Majoring In Diversity -- For Two High-School Seniors, Success Also Means Making The Grade In Real Life

Sometimes it's a triumph to spend a day without being insulted. Sometimes it's enough to just not be called names to your face.

The past two years have been that kind of a triumph for Christina Johnson, who had considered suicide when the taunts and jeers over her weight grew to be too much.

And sometimes, success is measured not by what you know but by how much you've been able to understand. Travis Ernsdorff has grown to understand plenty after sharing his life and mother with 120 foster children in their Duvall home during the past 14 years, enough of an understanding to earn his own foster-parent license when he turned 18 a few months ago.

As high-school seniors march down aisles in packed gymnasiums and auditoriums across the Eastside the next two weeks, each carries his or her own individual triumph. And when Johnson and Ernsdorff join their classmates - Johnson in Bothell's Secondary Alternative School in the Northshore School District and Ernsdorff in Monroe High School - it will be from less-traveled paths to success.

FOURTH-GRADE TURNING POINT

It was just two years ago that things were looking bleak for Johnson, 17, a lifelong Bothell resident. Johnson did fine at Maywood Elementary School. She remembers liking school until the fourth grade.

"I started getting acne in the fourth grade," she said. "People are really mean about that and with me being fat . . ." Johnson trailed off. She didn't think she needed to finish the sentence. Everyone knows what some kids did and said to their heavy classmates.

The weight and the acne combined proved too much for some of her classmates' sensitivity. The taunts escalated. Ignoring them was the best she could do, but sometimes the names flung at her clung to her self-esteem, weighing it down lower than she could bear.

Steadying herself between gags and jeers and rudeness took more and more of her energy, leaving little for concentrating in class. Her grades slipped and, more often, the thought of going to school would make her physically ill. She started missing days. School was no longer a place to learn, it was a place from which she was plotting her escape.

"I never really thought about graduating," she said, "I just thought I don't want to be here, in this classroom or sometimes on this Earth. If I hadn't come here I would have dropped out or committed suicide . . ." She paused with a wry smile, "or both."

Since she opted out of joining her classmates at Bothell High School, Johnson hasn't missed a day at the alternative high school. She finished three years of credits in two while working on the yearbook staff both years. She stayed, she said, because nobody insults her here.

"Since I've been here I have not been insulted once to my face," she said, her eyes narrowing in earnest. "A lot of people from other schools think people that go to alternative schools are on drugs or have big problems. I'm sure there are some students who are on drugs or have family problems. But there are some of those in every school."

In these halls, Johnson has her classmates' respect. It took her 12 weeks to begin speaking up in class, recalled English teacher Marit Krueger. It's taken much longer for Johnson to complete a full smile. A tinge of sadness occasionally still tugs at the corners of her mouth, pulling the smile down before it finishes rising. But the warmth remains in the tilt of her brown eyes even after the smile fades. Her eyes reflect the joy in her life now. That is her success.

Johnson attributes her re-emergence to smaller alternative-school classes and to teachers with time to help and encourage her. She hopes to enroll in community college next year and become a novelist. She's discovered she has a lot to say.

"Here was a girl who, if you said hello to her in the hall, she would drop her eyes and keep on walking," Krueger said. "I'd say, `You didn't say hello.' "

"Yes, I did," Johnson now says. "You just didn't hear me. This school turned my volume back up."

`BASIC TEENAGE STUFF'

Tall, lanky Travis Ernsdorff says he does the same things as most guys his age: play football, waterski, go to the movies, "basic teenage stuff," he says.

"I work, too. Everybody works."

He has a foster-parent license at 18, but he'd rather talk about the two-month National Guard boot camp he'll be leaving to attend in July, followed by another two months of training as an emergency medical technician.

He plans to use National Guard reserve duty to pay for college, to study law and accounting, to get into the FBI. He wants to do something with intrigue, not just sit behind a desk.

School is the only place Ernsdorff sits behind a desk. He volunteers for the Snohomish County search-and-rescue team and helps care for his five foster brothers and sisters, who range in age from 16 months to 12 years, with medically fragile and emotionally disturbed backgrounds.

But he balks at attempts to call his life extraordinary.

"Everybody I hang around with at school is responsible at things they care about," Ernsdorff said. "I'm responsible in the things I care about. Everybody has some aspect of my life in theirs. It's just regular old life. I never thought of it as any different."

Regular old life for Ernsdorff was picking, washing and selling blackberries door to door at 9 years old.

"I wanted a bike back then," Ernsdorff said. "I knew a lot of older people. They were working and getting money. I thought, why couldn't I work and get money?"

At 13 years he started an odd-job service - weeding, splitting wood, lawn care - by "just walking up and asking if they had any jobs." Those jobs helped pay for the jeep he now drives to his restaurant job in Bothell.

"Sometimes it's hard for a teenage kid to do without just because of foster kids," said his mother, Cindi Ernsdorff. "He shares his home and his mother with all of these other children and he has never complained about it."

Cindi said the transition toward becoming a single foster parent after her two biological sons reached school age was a natural one. Her parents had been foster parents as well. She's adopted four of her foster children and is the legal guardian to two of the young ones she's caring for now.

"This one is drug-addicted and fetal-alcohol addicted and he deserves a lot of patience," Cindi said as a bright-eyed 16-month-old child dressed in red grinned and climbed up the sofa arm. "They have to have somewhere to go."

Caring for children with medical and emotion problems takes a lot of patience, Travis concedes. He said he applied for the foster-parent license, "to give my mom a hand. If she wants to go out, I can baby-sit. You learn to be a lot more careful." His sharp blue eyes flash with an unabashed smile. "It makes me realize I don't want kids."

According to his mother, Cindi, his 20-year-old brother Shane said the same thing at Travis' age. But Shane and his wife recently applied for their own license as foster parents.

The foster children taught her sons more than caring for needy children, Cindi says. It taught them to be resourceful, responsible, compassionate and how to cope in a world with people different from themselves.

Cindi recalled an incident at a baseball game when a boy used racial slurs to taunt young Travis about living with kids from diverse racial backgrounds.

"Travis said, `Our family loves each other. Does yours?"