Orange County Students

From subsidized apartments in gritty Orange County neighborhoods, 40 high school students began preparations to board a charter bus before dawn Monday, packing with them dreams of a college education. By 7 a.m. the Latino students had hopped on what organizers called the "Barrio to Boardroom Bus" in Santa Ana for a week-long tour of college campuses in Northern California. Many of the teens had never stayed in a hotel or traveled outside Southern California.

As of four weeks ago, Orange County teen performers Amanda Bolten and Steven Rada had never strayed far from their high school stages. Today, they can say they've been on the playbill at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a nationally known showcase for the theater elite.

Orange County's students continued to outstrip their peers statewide in California's second administration of the Stanford 9 standardized exam, even though the county is home to a higher proportion of students who don't speak English fluently. According to test results released Thursday, Orange County public school pupils ranked five to 10 percentile points higher than students statewide in every subject and grade level tested by the high-stakes Stanford 9.

Ever feel like you're running around like a chicken with its head cut off? Join the club. Today's high school students often find themselves doing some fancy footwork as they juggle very busy schedules. How do students who seem to be involved in everything keep it all straight? And is it really worth it? Staying Involved "Keeping myself busy has been the best thing I could have ever done.

Two Orange County teenagers were killed after their single-engine plane crashed into the rugged hills north of Ventura early Saturday, officials said. The crash occurred shortly after midnight, when the rental Cessna 152 struck a hillside half a mile north of Emma Wood State Beach, Ventura County Sheriff's Senior Deputy Harold Hanley said Saturday. The plane was fairly intact after the crash, he said.

On one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, Marwa Atik chose a crowded Southern California mosque to debut her latest creation. It was just after midnight when the 20-year-old walked into the Islamic Center of Irvine, dressed in a long, flowing burgundy robe, her head wrapped in a charcoal-colored chiffon hijab , trimmed with decorative gold zippers. After the group prayers, sermon and Koran recitation, a woman approached Atik, gesturing at the scarf. "OK, I want one," she said excitedly.

Since its debut on cable channel MTV last September, "Beavis and Butt-head," a half-hour cartoon series featuring two pubescent males who sit on the couch and tell the "real truth" about what "sucks and doesn't suck," has become a phenomenon and stirred up more controversy than Madonna. Beavis and Butt-head are insipid: "Words suck." They are ugly: "If my dog was as ugly as me, I'd shave his butt and teach him to walk backward." They are crude: "Pull my finger." Destructive: "I like to burn things."

While politicians and armchair philosophers debate the economic impact of immigration, what really matters is people's lives--children's lives. "Proud of Being Brown" is a reminder of this. Sagrario Gil, now a 14-year-old freshman at Valley High School in Santa Ana, wrote her story in 1993 for the Building Bridges Storywriting Contest, held by Opera Pacific.

Keri Carrell grew up loving Gidget. Heck, she was Gidget--hanging at the beach, babbling sunny girl-talk and peeking at surfers from behind her shades. "Yes, you could say I was a typical [Southern California] kid," said Carrell. "I went to all the Frankie and Annette movies and, of course, was crazy about that one with Sandra Dee." That one was "Gidget" (1959), starring Dee as the beachy and bouncy teen.

Two Cypress High School students are among the Orange County students winning prestigious National Merit Scholarships this year. Paul E. Downing and Jeff A. Jung, both Cypress residents and students at Cypress High, were named as National Merit Scholars in the third and final round of 1988 announcements of the scholarship winners by the National Merit Scholarship Corp. of Evanston, Ill.