Rob Kuznia

In a region with countless millionaires and even a sprinkling of billionaires, it’s not unusual for local nonprofit organizations to publicly thank a well-to-do family for a donation of $1 million or more.

But the story of the late Fenton G. Davison is different.

Public donors often enjoy close relationships with their beneficiaries and are honored with plaques, parties and pictures for their philanthropy. But to Mr. Davison’s recipients, the man’s existence has been a mystery. He died at age 76 of a heart attack a year and a half ago at his condominium.

In his will, the childless and unmarried Goleta resident quietly conferred his entire estate — worth an estimated $10 million — evenly among nine nonprofit organizations in Santa Barbara.

The gifts didn’t become public until this week, when the Elings Park Foundation — shortly after receiving its final major installment — issued a press release declaring that it and eight other organizations each received $1.1 million.

The others are Sansum Diabetes Research Institute, Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara County, Boys & Girls Clubs, Girls Inc., Cancer Center of Santa Barbara, American Red Cross, Music Academy of the West and the Santa Barbara Public Library.

Even for monied Santa Barbara, the ghostly gifts are substantial. For the Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara, it was the biggest ever.

For Elings, which accepts no government money, Mr. Davison’s donation is the biggest since 1999, when technology entrepreneur Virgil Elings granted it $3 million — prompting the park to change its name in his honor.

But in contrast to the fanfare then, park officials didn’t even know what Mr. Davison looked like.

Meanwhile, his posthumous donation has left a lasting mark: The soon-to-be-finished Fenton Davison Picnic Area, located near the softball fields, will include a dozen tables and horseshoe pits.

“We’d love to have someone come over that we could say ‘thank you’ to, to shake someone’s hand, because it’s a wonderful, wonderful gift,” said Elings Park Executive Director Mike Warren.

Park officials knew one thing: Mr. Davison’s money was from real estate.

“He inherited most of that money,” Mr. Warren said. “The family had expensive real estate holdings. Oftentimes with large estates, it’s very quiet money.”

Documents and interviews have revealed more about the man.

In a sense, the story of Fenton Davison reflects the value of dirt in Santa Barbara. It also comes full circle: The sunny community that generated his family’s wealth ultimately reclaimed it.

The son of a dentist and an only child, Mr. Davison was born in Indiana on Christmas Eve of 1927. His parents divorced, and Mr. Davison and his mother moved west in the 1950s. His mother, a savvy investor, purchased properties in Encino, and later — after her second divorce — around Los Angeles.

Sources were not certain when or how the family purchased property in Santa Barbara, but his local estate included two duplexes, a 10-unit apartment, and property on State Street that now houses Your Choice Thai Restaurant.

Mr. Davison attended UCLA for a time without graduating but received his real-estate license in the 1950s.

By all accounts, Mr. Davison was not outgoing. Some called him a loner; others said he rarely left his residence.

But all describe him as gentle and kind.

“He always asked about my boys and wanted to see pictures of them,” said Susan Frazier, a certified public accountant who managed his affairs. She confirmed the total amount of his bequest but not how it was divvied up.

Mr. Davison was thrifty, habitually waking early enough to make the “early bird” special at IHOP.

Into his late 50s, he lived with his mother, Wanda Reitz, who taught him the tricks of the real-estate trade.

He was self-effacing, and tended to frequently “kick himself” for not selling or buying at the right time, Ms. Frazier said.

In the late 1980s, when he was about 60, Mr. Davison struck out on his own, taking up residence in Port Hueneme. In 1988, at 60, he married Lou Ann Treloar, but the union dissolved after just nine months. Divorce documents at the Santa Barbara Courthouse said they parted because of “irreconcilable differences.”

His mother died around 1990, and he grew gravely depressed, Ms. Frazier said.

He pledged nearly $950,000 in her name to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in the mid-1990s. The museum received it last year.

His despondency lasted years, and Ms. Frazier repeatedly encouraged him to take a cruise. Finally, after about 10 years, he did.

If Mr. Davison was hesitant to reward himself, he was generous with friends. Late in life he took Glores Cutler on several globe-trotting trips: Italy, France, Tahiti, the East Coast.

She said they became romantically involved in the late 1990s, but she rebuffed his frequent entreaties for her hand.

“I guess I was pretty stupid,” she joked.

On Aug. 2, 2004, she drove to his house to take him to the grocery store. (He hadn’t been driving ever since getting into a heart-attack-induced car accident earlier.) Mr. Davison came to the car, but turned around to get something in the house. He fell into the bushes.

“I figured he just tripped and would get up,” Ms. Cutler said. “He didn’t.”

As for the nine nonprofit organizations, Mr. Davison declared no unusual affinity for any one of them; the gift happened at the urging of his financial advisers, sources said.

But that doesn’t diminish their gratitude.

His donation will allow Sansum Diabetes Research Institute to bump to full time the employment status of a part-time diabetes educator, who gives classes to people stricken or at risk.

