High School Students

Trevor Niemann has grown up along the cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean as his backyard playground. To this 17-year-old avid beachgoer, it just makes sense to be concerned about the welfare of the coastal waters and marine life. Niemann, a senior at the Chadwick School, signed up for marine biology this year, but he and his classmates have taken their studies outside of the classroom, supporting proposals under review by a state-appointed task force to preserve a large swath of coastal water from fishing.

Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances. Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.

The small squares of colored paper began cropping up on the doors and walls of Henry M. Gunn High School last week, two days after William Dickens, 16, killed himself on the nearby train tracks. "Just keep swimming," one Post-it note said. "There is always someone who will listen," was written on another. And, "There's no meaning to happiness w/o sadness. Take it easy." Dickens was the fourth Gunn student in less than six months to commit suicide near where East Meadow Drive crosses the Caltrain tracks here in the affluent, high-achieving heart of the Silicon Valley.

The sense of horror seems to be fading at Richmond High -- the Northern California school that made news around the world this week after a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped outside a campus homecoming dance while a crowd of students watched but did nothing to intervene. Local school board members in this East Bay city near Oakland want to promote safety measures -- fences, lights, security cameras -- on the drawing board for years, now about to be delivered. Richmond High students want outsiders to stop calling them animals and savages . "We feel like they're blaming the school," an angry senior complained at a school board meeting I attended Wednesday night.

Reporting from Long Beach Ben Bolch and Los Angeles -- The "Supergirl" Halloween costume that 16-year-old Melody Ross wore to the Wilson High School football game was befitting of her promising resume: honors student, pole vaulter and athlete, positive attitude, aspirations to attend UCLA. Those were the attributes that Melody's friends and family recalled Saturday as they gathered near the stadium gates at the Long Beach campus. They placed flowers and votive candles at the spot where she was fatally shot Friday night as she and her friends were leaving the Wilson homecoming game against Polytechnic High School.

Mourning students at Long Beach's Wilson High School gathered Monday by the pavement where classmate Melody Ross was shot after the homecoming football game. Leaving handwritten notes to Melody and her family, the teenagers lit candles and shed tears as they remembered the bubbly 16-year-old. "Why her?" asked sophomore Micah Mathis, 15, who took French with Melody, an honors student. "That's what I want to know." The mood at the coastal campus was somber as students, teachers and administrators struggled to comprehend what occurred Friday, when someone fired into a crowd of students leaving the game, striking three people, including Melody, who was fatally wounded.

School officials in Santa Monica and Venice counseled students Wednesday and were cautioned to be on alert for suspicious activity after two former students were slain in separate shootings Tuesday. The killings occurred several hours apart in Venice's Oakwood neighborhood and in the Pico neighborhood in Santa Monica. Santa Monica police arrested and booked four people in connection with the shooting in that city. Sgt. Dave Hunscke, citing the ongoing investigation, declined to say what the suspects were booked on or whether the two killings were connected.

At Hawthorne High School recently, students easily identified areas where different groups hang out: the basketball players are in a corner near the cafeteria, the rockers near the stage, ditchers and smokers near the school gates and the JV football players and cheerleaders near the field. The exercise was aimed at focusing students' attention on the many social and cultural barriers formed by cliques on campus and the stereotypes they can engender. Afterward, Hawthorne senior Naya Pierce said she hoped her classmates would begin to reach beyond their tight-knit circles but admitted it would be slow going.

Things were a bit discombobulated last week on the Eastside, where a generations-old allegiance to Roosevelt Senior High School has been upset by a new relative: the recently opened Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center. At Roosevelt, hallways shimmered with gold and crimson banners hung in anticipation of the biggest football game of the season against Garfield High School. At the new Mendez high school -- populated by many students transferred from Roosevelt's overcrowded campus -- the walls were bare; the gymnasium empty.

Sixteen years. Not long enough. Not long enough for Melody Ross to get her driver's license. Nor to maneuver the perils and promise of high school, much less college. Not long enough to figure out where life might take her. Nor actually to live it. She was gunned down on a Long Beach street, in front of her beloved Wilson High School, when the air was still suffused with the frolic of the hauntingly named homecoming game. An alleged gang member fired into a crowd of hundreds.