The new black and white sign atop the new location told a visitor exactly where he was:
“Culver Park High School
A Model Continuation High School”
At exactly 11:45 this morning, Principal Veronica Montes’s car came to a stop, adjacent to Culver Park’s new, steadily upgraded campus.
The first of the school’s 520students began streaming outdoors into the sweltering noonday sun.
Not because they missed Ms. Montes while she was gone.
Because she had returned bearing the tastiest of all gifts for teenagers – Pepperoni, Cheese and Supreme pizzas, seven, all large.
Liquid Pleasures
They would splash down the 70 generously divided slices with flavored snow cones and bottled water.
Is the world perfect?
Supt. Dave LaRose, sleeves rolled in a concession to the weather and his latest healing task, teamed with Ms. Montes to serve the pizza on vanilla-colored paper plates.
Ah, life at the rehabilitated campus of transformed Culver Park.
On the last morning of Opening Week classes, amiable but soft-talking boys and girls mingled in the convivial, low-key manner of any sensible teen with a mouthful of invitingly warm pizza.
“This is a ‘Thanks for All Your Patience the First Week of School’ celebration,” Ms. Montes said.
Students lined up for pizza so orderly, so politely, their parents might have been amazed.
Lunch Hour Relaxation
Milling about, they took their seats among the newly arrived forest green dining tables, which soon will be accompanied by appropriately matching umbrellas.
Culver Park’s imaginatively reinvented setting, the parking lot behind Farragut Elementary, was derided all summer.
By this hour of Week One, it has morphed, virtually overnight, into a landscaped – albeit asphalt – campus handsomely distinguished by its two immaculate buildings that are fenced off for a sense of privacy.
UCLA may not be prepared to negotiate a straight-up campus swap. But the School District, under Mr. LaRose’s mercurial baton and Ms. Montes’s maternal/professional touch, campus progress borders on the miraculous.
What contributed perhaps most heavily to the You Are Home environment was the way Ms. Montes and Mr. LaRose worked together – harmoniously, casually, wordlessly, as if they were home in their own kitchens, serving their own children.
Their personalities and their steel-strong determination blended like a calorie-free cake to make this easygoing picnic work.
They shook off the much-criticized move from El Marino Language School. By now, the fading memory hopefully is fast floating away.
Meeting the Students
As the first person in line, quiet-spoken Jose Valencia, a returning senior, was the first Culver Park student to speak.
He conceded it will take a little longer at the new campus for Mr. Valencia to be as comfortable as he was at El Marino.
“I guess there are benefits here,” he said with a smile. “Over at El Marino, it was not like a home home, but I felt like it was a second home. We had such a nice view over there, a park right next to us.
“Now we are kind of stuck in a parking lot,” Mr. Valencia said as an appreciated breeze blew onto the grounds from adjacent Ballona Creek.”
The spacious classrooms are “cool,” he said. But it has been trying for students during the first four days. The promised textbooks, due today, still have not arrived.
Across the way, one of the tallest students, also soft-spoken, Jamieson (or Jack) Hudson, stylish in a watch cap, was at one of the new tables.
Mr. Hudson is not among the students thrilled with the relocation.
Speaking succinctly, he said the first four days have not quite met his expectations, though he did not need nearly as many words to say that.
Is it within his power to become more comfortable? “I am only a kid, and I can’t fix what’s wrong,” Mr. Hudson said while sounding impressively mature.
He, too, yearns for the good, ol’ El Marino days. “If this woman, Veronica Montes, can get my old school (the El Marino campus) back, then, oh, sure, I would be the happiest kid here. It was a school. We had everything we needed there, classrooms with windows, water fountains.”
Mr. Hudson began to shine when talk turned to academics.
Departing from the brick wall that had been encountered, he said his preferred subjects are science and English literature.
Mr. Hudson plans to attend college, and he is not sure yet of his career path. “Science just comes naturally to me,” and his face becomes electric at the prospect. I understand exactly what they are talking about.”
If science isn’t a strong enough magnet, a quite separate talent emerged.
Mr. Hudson writes poetry.
He has been invited to go public with them, but he wanted to think further about the offer.