“They learn how to eat correctly, cook correctly, exercise correctly,” said Rochelle Rose, the organization’s director of development. “There’s such a need for that in this community. . . . We’re seeing with young children an increase in obesity.”

It perhaps will allow the Mental Health Association to serve more mentally ill patients, many of whom are homeless or indigent. It will bring a permanent stream of money — probably $50,000 a year — to the Music Academy to the West, which added the gift to its endowment, which draws interest.

It will allow the library to purchase books and online materials.

“It’s an occasion for great happiness,” said Carol Keator, the library director.

“To distribute it that way, to a resource that is open to everyone in the community, that’s really generous thinking.”

By now, the term “grade inflation” is familiar to most, but what about GATE inflation?

Officials say it is happening in the Santa Barbara High School District, where 16 percent of the students are considered “gifted and talented” — more than twice the proportion statewide.

Are Santa Barbara-area students more gifted than others? Maybe. But administrators say the numbers are too high and, due to tighter restrictions, likely to decrease.

“It’s going to be a slow change,” said Davis Hayden, Santa Barbara schools’ director of research and technology.

Parents and educators say the swollen numbers in the high school district owe largely to a general aversion to the “average” classes, coined “college prep,” taken by the majority of middle school and high school students. In a community full of lawyers and doctors on one end of the spectrum, and tree trimmers and house cleaners on the other — with perhaps relatively few middle-class people in between — there’s a perception that average really means remedial.

Some say this has led to a clamor for GATE status, mostly among more affluent parents, who in Santa Barbara tend to be white.

Parent Ingrid Biancone said she urged her child to apply for GATE identification three times — with the third attempt finally a success — based on the college-prep experience of her eldest child at Santa Barbara High School.

“Kids were talking on cell phones, conversing with one another, being disrespectful,” she said. “I had to transfer him out of (the class).”

Said her eldest son, Gabe, who is still in another college prep course: “I’m in a class where I’m getting the only ‘A.’ None of the kids in the class really cares. Therefore, my teacher doesn’t care.”

In a district with a near 50-50 split between white and Latino students, just two in 10 GATE students are Latino. Seven in 10 are white, and nearly one in 10 are Asian.

In the seventh-through-12th-grade high school district, an off-the-charts test score isn’t the only pathway to GATE. If a student doesn’t test well enough, but the teacher agrees that his or her work is the product of giftedness, the child can enter the class. Some say that clause has morphed into a loophole for savvy parents.

If a pupil doesn’t pass the test, “their mom can call the counselor and say, ‘I want my kid in GATE,’ ” said Santa Barbara High School teacher P.J. Elder. “The parents who know how to do that are predominantly white and predominantly English-speaking.”

Mr. Hayden, who has been working at the district about six months, said referrals will be watched more closely.

“We’re going to try to keep it more on the up and up,” he said.

When it comes to testing, officials are mulling another change: limiting the number of times a child can take the test, from once a year to once every other.

But the bigger change is already happening — although its effects won’t filter into the high school district for a while.

Two years ago, the elementary district upgraded the “cognitive abilities” test, described by officials as a hybrid between an IQ test and an academic achievement test. Apparently, the new version is more difficult.

In 2003-04, the first year of the new test, the proportion of elementary school aspirants who were successful plummeted from 36 percent to 13 percent in a year, said Barbie Evans, the GATE identification coordinator for the elementary district. The raw number of new GATE recruits decreased from 143 to 48.

The proportion of GATE students in the Santa Barbara elementary district is only 4.5 percent, much smaller than the high school district’s 16 percent. Perhaps that is because parents whose kids don’t score high enough can’t ask the teacher for a referral, as they can in the high school district. (The Santa Barbara elementary district is located wholly within the city limits; the high school district stretches from Montecito to Goleta.)

Meanwhile, at the high school district, administrators said they have no breakdown of who qualified for GATE through testing and who got in through teacher referrals.

Nonetheless, the phenomenon has renewed old questions about the meaning of GATE and sparked debate about who should get in.

Historically, GATE has applied to students considered innately talented, excluding those who are simply motivated or high achieving. The rationale for this approach has been that GATE students, like special-education students, have special educational needs: They absorb information more quickly, or delve more deeply into it, than others.

“Their minds may be wandering,” Mr. Hayden said. “The class is working on something that is so mundane to them, their minds just drift off.”

The first school for gifted children opened in New York City in 1936, but the program didn’t take off until the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957.

Amid the paranoia that powered that era’s nuclear arms race, the event touched off widespread criticism that America lacked challenging courses for its best and brightest scientific minds. A wave of research and funding for gifted programs followed.

In California, though, funding has waned, from $56 million in 2002-03 to $47 million this year, said Sandra Frank, the state’s top GATE administrator.

The concept of “gifted” is linked closely to that of IQ. To qualify for GATE, students must achieve a score of 132 on their cognitive abilities test on one of three measures: verbal, mathematical or spatial.

