High School Students

A worker in Inglewood sprays an office with a semiautomatic handgun, killing two. A former employee rakes the Caltrans yard in Orange with an assault rifle, killing four. A man in pastoral upper Ojai guns down two neighbors, the latter in front of her shrieking 3-year-old. A rifle-wielding father in suburban Simi Valley chases his wife and three children, shooting all to death. A Huntington Beach man slaughters five.

Valley College opened its doors, robotics laboratory and broadcasting studios Tuesday and today to some 600 high school seniors from around the Valley during senior days, designed to display the school's facilities and acclimate teens to the college atmosphere.

Re "Spreading the atheist word," Jan. 12 There are many understandings, gained by those enlightened, of the nature of a universal intelligence that some call "God." Dawkins gets to choose, and limit his attack to the least defensible concept: a wise person, sort of like us, who lives in Heaven. He is correct; there's probably no God like that. William Vietinghoff Thousand Oaks

Briana Ramirez and Troy Harrington, both seniors at Santa Monica High School, recently spent an afternoon at a local community center, searching the Internet for college scholarships. Thousands of results appeared on the computer screen, making the confusing process even more daunting. But nearby was a walking, talking college resource, ready to answer their questions.

The year of education went flatter than a sheet of three-hole notebook paper in the few minutes it took Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to cover schools in his State of the State speech. But the budget crisis is no excuse for shrinking his once-grand plans to a couple of modest initiatives. Schwarzenegger has plenty of reasons to move forward now. For starters, he has some good ideas already at his fingertips, courtesy of his own committee on education.

Chris Cummings is one of the nation's top high school soccer players, a quick and aggressive forward-midfielder described by his coach as "electric" and "charismatic." He was looking forward to playing his senior season with his best friends at Encino Crespi High before moving on to UCLA in the fall on a soccer scholarship.

Charlie Weis came to town Monday to escape the cold Indiana winter but primarily to make one last run at landing one of the top high school football players in the nation. The Notre Dame coach stopped by Lake Balboa Birmingham High to finalize a recruiting visit from running back Milton Knox, the City Section player of the year who long ago committed to UCLA.

California public school students continued to outperform their peers in most states on Advanced Placement tests last year, and the state's huge population of Latino students was a particular bright spot, according to reports issued by the College Board on Wednesday. But the state's overall performance slipped slightly from the previous year, and African American students performed dismally compared with their counterparts of other races.

Grover Cleveland High School Principal Bob Marks has his limits. On Thursday, it was the labeled diagram of a vagina splashed across the front page of the student newspaper's Valentine's Day issue. Flustered teachers rushed to confiscate the publication, but with some copies already in circulation and the Reseda campus in an uproar, it quickly became a hot read for the school's roughly 3,700 students. And some of the contraband issues made their way home, getting a quick reaction from parents.

This conservative city on the barren eastern plains of New Mexico long had been spared the acrimonious debates over illegal immigration that have racked so much of the Southwest. That is, until December, when immigration enforcement entered the murky terrain of the local high school. A school security officer stopped Karina Acosta, an 18-year-old pregnant Roswell High School senior, and discovered she was in the country illegally.