Magnet Program Draws Youths to Legal System : Education: Monroe High School students learn that there's a lot more to it than lawyers and judges.

By HENRY CHU

Nov. 11, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Annie lay dead on the classroom floor, her fingers curled loosely around a gun, a crimson wound staining her forehead. Cigarette butts and soda cans littered her desk and the floor. A plastic bag stuffed with what looked suspiciously like marijuana sat a few feet from her lifeless body.

But this wasn’t another example of spontaneous violence. This was a premeditated crime--plotted to the last detail by James Monroe High School teacher Kathy Floor.

“Was it a suicide?” she asked the two dozen investigators before her. “Or was it a murder?”

The investigators surveyed the scene keenly for clues. No matter that Annie, the hapless victim, was actually a rubber dummy ordinarily used for cardiopulmonary resuscitation demonstrations. Or that the blood was in fact some artfully dripped ketchup and the marijuana some chopped oregano.

It was as good as real for the detectives, who were themselves high school sophomores--most without driver’s licenses, much less investigative credentials.

The teen-agers in Floor’s class are part of Monroe’s new law and government magnet program, which is in its first year of existence. With an emphasis on civics and the intricacies of the legal system, the Sepulveda magnet is the only one of its kind in California.

“It’s a fledgling magnet right now, but I have no doubt that it will grow,” said Los Angeles Unified School District board member Julie Korenstein, who represents the west San Fernando Valley. “And because there’s no other like it, it’s going to be interesting to watch it evolve.”

The program originated two years ago with the Los Angeles-based Constitutional Rights Foundation, which sought to develop a magnet stressing constitutional law. Foundation officials approached the district with their proposal and, at the same time, Monroe Principal Joan Elam requested a magnet for her campus.

“It was the perfect marriage,” Korenstein said. “The magnet was looking for a place, and she was looking for a magnet.”

Officials say the aim of the magnet, which cost about $171,000 in federal grant money to start, is not solely to train young would-be lawyers but to acquaint students with the legal system as a whole, from the creation of laws to their enforcement.

“The general impression is that the legal system is made up of lawyers and judges and that’s it, when in fact it’s much broader than that,” said Todd Clark, the foundation’s executive director. “Translators, paralegals, social workers, psychiatrists, investigators, forensic chemists--almost any occupation that has to do with providing service to human beings is connected to the legal system as well.”

Take Floor’s health class, which incorporates forensic science and the high-tech art of criminalistics, or analysis of evidence. Over the course of the year, her sophomores will learn how to dust for fingerprints, examine saliva, determine blood type and draft composite sketches.

The material is new for Floor herself, who banded together last spring with the eight other magnet teachers to develop a curriculum from scratch.

Floor journeyed across the country for a weeklong session at a similar magnet in Long Island, N. Y. After working with a forensic teacher there, she rejoined her colleagues in Sepulveda, racing against the clock to be prepared for opening day of school in August.

“I was really going in there blind,” she said. “I read and read and read. I spent 90% of my summer working on this. It’s a monumental undertaking.

“The first year is always difficult,” she said. “Starting a new lab class where I had absolutely no resources, I was fumbling around. But the students love it.”

Like 15-year-old Karisa Talamantez of Winnetka. “This class is so much fun,” she said, surveying the mock crime scene set up by Floor last week.

“I want to be either an FBI agent or a criminalist. It’s kind of gross, but I like reading about murders and how things happened,” Karisa said.

Her theory about the violent death displayed before her held that Annie had died after a struggle with an unknown attacker. The drops of blood splattered around the scene belied a quiet suicide, she said.

But classmate Catherine Coatsworth, also 15, pointed out that the blood itself posed a mystery. The drops were uniformly neat and circular, whereas violent motion would have produced drip marks with edges that tailed off in a certain direction--a detail Floor acknowledged that she had overlooked in creating the scenario.

“I know I’ll make mistakes,” she said, adding that next time “I’ll refine it.”

The ability to adapt in the classroom and to present material in an engaging manner was key to school officials’ decisions when they hired teachers out of a pool of some 50 applicants.

Magnet coordinator Denise Wilcox said some applicants boasted Harvard law degrees and voluminous legal experience but had scant teaching backgrounds. “We opted for teachers who presented the material in a bright and dynamic way,” she said.

The magnet teachers work in concert to weave common thematic threads throughout their curricula. For example, while students in Floor’s classes studied suspect sketches in the infamous Son of Sam murders, in Mark Elinson’s law and youth class, they debated the so-called Son of Sam laws, which prohibit convicted criminals from profiting by selling the tales of their misdeeds to publishers or movie producers.

Students are treated to a variety of speakers, ranging from Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Los Angeles) to U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski. The youths also go on a variety of field trips--to such places as the county coroner’s office and City Hall--and will have a custom-built, state-of-the-art courtroom right on campus, which may even take overflow cases from nearby courthouses.

English teacher Marti Sutherland, a 20-year teaching veteran who called her magnet experience “a regeneration,” said one of the toughest aspects of teaching in the program is the divergent skill levels of the magnet’s 114 students--about 85 sophomores and 30 juniors, all of whom attend by choice rather than by qualification through tests.

“The students did not come in with superior training,” she said. “It’s not that they’re not intelligent, but many of them haven’t been pushed before. And now they’re being pushed by every teacher in every class.”

“We had expected all these Century City clones carrying their little briefcases, but we got kids that are just kids, that span all types,” Elinson said.

Compare sophomore Elana Rosen with junior Jami Grayer.

Both are articulate teen-agers, with definite opinions and the assertiveness to express them. Like the majority of her fellow students, Elana, who participates on the magnet’s mock trial team, aspires to a career in law.

“Everyone has always told me I argue well,” she said. “I don’t really like math, and science isn’t my thing, so I figured, where can I do something I do well and get paid for it?”

Her latest phase, she said, is international relations, with an emphasis, perhaps, on Anglo-American relations.

Jami’s interests run closer to home. The Toluca Lake teen-ager, who braves a 90-minute bus ride home each day, wants to become a social worker, not an attorney. But she said the magnet has taught her how laws can affect children, for whom she harbors special concern.

Over the last few months, she said, she has been challenged to think analytically and to weigh arguments objectively--an asset in any line of work. And besides, her training in legal basics has other practical applications.

“If ever I got arrested, I’d be lucky,” she said, laughing. “I know all my rights.”