Although the test is technically different than an IQ test, the two scoring systems line up: 130 on an IQ test is considered “genius.”

About 2.5 percent of people who take an IQ test land in this range. Mr. Hayden said that, ideally, about 5 percent of students should be in GATE.

“Students in the 130-and-above range are different in the way they think than the rest of us,” he said.

Parents such as Ms. Biancone are turned off by the premise that GATE should apply only to students considered inherently special. Left behind, she said, are the hard-working high achievers.

“Here they’re scoring at 120 on their IQ tests and they’re being put in classes where students aren’t even at (grade level),” she said.

But Ms. Evans countered that mixing high achievers and gifted students can be detrimental to the rest of the students.

“I feel it’s wrong to drain our high achievers out of our regular classes,” she said. “It’s good for them to stay there, so children who are not high achievers can see what this other child is doing. (Otherwise) they’re not going to be inspired.”

Ms. Elder teaches one period of GATE freshman English, and one period of regular English. She said the contrast between the two is stark.

“The students in my (regular English class) haven’t had challenging expectations — they’re more passive about their education,” she said. “(The GATE) students will whine, but they’ll do the extra work.”

Last week, her GATE class discussed “The Odyssey.”

For a quiz, she told the class to draw a picture illustrating how Odysseus won the heart and hand of Penelope. (He shot an arrow through 12 ax rings.)

In many ways, the class seemed like any other with pubescent adolescents.

Students were distracted by one another and appeared to delight in getting under Ms. Elder’s skin by asking, for instance, far too many questions about the quiz.

“Do we have to get the number of rings correct?” asked one high-energy and mischievous boy, disclosing a key piece of information.

But classmates also showed their capacity to think in depth, pondering, at Ms. Elder’s behest, the nature of the relationship between the Greeks and their gods.

“The mortals fear the gods,” said Amber Harrington. “The mortals are at the mercy of the gods.”

Ms. Elder said many students and parents believe that GATE classes have siphoned off all the smart kids.

“I think there’s some accuracy to it,” she said, but added that there are a couple of kids easily smart enough to qualify for GATE in the regular class, and vice versa.

In Santa Barbara, where the competition between public and private schools is fierce, there may be an unintended incentive for administrators to keep the doors to GATE open wider than usual.

Anthony Spann, whose sixth-grade daughter attends the public Montecito Elementary school, said his decision on whether to send his child to public Santa Barbara Junior High School or private Laguna Blanca rests largely on whether his child qualifies for GATE.

“When she gets to junior high, it’s going to take much more involvement to keep the kind of education she’s had” in Montecito, he said. But he conceded that she doesn’t seem to much care whether or not she’s gifted. “My daughter is more interested in boys.”

A local attorney was the sole survivor of a plane crash near Mammoth Lakes Airport over the weekend that left two others dead.

Bill Hansult, a lawyer who often represents the Libertarian Party of Santa Barbara County, was a passenger in the four-seat Piper Cherokee piloted by a friend, Joseph Terrell “Terre” Owens of Arroyo Grande. The plane had a mechanical failure 10 minutes after takeoff and crashed upside down in a snowbank near the airport. Mr. Owens was 59. Also killed was Carol Maki, 51, of San Luis Obispo.

The three were returning to San Luis Obispo County from a ski trip in Mammoth.

Speaking Wednesday from his hospital bed at Washoe Medical Center in Reno, Nev., a battered and emotionally drained Mr. Hansult recounted the wreck and reflected on his luck.

“Everyone’s saying it was a miracle,” said the 51-year-old Grover Beach resident.

Mr. Hansult suffered multiple broken bones in his left arm and back — three of them compound fractures — as well as several bruises. He bled so badly from a cut on his head that he received a transfusion. Mr. Hansult said he is scheduled to undergo surgery on his shoulder today.

The group of friends was 600 feet in the air when the plane sputtered, lurched right and plunged, he said.

“I saw the ground rushing toward us,” he said. “Terre tried to correct the problem. The next thing I know I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, Terre.’ ”

When he came to, the 6-foot, 215-pound Mr. Hansult was trapped in a mangled mess. “I was like a sardine in a broken sardine can,” he said. With its white underbelly, the plane was not easy to spot.

“I was in a T-shirt and jeans,” said Mr. Hansult, a native of Long Island, N.Y. “I figured I was going to die in the elements. All of a sudden, a miracle happened. I faintly heard some voices in the background. Luck had it these two women were cross-country skiing in the outback.” One had a cell phone and called 911. Rescue workers arrived the only way possible, via snowmobile. They used the Jaws of Life to save Mr. Hansult.

He said Mr. Owens typically asks passengers to take turns sitting in the front seat — one each way. When they left for Mammoth on Thursday, Ms. Maki took the front. Just before the return trip, Mr. Hansult asked if he could sit in the back again because he wanted to take a nap, a move that likely saved his life.

Mr. Hansult said he’s been having trouble sleeping since the crash.

“As soon as I’m close, I start getting flashbacks,” he said. “When I came to in the plane, my head was resting against Terre, who was dead.”

