a continuing legal education requirement for the profession. The court, in a 5-2 decision, held that a state law that requires continuing education for lawyers does not violate equal protection rights by exempting some attorneys, including state elected officials and judges.

Ventura County's high school dropout rate continued a steep seven-year decline in 1992, with Oak Park High School emerging among a handful of districts statewide that reported no dropouts at all in their graduating classes, according to state figures released Monday. "Our high school is the closest you're going to get in a public school to a private school education, because we're so small," Principal Jeff Chancer said of his 530-student campus in affluent Oak Park.

The score: Philosophy professor Roy Bauer 4, South Orange County Community College District and administrators 0. But the acrimony continues. In this saga of squabbling educators, Bauer won his fourth court decision against his college district opponents when an Orange County Superior Court judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit brought by Irvine Valley College President Raghu Mathur.

While arresting a 42-year-old man who was behaving erratically, Los Angeles police officers restrained his hands and feet and laid him on his side, violating department policy. The man died of asphyxiation; his family sued the city. Acting on a tip, officers arrested a man with a suitcase full of heroin apparently intended for sale. When he was jailed, the heroin was booked into evidence but not the suitcase or the man's wallet, which linked him to the drugs.