Coming of Age

For most of its so-called life, “Malibu High” hasn’t been a school at all, just an overheated Hollywood concept. It was a place where surfed-out boys and insipid girls spent lots of time speeding around in daddy’s Beamer, partying all night or sunning at the beach.

Today the real-life cast of Malibu High School, Class of 1996, will step forward, take diplomas and create a little history as the first graduates of their school.

It’s about time.

For more than 20 years the beach community talked about forming a high school. For the last four years they have set about the task, adding a grade each year until, finally, Malibu High has its first seniors, fledgling traditions and a distinctive personality that melds Mayberry and Movieland on a pristine campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The real Malibu High School is a place where kids worry about grades and where they will go to college, more than about impressing the budding film star who is their classmate. It’s a school where Sean Penn, a local boy made good, drops by to debate the death penalty, not to sign autographs. It’s a school where the daughter of Academy Award winner Mel Gibson takes classes alongside the son of a school crossing guard.

“The least important thing about this place is its name,” says Patricia Cairns, a vice principal at the campus, which has 924 students in grades 6 through 12. “The most important thing is that we are small and intimate. We see the kids and their parents in church and in the market. Everyone knows your name here. Kids don’t get lost.”

In short, the outside world’s visions of glitz and celebrity fade mostly into inconsequence at Malibu High, where students struggle, like teenagers everywhere, to find their niche on campus and begin to wonder about their place in the world.

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In a school populated with plenty of scrawny sixth graders, there have been no big men and women on campus to point the way, to set tradition. Malibu simply added a grade each year--fitting all its students onto the old middle school campus without significant new construction. Members of the Class of ’96 have always been the oldest in their school.

“At first it was hard. It didn’t feel like a high school,” said Claudia Alvarado, a Guatemalan immigrant and one of three candidates to be Malibu High’s first valedictorians. “There were just all these little kids running around. It took a while to create something new.”

Who can mark the exact moment when all that changed, when a high school was born?

Perhaps it was this spring, when Principal Mike Matthews finally, and happily, found himself eclipsed as the school’s loudest booster when the classes of 1996, ‘97, ’98 and ’99 screamed their fealty at a pep rally.

Senior Keola Jarrett, a star swimmer and water polo player, wore only his Speedo to that rally, the rest of his body painted in the school colors, teal and black. “It was beautiful,” Matthews recalls. “Just beautiful!”

Or perhaps it was a few months earlier when senior Alexis Sherwin, the student body president, was called out of her class to the main office. On the telephone, her parents said only, “Goodbye, y’all”--their way of telling her that she had been accepted to Duke University in North Carolina.

“She was crying and laughing and screaming all at once. It was a moment, a real moment,” said counselor Nancy Pallathena. “It was confirmation that we had arrived.”

Or perhaps Malibu High came of age during a more sobering episode in March, when one of the school’s most popular students broke his neck in a surfing accident. Dozens of friends have rallied around Jesse Billauer, who is paralyzed from the chest down. When they pushed his wheelchair onto the dance floor at the prom two weeks ago, Billauer was showered with back slaps and adulation.

“It’s really touched a lot of people at our school. Nobody really did any work for a couple of weeks after it first happened,” said Beny Rabuchin, 16, who is Billauer’s best friend. “I don’t think people realize how easily a life can be taken or how quickly things can change. Now we all know how real that can be.”

Playing against stereotype, the school held its prom at a West Los Angeles mini-mall, in a banquet hall. A post-prom party back in Malibu was to have been the evening’s highlight, until the teen-age host got a call from his parents. They were vacationing in Europe but had still managed to hear about the man-sized stereo speakers being wheeled into their home. The party, they said, was over.

While its character has evolved in relative isolation on 30 grassy, wind-swept acres overlooking Zuma Beach, word about Malibu High is beginning to reach beyond its community.

A recent study by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin found that Malibu had the highest percentage of students in college prep classes of any public high school in the Westside.

It ranks far above the state norm on the Scholastic Assessment Test and placed 56% of its students in four-year colleges and universities, slightly more than its sister campus, Santa Monica High.

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Malibu’s parents are wealthy enough that they raised $137,000 in the past year for academic and athletic programs. At the same time, more than 11% of the school’s children qualify for free or subsidized school lunches because of their families’ low incomes.