He said he’d known Mr. Owens, an accountant, for about a year, but hadn’t really known Ms. Maki. She was a nurse who’d worked for many years at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center. All three were members of the SLO Skiers club, which had scheduled the four-day getaway.

The cause of the crash is being investigated by officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, but Mr. Hansult said Mr. Owens was a responsible pilot.

Mr. Hansult, who is currently representing the Libertarian Party in a Brown Act suit against the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District, said he does not know when he can return to work.

“It depends on what I can do,” he said. “My left arm I can’t even move. I can’t even stand up and walk.”

A father and son were found dead at their home on Tuesday night, apparent victims of a murder-suicide, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.

About 6:15 p.m., a doctor from the Veterans Hospital called the Sheriff’s Department saying she received a call from a patient who told her that he wouldn’t be seeing her tomorrow, said Sgt. Erik Raney, spokesman for the department. He said the doctor may have been a psychiatrist.

Deputies responded to the home of the patient, 1215 Twinridge Road, off San Marcos Road, and found the body of the father in the kitchen and son in the bedroom. Authorities suspect that the son shot the father with a rifle before turning the gun on himself. The bodies have not been officially identified.

Sgt. Raney said the 42-year-old son was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War. He did not have the age of the father.

The sloped street on which they lived has a sweeping view of the city, and their neighbors’ houses — some with gated entrances — are sparsely scattered. That portion of the short windy road is devoid of street lights. Authorities surrounded the house and were investigating the crime scene late into the evening.

On Wednesday night, just one neighbor, Pete Conrad, stepped outside to watch about a dozen detectives and forensic experts working at the house, which was taped off at the driveway.

The bewildered Mr. Conrad said he did not know the names of his neighbors, even though the house is across the street from his own. But Mr. Conrad did say a man with a crew cut who lived there frequently referred to him by his last name from across the street.

“He would say ‘Conrad, how are you!’ ” he said, gesturing toward the taped-off driveway, where two pickups and a car were parked.

Neighbors suspected a problem with the son, a former U.S. Marine.

“I knew (he) has been going through some depression,” said Jeanne Mora, a neighbor on the block. “He just seemed depressed.”

She said that neighbors heard two shots.

The father was possibly a retired pharmacist in Goleta, she said.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said.

Sgt. Raney said no one else was inside the house when the deputies arrived.

“Physically how they got in, whether it was an open door or they had to kick it in, I don’t know,” he said. “They entered with the purpose of determining if medical care was needed or if someone’s safety was in jeopardy.”

News-Press Staff Writer Joshua Molina contributed to this report.

When Jo Ann Caines took the principal post at La Cumbre Junior High last spring, she was appalled.

Not so much by kids loitering in the hallways during class time, or by the chronic tardiness of students at what was then Santa Barbara’s version of an inner-city school. Instead, she was dismayed by what she felt was a dumbed-down English program, foisted upon the school’s native Spanish-speaking population — about half of the school’s student body. This fall, Ms. Caines banished the program — called Corrective Reading — for that group. “It is a very scripted program: There’s no thinking, certainly no critical thinking,” she said.

But other educators swear by the curriculum. At Santa Barbara’s other middle and high schools, about 500 students — 5 percent of the district’s population — are still taking the class, which has produced positive results on test scores.

Corrective Reading, also known as Reading for Success, focuses on rote skills such as timed reading, not literature. Until this year, many students at La Cumbre had to take Corrective Reading for two or even three periods a day, so they couldn’t take electives such as choir or theater. Many went without science.

Does it aim too low, or is Ms. Caines aiming too high?

Few local education experts claim to know. But one thing is certain: Test scores of struggling students need to improve faster for La Cumbre and some other schools to avoid harsh penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Also, Ms. Caines says it will take bold measures to close the stubborn achievement gap between low-income, mostly Latino students and more affluent, mostly white students.

Corrective Reading is meant to teach reading to seventh- and eighth-graders who read at fifth- and sixth-grade levels or lower. Although at La Cumbre it was widely used by English learners, it was designed for special-education students. (In Santa Barbara’s schools, many students fall into both categories.)

The fast-paced class is an odd sight to behold, described by one teacher as a “drill sergeant” environment.

The coursework requires the instructor to use some sort of metronome — a hand-held clicker, a finger snap or a pen used as a drumstick — to tap a cadence for the students who, with heads down in their books and fingers following along, must call out answers on command. Ninety percent of their grade is based on classroom participation. There is very little homework.

Ms. Caines believes that the rudimentary nature of the workload sets students up for failure.

“You can’t expect kids to master standards that they are not being taught,” she said.

Other educators hail the program, saying it’s a way to catch kids slipping through the cracks, possibly into the abyss of lifelong illiteracy.

“The students are constantly engaged,” said Kathy Dubock, who teaches Corrective Reading at Santa Barbara Junior High. “All their points are accumulated in class. It’s designed that way so they will be successful — many never have been. It’s really exciting to see them blossom.”

