O Melveny Elementary School

Sandra McRea, a fifth-grade teacher from Northridge, was hiking in Malibu Creek State Park recently when a red-shouldered hawk streaked across the blue sky. She recognized it immediately. "That's our 'guard' hawk," she said, watching the bird until it disappeared into a large, gnarled oak. "He has three different perches and checks things out from those."

The oil pipeline that ruptured during the Northridge earthquake is held together in many places with weak welds that pose a danger of breaking, and regulators are pushing the line's owner, Atlantic Richfield Co., to replace them.

When a San Fernando High school gangbanger threatened to derail Edgar Ibarra's plans of academic success a few years ago, he picked up the phone and called his mentor, Mike Maddigan. Maddigan, 33, who lives in Chatsworth and is a partner at the prestigious O'Melveny & Myers law firm in downtown Los Angeles, counseled the teen, who was then a 14-year-old ninth-grader. "He was pretty mature about the whole thing," said Maddigan, a litigator with the firm.

One of the most historic locations in the Valley, the city of San Fernando has changed a lot since its days as a railroad boom town, when lots sold for $150 each. Yet despite being surrounded entirely by Los Angeles, San Fernando has managed to retain the feel of a small town: The city's outdoor shopping district, is an virtual anomaly in the mall-crazy Valley.

If the Northridge earthquake had happened a few hours later in the morning, on any Monday other than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, scores of children would have been arriving at O'Melveny Elementary School in San Fernando. They would have greeted rivers of crude oil spewing from a fractured pipeline on Wolfskill Street--rivers that later ignited, seriously burning a man, charring a house and 17 cars, and terrifying an entire neighborhood.

Sandra McRea, a fifth-grade teacher from Northridge, was hiking in Malibu Creek State Park recently when a red-shouldered hawk streaked across the blue sky. She recognized it immediately. "That's our 'guard' hawk," she said, watching the bird until it disappeared into a large, gnarled oak. "He has three different perches and checks things out from those."

Dozens of children hang on Nancy Gordon's every word. Whether they are fifth-graders trying to finish Sylvia Cassedy's "Behind the Attic Wall" or kindergartners following along to Marcia Brown's "Stone Soup," everyone at Sherman Oaks Elementary School is listening. Gordon started reading to her grandson's kindergarten class in 1993. Today, the 64-year-old Encino resident reads to more than 30 classes a week. "It's like having 650 grandchildren," she said recently.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is considering a shift of sixth-grade classes next year from some middle schools to as many as 124 elementary schools that now end at fifth grade, officials said. The reconfiguration, proposed to begin in July, is supposed to help ease crowding in middle schools and add more instruction days for students on year-round calendars.

It was 1977 when Robert Torres, just 15 at the time, came home with the letters "SF" tattooed on his left hand. "What did you go and do?" his mother asked, recognizing the "San Fer" street gang insignia. "You just marked yourself for life." Frances Hernandez may have been right. For her son's funeral on Friday, she assembled a photo collage of Robert's life.

Ever since the Northridge quake, Rachel Hayes has tried to convince her 3-year-old daughter Rosanna that it is safe to leave her aunt's house in Lake Elsinore and return to her home on Wolfskill Street in Mission Hills. But the subject only brings back terrifying memories for the child. "She still cries on the phone when we talk to her," Hayes said. "She says 'Mommy, clean up the house, but move it away.'