Granada Hills High School

Los Angeles Unified School District officials are considering building a new high school on the Cal State Northridge campus, a move that would give the San Fernando Valley its first such facility in nearly three decades, officials said Thursday.

Parents who want to inspire their kids to appreciate good music can take the family to the Granada Hills Spring Concert tonight. This is no folding-chairs-in-the-auditorium event. The concert will be at the CSUN Performing Arts Center, a venue that hosts internationally acclaimed artists. The Granada Hills High School program will feature a full concert band, two jazz bands, brass, woodwind, guitar ensembles and a few choirs.

Christina Ann Kramer could not remember to brush her teeth before bedtime. So when Balboa Gifted Magnet teacher Christy Wyatt assigned Christina's second-grade class to devise their own inventions, the 7-year-old said, "Eureka!" "I thought seeing my toothbrush right at the dinner table would help me remember," she said. "My parents think the idea was brilliant."

All the students in Vonceil Allford's English class open their books and a few of them read aloud. Well, almost all of them. One sits at the back of the Granada Hills High classroom, staring at nothing in particular and trying to absorb every word. All David Haas can do is listen carefully. "Most of the time, I have to picture in my mind what they are saying, and I'm able to learn that way," said David, a 17-year-old senior.

Subha Palanivelu wandered around the Granada Hills High auditorium picking up brochures, filling out information cards and chatting with recruiters Thursday at the school's career fair. "Sometimes I think I want to be a doctor or an astronaut," the 16-year-old junior mused. "Right when I think I've got it, I change my mind. It's so hard."

The students are rowdy, loud and some don't even want to enter the classroom at Granada Hills High School. Chemistry teacher Bill Lee holds up a plastic bottle with a syringe inside. Wondering what he is up to this time, they walk in. "Want to find out the volume inside this bottle?" Lee asks. They do. And so goes another day at the most popular class at the high school.

Midwin Francis of Granada Hills High is so adept at rebounding, he could give lessons, right? Wrong. "I just try to read where the ball is going to go and I try to get myself there," said Francis, shrugging his shoulders. The simple approach has worked for the lanky, 6-foot-4 senior forward, who leads the region in rebounding with an average of 15.9. He averages nearly two rebounds more than any other player. Francis makes it look easy even in the toughest circumstances.

A football player knows Xs and Os the way a geneticist knows Xs and Ys. But who knows a football player who knows genetics? At Granada Hills High they do. Brad Cohn knows Xs, Os and Ys, giving new meaning to the term letterman. Cohn, 17, is the only two-way starter for the Highlanders, playing guard and defensive end. And he is the only player to spend last summer in a laboratory side-by-side with college professors painstakingly sequencing genes under high-powered microscopes.