A DAUNTING CHALLENGE

The polarized opinions underscore the daunting challenge of teaching English in a K-12 system where an unusually large percentage of children — roughly a quarter — do not speak English fluently.

The task is further complicated by the current pressure-cooker era of high-stakes testing. No Child Left Behind wields a heavy hammer for schools that fail to boost the scores of struggling, often minority, students.

For La Cumbre, the stakes this year are higher than ever. If it doesn’t significantly improve the test scores of certain subsets of students — primarily English learners — it will enter its fourth year of sanctions. Possible consequences: “contract with outside agency to manage the school,” “state takeover,” “reopen school as a charter” and “replace all or most staff, including principal.”

As for Corrective Reading, teachers and administrators admit that the lessons do not even begin to prepare students for meeting the instructional standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 1997.

The standards, for instance, call for seventh-graders to be able to “Identify and analyze recurring themes across works (i.e. value of bravery, loyalty and friendship; the effects of loneliness).”

For students in Corrective Reading, those standards are lofty.

The class is meant to give kids the tools to sound out words. To the average adult reader, it is clearly remedial.

In a typical workbook exercise, pupils are given six words and a passage with a missing word. The students are asked to fill the blank with one of the six words.

Question: “They found a ‘blank’ to their problem.”

Answer: “Solution”

Question: “Sam lost the ‘blank’ with Cindy.”

Answer: “Argument”

Superintendent Brian Sarvis said he believes Corrective Reading has been a great success. With this in mind, he said he is reserving judgment about La Cumbre’s plan.

“(Corrective Reading) does produce results, but the question is, can you produce those same results in a different way?” he said. “That’s part of the grand experiment here.”

He added, “I have a lot of confidence in the school’s ability to deliver, so I’m not particularly worried about it.”

A BOLD MOVE

At La Cumbre, Ms. Caines instituted a change this fall that even she describes as bold. She not only axed Corrective Reading, but also skipped a middle level for the vast majority of her English learners.

The middle ground, a less phonics-based course called High Point, is designed for English learners and is also widely used across the district. (In general, High Point is geared toward English learners and Corrective Reading is geared toward special-education students, but in Santa Barbara the crossover is significant.)

Now at La Cumbre, the same grade-level English textbooks are given to the vast majority of students, English learners and “gifted and talented” kids alike.

The kids appreciate this, and not just because they love literature. For them, the change has removed a painful marker of pecking order: the color of their English textbook. In fact, students at La Cumbre used to refer to their English classes by color, not name, Ms. Caines said. (“Are you in the green class or the yellow?”) But now, all seventh-graders carry green English books; all eighth-graders, red. In a sense, it’s similar to the logic behind a dress code.

But for Ms. Caines, the change is more about content than confidence.

“I think truly, had I been one of the students, I would have dropped out of school,” she said.

As for the measurable results of her move, the jury’s still out. Students don’t take their annual barrage of tests until spring; schools don’t see the results until summer.

A STARK CONTRAST

What English learners are now reading at La Cumbre is a stark contrast to Corrective Reading.

In the series of textbooks called “Literature and Language Arts” by Holt, students read from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Amy Tan.

They read short stories, essays and articles to study concepts such as “putting analogies to work,” “omniscient point of view” and “presenting an argument.” Their lessons are directly aligned with the California standards.

La Cumbre eighth-grader Nancy Valencia has experienced both curricula. She said she much prefers this year’s more challenging reading assignments.

“I like the stories,” she said. “They talk about life.”

Last year, she had two periods of Corrective Reading, so she couldn’t take an elective course. She said she hopes to one day become an actor, choreographer or a counselor who helps kids. This year, she’s taking dance.

Her favorite short story, “The Circuit” by Francisco Jimenez, is about a boy who is the son of migrant farmworkers in California.

The boy, who had spent his young years in the fields, moves to a new town and enrolls himself in the sixth grade. He says he would like to learn how to read and play the trumpet. But soon enough, his family moves again. The story ends with the family packing, leaving the reader uncertain about the boy’s fate.

But some students appeared less confident than Nancy, suggesting that a wide gulf in skill level exists among so-called English learners.

One boy, upon being asked how many periods of English he takes, shyly replied, “six,” only to be corrected by his peers. (It’s two.)

Ms. Caines is sailing her ship into uncharted waters. Under her unique plan, instead of taking remedial English, special-education students and English learners take two periods of the same regular English class.

In short, they get extra time to learn the same stuff.

Teacher Joanne Thompson said so far it’s working: Her English learners are scoring on par with her honor students.

“I give them the same test,” she said. “The other thing is the discussion. You would never know it wasn’t an honors class.”

But not all teachers were on board last spring. One La Cumbre teacher, unable to reconcile her opposition, moved to La Colina Junior High, where she still teaches Corrective Reading.

Another La Cumbre teacher, Josephine Moore, initially disagreed with the mandate.

