Teachers Orange County

A former Santa Ana math teacher who fled the state just before being charged with molesting two male students was arrested Friday in Laredo, Tex., after being a fugitive for more than seven months, federal authorities said. Enrique Solorzano Provence, 37, a former teacher at Willard Intermediate School, had been charged in an arrest warrant issued April 11 with two counts each of felony child molestation and misdemeanor child annoyance involving two boys, 11 and 12 years old.

A Dana Hills High School teacher charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old female student during a field trip was placed Monday on a compulsory leave without pay, a district spokeswoman said. The Capistrano Unified School District Board of Trustees, meeting in a closed-door session Monday night, placed Michael W. Gaskins on mandatory leave pending the outcome of his criminal case, which was filed in Inyo Superior Court on Nov. 16, district spokeswoman Jacqueline Cerra said.

Miriam Johnson, a science teacher at Venado Middle School in Irvine, recently won a second-place award in Toshiba's Encouraging Excellence in Science Education program and a $500 first-place award in the middle school category. Johnson developed a program to complement a videotaped field trip to a landfill by bringing "clean" garbage into the classroom for students to analyze. The program includes discussions on the effects of waste on the environment and over-packaging of consumer products.

At 72, retired teacher Don Shaw hasn't gone to school in a long time. He still keeps busy teaching, though, because now the students come to him. "It feels tremendous" to work with children again, Shaw said on a recent afternoon at the Senior Center, where he was surrounded by his young charges. "It's a very warm feeling that you get."

Roy Beven, a physics teacher at Mission Viejo High School, is known across campus for his unusual way of teaching science. Beven doesn't give written tests. Instead, every semester students build "Rube Goldberg machines," whimsical contraptions designed to perform a simple task in the most complex way possible. But by constructing what Beven says usually looks like a "comic mousetrap," each student learns to measure energy conversion.

Orange Unified School District trustees have agreed to aim for no more than 20 students per teacher in first-grade classes this fall. Board members late last week gave unanimous approval for elementary school principals to participate in a $971-million program announced by Gov. Pete Wilson this summer to reduce elementary class sizes by February. Orange Unified, one of the county's older school districts, has to overcome some formidable obstacles to meet the challenge, Supt. Robert L.

A veteran Fullerton high school teacher was sentenced Monday to three years' probation and was stripped of his teaching credentials after pleading guilty to fondling and making sexual overtures to several female students. George Melvin Fairchild, 53, a former life science and mathematics teacher at Sunny Hills High School, pleaded not guilty last August after he was ordered to stand trial on 15 charges of lewd and lascivious conduct, sexual battery and molesting a child under 18.

An Orange County Superior Court jury Friday awarded $250,000 in damages to an Orange County chemistry teacher who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by school administrators. In her lawsuit, Sharon Daly Forslund, 51, of Lake Forest contended that she was sexually harassed in 1985 by the principal and assistant principal at Mission Viejo High School and that they transferred her to another high school when she complained to their supervisors.

The school board president Friday defended a decision by Sunny Hills High School officials not to inform police about complaints in September that teacher George M. Fairchild had sexually harassed a teen-age girl. The allegations "were dealt with at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner," said Barbara R. Kilponen, board president of the Fullerton Joint Union High School District.

A veteran Orange County educator surrendered to authorities Thursday after his return from a Caribbean vacation to face charges that he molested a female student and sexually harassed four others. Sunny Hills High School teacher George Melvin Fairchild, 52, was released on his own recognizance by Judge Roger B. Robbins after an early-morning appearance in North Orange County Municipal Court.