SUNDAY STORY:On a fact-finding mission

EDITOR'S NOTE: In response to readers' assertions that TeWinkle Middle School is chaotic and gang-infested, we sent reporter Michael Miller to spend a day on the campus. He wrote the following account of his day there.

COSTA MESA — It's a good school, the boy was telling me — a far cry from the one he attended in Mexico just a year or two ago. The students acted up less and the teachers paid attention to them in class rather than just assigning them work and dozing off. Best of all, they provided locker rooms, which were a blessing after gym class.

"You don't have to wear your PE clothes all day," David Flores said, taking a break from his language class at TeWinkle Middle School. "You don't have to pay for lunch. Most of the teachers speak Spanish too."

David, 13, is an eighth-grader and an English-learner. I rounded him up with two of his friends Wednesday to ask what TeWinkle looked like to someone who had never set foot in an American school before. The answer I got was that, for all practical purposes, it looked great. David's friends talked about the cramped classrooms they had studied in back home, the teachers who disciplined students by smacking them with rulers. After that, they noted, Costa Mesa was no big deal.

"Here, you don't have a lot of problems," said Jonathan Guerrero, 13.

Innovative. Gang-infested. Nurturing. Terrifying.

I had heard TeWinkle called a great many things, but I had no problem believing that for some people, it felt like a dream come true. Every school has different sides, and that's why I had forfeited an entire day at the office to visit TeWinkle up close. After three weeks of anonymous online postings, I wanted to see for myself.

SEEING IT FIRSTHAND

TeWinkle, where 40% of students are English-learners and 40% of parents lack a high school diploma, had become a center of contention in Newport-Mesa over the last month. On March 4, parent Robin Benham wrote a scathing op-ed piece in the Daily Pilot accusing the school of lacking discipline and shortchanging its gifted students. PTA President Vicki Snell published a letter denouncing that, and then the reader comments began online.

From an anonymous poster named LPT: "It's a failing and lousy school that is robbing citizen kids of a good education. It's full of gang members."