Mt. Olive Students to Present a Play

San Gabriel Valley News
By Emanuel Parker
      Staff Writer

Duarte- For the first time in school’s history, students at Mt. Olive High, the Duarte Unified School District’s continuation school, will stage a play.

Under the supervision of special education teacher Fred Hawthorne, a cast of about 20 students, 7th – 12th graders, will perform “ We Hold Our Future in Our Hands,”  a play students wrote with the help from Hawthorne. 

The play will be performed at 10 a.m. June 15 at Duarte High School’s Performing Arts Center, 1565 E. Central Ave. and is free to the public.

“ I’m really jazzed about this,” Hawthorne said.  “They’ll be ready on the 15th and I expect nothing short of greatness from them.”

The play is about a student from New York who transfers to a new school and encounters problems with students who are gang members. 

“It’s about teenage life,” Hawthorne said.  “ As an adolescent you have to make positive and negative choices and these decisions can have adverse or positive effects on your life.”

Jeremy Rubi,17, a junior, plays a character named Joseph. 

“I’m friends with Carlos, the main character,” he said.  “I introduce him around and advise him not to get involved in gangs.  I get killed, and my death changes Carlos’ life.

“This is good exposure to something new.  I’ve taken drama classes, but I’ve never been on stage in front of people.  It’s interesting to see people react to what I say,” Rubi said. 

Hawthorne said the goal of the paly is to improve his students’ self-esteem.

“I want them to see a bigger picture, to see outside the box,”  he said.  “ I wanted to get away form the situation where students sit down, the teacher stands up and we learn from a book.  I wanted to get outside book learning.”

Hawthorne, who has been at Mt. Olive three years, has tried other unorthodox teaching methods.  Last year he and eight students entered the Los Angeles Marathon, finished in six to eight hours, and raised over $5,000 for the City of Hope.

This year they did the marathon on bicycles and finished in an hour and 20 minutes.  Hawthorne said there’s no reason why his special education class can’t perform like regular high school students.

“These students had bumps in their paths and weren’t mature enough in ways to get over it,” he said.  “Once they matured, they’re just as normal as anyone else.  Other teachers just gave up on them.”

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