Junior High Schools

Dawn Boldrin took note when a subdued Larry King showed up for her class at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard dressed in his school uniform without the flashy boots and makeup. The teacher heard he'd been roughed up the day before by boys put off by his effeminate manner. So, as she walked her eighth-graders to the computer lab on Feb. 12, 2008, she pulled him aside.

Commencement at this Santa Ana school was a serious ordeal. Boys had to wear ties. Girls' dresses required shoulder straps at least 2 inches wide. Families brought balloons and flowers and decorated their cars with white shoe polish. Five rehearsals ensured flawless filing in and out of the auditorium by students in red gowns. But if something did go awry, it was hardly the end of the world. After all, they were only leaving middle school.

It all started 10 years ago when middle school student Helen Camarillo walked up to music executive Tom Sturges at a Christmas party for youths and adults interested in mentoring. She told him that she planned to be president of the United States one day. As an ice breaker, it worked. Sturges, a son of legendary screenwriter and director Preston Sturges, asked Helen where she went to school. Foshay Learning Center, she told him, naming a school in a crime-ridden neighborhood in South Los Angeles.

High school students already face a battery of standardized tests on their way to college. Now, the college testing frenzy is reaching into middle school. The College Board, which owns the SAT, PSAT and other tests, plans to introduce an eighth-grade college assessment exam in 2010, a top College Board official said this week.

Professor Harold Hill had a name for it: "the think system." As a way of teaching music, it had its drawbacks, but anyone who's seen "The Music Man" knows that it worked out in the end. That's what Charles Barnes must have been thinking Thursday morning as he taught his regular marching band class at Roosevelt Middle School in Compton. "Jaime, you feel like tapping on the desk a little bit, you and Jonathan?" he asked his drummers.

A teacher at Stevenson Middle School in East Los Angeles has been arrested on suspicion of molesting five teenage girls, and Los Angeles police detectives said there could be more victims. Antonio Gomez, 35, of Downey was arrested March 6 after a monthlong investigation, said Det. Kathie McCarthy of the Robbery-Homicide Division. Formal charges are pending, but Gomez has been accused of committing lewd acts with a child younger than 14 and is free on $100,000 bail, police said.

For the parents at this school meeting, the question was a no-brainer: How many of you want to see your sixth-graders stay in elementary school rather than move on to middle school? About 50 hands shot up. Middle school, they said, was too big, too scary, too much for an 11-year-old. The parents, mostly from Mayberry Street Elementary near Silver Lake, agreed to push the Los Angeles Unified School District to reconfigure their elementary school.

An 11-year-old boy collapsed and died after running less than a lap during gym class at his Burbank middle school, authorities said Friday. Austin Anthony Cook, a sixth-grader at John Muir Middle School, was doing a standard fitness run on the outdoor track Thursday when he collapsed, said Joel Shapiro, a deputy superintendent for the Burbank Unified School District. Shapiro said Austin was known to be athletic and in "excellent physical condition."

An Orange County teacher has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill one of his seventh-grade students, police said Monday. Brian Christopher Wilcher, 38, of Orange was taken into custody Friday after an altercation in his classroom at Brea Junior High School during which he allegedly told the 12-year-old boy "something to the effect that 'next semester you'd better find another teacher because if you're in my class I'm going to kill you,' " said Lt.

About $110 million in school construction projects promised to Anaheim voters when they approved a bond measure in 2002 will be abandoned because of a funding shortfall caused by mismanagement, Anaheim Union High School District officials said Thursday. The shortfall, identified last year by auditors who found that the district's construction program was rife with overspending and lack of oversight, will scuttle renovations to three aging high schools and six junior highs.