But her outlook did an about-face this fall, when she saw the students’ reaction to literature. “What if you never show a kid how to run, you just show them how to walk?” she said.

“They would never know there is running going on. They would never know there’s a faster way.”

By the test scores alone, the success of Corrective Reading is mixed. When it comes to closing the achievement gap between regular and remedial students, it has steadily closed the canyon by a couple inches a year.

For example, in 2003-04, on a standardized English test taken by all students in the secondary district, the average score of regular students dropped one point, from 59 to 58 out of 100.

But the score of Corrective Reading students gained three points, from 25 to 28.

And at La Cumbre, during the Corrective Reading years, the proportion of English learners scoring “proficient” (or grade-level) more than doubled, from 8 percent in 2002-03 to 19 percent last school year. On the other hand, La Cumbre’s English learners still fell well shy of the federal target of 24 percent. Also, their scores last year were the lowest of the district’s four middle schools’ English learners.

CORRECTIVE READING ORIGINS

Corrective Reading was introduced to La Cumbre in 2000. At the time, the test scores of the school’s English-learner population were in the basement.

The change was spurred by then-Santa Barbara school board member Ruth Green, now the president of the State Board of Education. (She was nominated to the post by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Alarmed by the curriculum void for La Cumbre’s English learners, the well-connected Ms. Green put local school officials in touch with a reading consultant in Sacramento. The consultant told school officials that Corrective Reading would produce fast results.

Back then, she said, schools didn’t have nearly as much to work with in the way of standards-based curricula.

“Looking over the long haul, we’re relatively new to the game,” Ms. Green said, referring to how the standards weren’t adopted until the late 1990s.

“Materials written to those standards did not come along until a few years later. We get better at it as we go along.”

At La Cumbre, Corrective Reading is still taught to about 60 special-education students, but Ms. Caines said she hopes to eventually weave the literature-based program into their schedules, as well.

Corrective Reading did not shield La Cumbre from the cudgel of the No Child Left Behind law, signed by President Bush in 2002.

In 2003, La Cumbre became the first school on the South Coast to be penalized, largely for the test scores of its English learners. The school, like all schools in their first year of No Child sanctions, was forced to tell parents they could send their children to other schools, with the district footing the bill for transportation. A wave of white, middle-class students left.

Since then, Santa Barbara Junior High has joined La Cumbre on the list, also for the performance of its English-learner population.

At La Cumbre, in the two years after the school was sanctioned, the proportion of Latino students rose from 82 percent to 88 percent.

But while some education officials blast No Child for segregating the school, others credit the law for spurring improvement.

Either way, Ms. Caines is keenly aware of the pressure, though she insists that she would have initiated major changes without No Child Left Behind.

“It was time for some really bold action,” she said.

“And ‘timid’ is not a description you would use for me, would you?”

Students who flunk drug test not arrested

As school officials in Santa Barbara consider enacting a drug test policy for students, they need look no farther than Carpinteria to see how fractious — and possibly politically risky — the issue can be.

In January of 2004, the school board voted 4-1 to initiate the policy at Carpinteria High School for athletes and cheerleaders. In November, school board President Michael Damron — a proponent of testing — was unseated in a landslide by political newcomer Amrita Salm, a vocal opponent of the policy during the campaign. Nearly a year after the upset, the divide is at 3-2 in favor of testing, and the matter is expected to soon come back to the board.

In Santa Barbara, the issue has emerged amid high-pitched student chatter over a separate but related matter: Breathalyzers at the door for tonight’s homecoming dances at Santa Barbara and Dos Pueblos high schools. If students are caught under the influence, they will be suspended and forced to attend several sessions with a counselor and their parents. But they will not be arrested, Santa Barbara High School Principal Paul Turnbull said.

Like the proposed drug-testing policy, Breathalyzer use is a practice started in Carpinteria for school dances. But the Breathalyzer need not be approved by the school board, because it is not considered invasive.

Officials in Santa Barbara are treading carefully with the drug-testing initiative.

Already, they have enlisted the aid of a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union for guidance. Her advice, according to Dos Pueblos Principal Quentin Panek: Keep it voluntary, and do not limit testing to any particular group, such as athletes. The spokeswoman couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

It is this version that Mr. Panek prefers.

“In my experience, in many, many years in education, athletes are probably less likely than your average students (to use illegal drugs.)”

But Nan Verkaik, the athletic director at Santa Barbara High School, would like to see the testing specific to athletes, as they are in Carpinteria.

“If 1,000 kids (who are in sports) are not using, that’s going to change a lot of things that go on at the whole school,” she said.

Ms. Verkaik and other athletic directors in the district have long lobbied the city’s top education officials to consider a drug testing policy for athletes. But the powers that be didn’t take notice until the summer, when students in Ms. Verkaik’s TV production class created a video promoting the idea.

“The downtown people get a lot of requests,” she said of the school board and administration. “But when kids ask for help, an educator doesn’t turn away.”