Now Principal Matthews is striving mightily to stem the flight of the community’s high-school-age students to private schools. Matthews regularly calls Malibu High a “public school with a private school attitude.” He has published a glossy, six-page, illustrated brochure, which proclaims: “You can’t put a price on quality education. . . . And at Malibu High School you don’t have to!”

Teachers and students alike rhapsodize about Matthews, 34, a Stanford graduate who has charmed his school by not entirely outgrowing his own days as a student body president and athlete in Little Rock, Ark. In three years he has waded into the thick of campus life--teaching an honors history class, performing as Elvis at a school talent show and delivering Arkansas pig-sooooeey calls on special occasions.

“I feel like I’m devoting my life to something that is really important,” Matthews says.

Such wholesome sentiments would seem disingenuous if Malibu High were preoccupied with its own celebrity. But kids in Malibu are used to living beside the movie makers, musicians and actors.

When a casting call went out recently for next fall’s school play, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Dominique Swain lined up with 70 other students for auditions. No matter that Swain recently finished filming the the movie “Lolita,” in which she has the title role, alongside Jeremy Irons.

In the school production she had a short reading like everyone else and was pleased to win a supporting role as the story’s antagonist, Mayella Ewell.

“It’s all part of the same thing, acting,” said Swain. “I don’t feel any different and I don’t think the other kids see me as any different than the rest of them.”

When Malibuite and actor Charlie Sheen shows up to play a little baseball or Penn arrives for his class visit, students are interested, but not bowled over. “They are very unimpressed by people’s stature or position,” said Leonard Vincent, a popular government teacher, who taught Penn in junior high school 20 years ago. “They were very impressed by what Sean had to say, by his ideas about the death penalty. Not a single kid asked for his autograph.”

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Many parents in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have long opposed the creation of a separate high school in Malibu, saying it would divert too many students and too much cash from century-old Santa Monica High School. They questioned whether Malibu parents were trying to draw their children into a homogenous cocoon.

But advocates in Malibu said they simply wanted to avoid commutes of an hour or more for their children and preferred a more intimate campus.

The district allocated only limited start-up funds and the school embraced an open enrollment policy, to let Santa Monica students commute to Malibu. That assuaged some of the protests, and in 1991, the Santa Monica-Malibu school board finally gave its blessing to Malibu High.

In an effort to approximate the 43% minority enrollment of the school district, Malibu opened its doors to students from Santa Monica and other districts two years before state law required a similar policy. The campus is now 71% white, 18% Latino, 6% black, 4% Asian and 1% other groups.

The campus is not a nirvana, though, or immune to the social issues that complicate the outside world. Students still tend to group around racial lines during lunch breaks and free time, as they do at many high schools--a concern to the staff.

And this spring, parents were stunned when the school ferreted out a group of middle school students who were drinking on campus and, in one case, even bringing a water bottle filled with vodka into class.

Under district policy, all seven students involved were removed from school. Two from other districts were asked not to return and five locals were transferred to other middle school campuses for the remainder of the school year.

“It’s an alarm to all of us to pay attention and take action,” said parent Lynn Guilburt, who has helped form the Parents Support Network.

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While Malibu may seem wildly alluring to adults who can’t afford to live there, it sometimes look downright dreary to local kids who see only its vast rural spaces and its dearth of movie theaters, clubs and other hang-outs. Guilburt’s group is working to find distractions, and a permanent teen center to help keep kids out of trouble.

The school is looking forward to more big things, its boosters say.

There is an appearance for the school choral group at the opening of this Summer’s Olympic Games, and the possibility of a trip to Carnegie Hall after that. And in the fall, a start-up football team.

Some thought the school was too new and too small for the game, but 15 gangly boys have already been working out for a few weeks, the core of next year’s frosh-sophomore team and, with any luck, the Shark varsity team.

For now, football coach Rich Lawson--who left a winning team at Chaminade High School in the San Fernando Valley--is merely trying to get his players to tuck in their shirts and clap in unison during team drills.

“It’s just one more way to build school spirit and tradition,” says Lawson. “It’s just one more piece of what makes a high school a high school.”