[Student Reporters] Living and Learning in 'the sticks'

James Lee / <9th, Serrano HS>

“I hate going to school here in Phelan. There are many ignorant people. I‘ve seen students smoking weed in the school bus and the bus driver wouldn’t even care,” says 11th grader Kevin Kim from Serrano High School. Phelan is located 30 miles east of Palmdale and 18 miles west of Victorville, and approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes drive from Los Angeles. Phelan is a small desert community of 20,000 people that has only one marketplace in the whole town.

“It‘s really boring and too calm here in Phelan. There are barely any people to play sports with,” says Kenny Song, a 12th grader. This explains how lonely and unpopulated Phelan is. “All my friends live 20 miles away from me,” says Ben Minick, a 9th grader. “Unfortunately, the closest movie theatre is 30-40 minutes away,” says Harry Moon, an 11th grader. Many students like to watch movies once in a while, but students in Phelan are not able to watch as much as the students in urban areas. “There is like no market to buy clothes or do shopping in this dumb countryside!” exclaims Steffy Rodriguez, an 8th grader from Heritage Middle School. The nearest shopping mall is as far away as the nearest movie theatres.

Phelan also has plenty of snow every winter. “It is so annoying sometimes when we miss our valuable school time. I sometimes get annoyed by those snow days,” says Gage Herrera, a 9th grader. Once, there was an occasion when the whole school district was closed for 12 days due to snow, but the students never ended up getting snow-day make up.

Some students have differing views, however. “Phelan is calm and has fresh air so we can study well,” states Moses Yoo, a 12th grader. This indicates that students in Phelan can concentrate on their studies peacefully and quietly without too much distraction. Mrs. Nelson, a 7th grade English teacher in Valencia once said, “No matter how much time passes by, you won’t be able to accomplish your goal without concentration.” Anthony, a 10th grader, states, “Phelan has a really good environment unlike Yorba Linda, where I used to live in. Yorba Linda reeked of garbage cans every so often.”

Lisa Parker, a parent of a freshman, is not so enamored about sending her child to rural schools. “I don‘t think it is a very good idea for Brandon to attend school in the countryside. There will be fewer students, so there will be less competition among the students.

That leads to the students not trying as hard as they would in urban areas.” Other pro-urban parents think there are more beneficial activities and classes in city schools. They think learning in “the sticks” is totally different from urban schools in that there are less academic choices in rural schools.

Whether it is better to learn in the countryside or to learn in a city is debatable. Some test results, such as API and CST tests, indicate that students in Phelan may be getting a better education since their scores are higher than the students in the LAUSD. Does this truly reflect that Phelan schools provide better education? There are too many variables which make drawing such simple conclusions difficult. The results may depend on the study habits and personality of the students, among other factors.

Ultimately, rural schools lack what urban schools do not, and vice versa. “There is never a perfect thing in life. If it has certain good qualities, there is bound to be some bad qualities,” a father of a 9th grader says.