One of the main points of the video is that a drug test provides students another avenue to say no, and encourages their friends to follow suit.

Indeed, several students at Santa Barbara High School expressed support for drug testing Friday afternoon.

“If you’re going to play a sport, why do drugs?” said Adam Medina, who plays defensive tackle on the varsity football team. “It just slows you down. I’ve gotten some offers, but I’m already slowed down enough.”

Said cheerleader Ashley Vizzolini, “If they catch them, bench ’em.”

Others worry about equity. “I think drug testing is fine, if you’re not singling out the athletes,” said Justin Fareed, a running back for the team.

At Carpinteria High, about five students — all athletes or cheerleaders — are randomly selected for testing each week. During physical education or a free period, the students come to the office, where they are asked to urinate in a cup.

And if they can’t perform, they don’t leave until they can,

said Carpinteria High Assistant Principal Gerardo Cornejo. “I’ll go and get a bottle of water,” he said.

The test looks for cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines, amphetamines and opiates. It costs the district about $1,000 a year, or $6 a student. (If they were to test for steroids, the cost would skyrocket.) If students are caught, they are suspended from the team for 14 days and must see a counselor. They are not suspended from school or thrust into the criminal justice system.

Mr. Cornejo said it is something students should get used to — especially athletes.

“If you work for a lot of companies you get tested . . . if you work for the government you get tested,” he said. “This is just a simple reflection of society.”

Carpinteria trustee John Franklin said he supports the policy because athletics are a privilege, not a right.

“(Similarly), if they don’t keep a certain grade standard, they can’t participate,” he said. “They are models of the school, and are representing the school in the community.”

The policy is also endorsed by Carpinteria’s new superintendent, Paul Cordeiro.

Carpinteria district officials refused to divulge how many students have been caught.

“When all the schools start doing testing, we’ll be less hesitant (to reveal numbers),” Mr. Cordeiro said. “But it puts our high school in an unfair bad light.”

The Santa Barbara school board has yet to address the issue. On Friday, the News-Press reached just one board member, Laura Malakoff. She declined to comment.

Local educators tread carefully around issue

The politically volatile issue of explaining man’s origin has returned to the national spotlight, and some local biology teachers and other educators say they are treading carefully around the topic as students return to the classroom.

Although teachers in Santa Barbara are required to stick to teaching the theory of evolution, no state law can tell them how to address the topic when students raise objections to it.

The issue resurfaced last spring, when the conservative-leaning Kansas Board of Education changed that state’s public school science standards to allow instructors to teach “the scientific criticisms” of Charles Darwin’s theory, which holds that all living organisms — humans, apes, fish, plankton — share a common ancestor.

The most prevalent recent countertheory, often supported by leaders of the religious right, is known as “intelligent design.”

This hypothesis contends that because some body parts and organisms are so “irreducibly complex,” they must have been designed by a superior intelligence. Unlike creationists, who believe God made man in his image, intelligent design advocates don’t specify God as this superior intelligence, but most in the science community say the linkage is clear.

Two weeks ago, President Bush ratcheted up the debate by saying, in response to reporters’ inquiries, that students should “be exposed to different ideas” about the creation of man.

While left-leaning Santa Barbara is arguably as far from Kansas politically as it is geographically, many local educators still are loath to discuss evolution publicly.

One top-level district administrator, for instance, did not return repeated phone calls over a two-week period for comment. One principal refused a News-Press request to borrow a biology textbook to obtain excerpts, though another obliged.

Santa Barbara schools superintendent Brian Sarvis said he understands their squeamishness.

“They don’t want to get mired in the controversy,” he said.

HANDLING CHALLENGES

The educators’ reticence is testament to how, even here, the topic of evolution can be a charged one.

Local educators do their best to avoid broaching the debate, but they have their own methods of handling students who challenge them on the topic.

Dos Pueblos High School biology teacher Bob Evans starts the evolution unit by asking students to write down what they already know.

“There’s always a large portion of people who say, ‘I don’t believe that happened,'” he said. “I’d say 20 percent.”

Mr. Evans tries to make clear that he is asking those students to learn the theory, not necessarily to believe it.

Still, he said, “This is what the science is, and I’m not particularly apologetic about it.”

Ken Uchio, a biology teacher at San Marcos High School, begins the lesson with a verbal preface.

“I just tell the kids, ‘Look, I’m not here to shoot down any religious beliefs,'” he said. “For many of them, it’s a very important part of their lives. … I tell them that this is a science class and (evolution) is the best scientific evidence we have at this point.”

Rob Lindsay, a biology teacher and the science chairman at Carpinteria High, also tries to avoid the debate. But when it happens, he plays devil’s advocate, “no matter what position is being defended.”

“I’m trying to help them learn to think for themselves,” he said. “I’m less concerned with the conclusion they come to than the internal process that led to those conclusions.”

