Duffy Clark

The Las Virgenes Unified School District posted the highest SAT scores among area school systems this year and registered the largest overall improvement in student scores on the college entrance exam, according to statistics released this week. Students in the Las Virgenes district scored an average of 1,124 on the combined math and English tests--111 points higher than the average state score. That is three points over the district's 1997 average.

Three Mission Viejo High School students have been charged with robbery, kidnaping, felony assault and false imprisonment after they allegedly forced two freshmen girls into a Chevrolet Blazer Wednesday, drove them to a nearby elementary school and beat them up. Marlena Riordan, 18, was arraigned Friday in Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel and was being held on $50,000 bail.

It is often waxed poetic that in the spring, young people's fancy turns to love. Or something like that. At Mission Viejo High School, l'amour has apparently blossomed so much that administrators felt it necessary to nip some of it in the bud. On May 12, Dean of Students Toby Thurlow issued a memo to faculty and campus supervisors in an effort to splash cold water, so to speak, on what he termed "affectionate couples."

Roy Beven, a physics teacher at Mission Viejo High School, is known across campus for his unusual way of teaching science. Beven doesn't give written tests. Instead, every semester students build "Rube Goldberg machines," whimsical contraptions designed to perform a simple task in the most complex way possible. But by constructing what Beven says usually looks like a "comic mousetrap," each student learns to measure energy conversion.

School district officials, flooded with calls from angry parents, on Thursday condemned an appearance at a high school by the "infamous" Rodney G. King and vowed to find out why King was allowed to speak in one of their classrooms. School officials were quick to distance themselves from King's Wednesday night speech at Tustin High School, saying they had no idea it was planned and they would not have approved it because of the controversy surrounding King.

Rosalia Munoz had just finished cleaning the grime from her front window when a huge yellow tractor rumbled by, kicking up a cloud of dust in front of her apartment on El Camino Real in central Tustin. "I can't afford to move, so I guess I'll just have to put up with it," she said. "But it's going to be a long time before this is all over." Munoz's apartment is less than 50 feet from the Santa Ana Freeway, which the California Department of Transportation began widening a year ago.

The county of San Diego should be taken before a federal jury to determine whether it was liable for the rape of an 18-year-old man at the County Jail in Chula Vista by an older inmate in 1983, a federal appeals court ruled Monday. The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturns a 1987 decision by U.S. District Judge Leland Nielsen.

The debate over an Orange County section for high school athletics continued Thursday in the Southern Section's general council meeting, where two county administrators criticized the proposal. Consultant Barbara Wilson, representing the superintendents of the county's 14 public high school districts, reviewed the proposal in an effort to gain support from representatives of the section's 66 leagues.

Proponents of an Orange County section for high school athletics will address the Southern Section's general council today in an effort to gain support from representatives of the section's 66 leagues. Maury Ross, former superintendent of the Tustin Unified School District, will represent the superintendents of the county's public high schools at the meeting and is expected to ask for approval for 57 high schools to form a CIF section in 1993.

Representatives from Santa Ana's Foothill High applauded politely Wednesday when President Clinton congratulated the school and 265 other secondary campuses for being selected this year's national Blue Ribbon School Award winners. But the real celebration came long before Wednesday's ceremony, held in a rain-dampened tent on the South Lawn of the White House. It was the afternoon late last winter when Foothill Principal Dan Brooks announced the award over the school's public address system.