Mr. Lindsay hasn’t always tried to steer clear of the debate. About 15 years ago, he accepted a church’s request to come into the classroom to give a presentation on its brand of creationism. Oddly, the presentation drew fire from another local church, which has a more literal interpretation of the Bible.

Since then, Mr. Lindsay has learned to sidestep the point-counterpoint, which he said is perhaps better suited for the English department. Mr. Lindsay also has altered the way he responds to being challenged.

“I was more inclined to debate with them than I am now,” he said. “I’m better at helping them understand what the state wants them to do within a public school classroom.”

TWO CENTURIES OF CONTENTION

Though evolution was a concept codified by the ancient Greeks, in the 19th century, British naturalist Charles Darwin devised a theory of how it worked. The theory, called natural selection, holds that organisms that have physical traits that better suit their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have such traits. Over time, a species will change — or evolve — through natural selection into either a new species or one with more complex attributes.

In 1859, the public release of Darwin’s theory in the book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” stirred an international furor.

In 1925, Tennessee teacher John Scopes drew intense hometown fire — and considerable national attention — when he was sued by the state after imparting Darwin’s theory to his students in defiance of a state law that called for teaching creationism only. Though Mr. Scopes initially was found guilty in what became famously known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” the state Supreme Court overturned the decision on a technicality.

It was a high-water mark for creationism in the schools, and the controversy mostly stayed below the surface of national debate until 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education started what would become a series of flip-flops on the matter by voting to remove Darwin’s theory from public school science standards. In 2001, a less conservative board reinstated the curriculum. Since then, the board has swung back to the right and the curriculum has taken its current form.

Locally, Dos Pueblos High School teacher John Torkington says the number of kids who disagree with evolution seems to be on the rise. But their distaste usually manifests itself silently — in their faces.

“They roll their eyes,” he said. “They do sometimes ask me what my religious point of view is. I just cut that conversation off right there.”

Others say their biggest confrontations happened long before the latest tempest in Kansas.

More than five years ago, Dos Pueblos’ Mr. Evans taught at Lompoc High, which had a “very large Christian club.”

When the club met at lunchtime, he said, the adviser would coach the kids on how to challenge their biology teachers when the subject came up.

“They raised their hands and would say, ‘Did you hear that so-and-so professor of chemistry from this prestigious school said this about evolution?'” he recalled. “A lot of their approach was to try and nitpick pieces of evolution.”

For their part, many students who believe in creationism keep a low profile.

Carpinteria High student April Wood said that although she doesn’t necessarily believe what’s being taught, she tries to pass the tests and keep her grades up.

“I’d rather be a good witness (for my faith) by example,” she said. “People don’t care what I have to say. High schoolers already have their mind made up.”

Chris Targoni, a 2005 graduate of Carpinteria High, said he appreciates the separation of church and state that most teachers practice.

“I’m not sure if I’d want a public educator teaching me about my faith,” he said, lamenting that one of his science teachers called creationism “junk science.”

“I’m not sure if they would be unbiased.”

At Bishop Diego High School — a Catholic school — biology teacher Randall Hahn said he’s never experienced a classroom debate during his seven years on the job.

Bishop’s science department has a written policy directing teachers to stick to evolution.

It reads: “It is possible that God created the world while also accepting that the planets, mountains, plants and animals came about after the initial creation, by natural processes.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Hahn said he hadn’t even heard the term intelligent design until very recently. But he’s well aware that the theory of evolution has been controversial.

“Some theologians say you shouldn’t restrict God’s power: If he’s all powerful, couldn’t he use evolution?” he said.

CALIFORNIA SIDESTEPPING

Although California’s content standards require that students learn evolution, the text itself seems to skirt the controversy. For example, nowhere does the name Darwin appear. Instead, the required knowledge includes bullet points that are highly technical. The least technical includes: “Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.”

Conversely, in Kansas, the newly adopted standards — which go into effect for the first time this coming school year — use language that is more inflammatory.

The Kansas guidelines, for example, say students should be exposed to some “of the scientific criticisms” of Darwin’s theory, such as “the sudden rather than gradual emergence of organisms near the time that the Earth first became habitable.”

Also, “The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified descendants of a common ancestor has been challenged in recent years by (how) … genetic changes occur only in individual organisms.”

In California, biology teachers do not teach that man evolved from monkeys. In fact, in Mr. Evans’ class, students learn about a 19th-century scandal in which scientists, in an effort to shore up support for Darwin’s theory, slapped together a skull by fusing the bones of a human and an ape.

“The point is, we both have a common ancestor,” he said. “Our common ancestor is a single cell. It’s a fish.”

He added, “You don’t have this classic picture of a four-knuckled walker turning into a sentient human. We don’t have a succession of fossils that lead in minor steps directly to the next.”

Meanwhile, at Santa Barbara High, biology teacher Claire Carey said the way an instructor responds to students who question the material is itself a teachable moment.

When that happens, “I listen and the class listens,” she said. “I would probably thank them for their input. … We respect that everyone has their own beliefs and opinions. But I’m also going to lay out the theory of evolution.”