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Summer's Siren Call
School's Out, but the Worries Are Just Beginning for Elementary School Principal Sandi Jimenez

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006

Spitballs flew on the school bus and sent both boys straight to the principal's office.

"He spit at me first!" the younger one bellows.

But Sandi Jimenez is staring, alarmed, at the red marker dotted on the older boy's hand.

"You can't come to school like that," Jimenez tells the sixth-grader. Wash the red dots off. Now.

"Why?" the boy asks. He stares at the floor.

"Es marca de pandilla," Jimenez answers, somber and saddened. A gang symbol. He is 12.

"Oh," she sighs later in a meeting with teachers, that boy "is just going crazy on us. He used to be such a charming young man. I'm afraid he's getting into the gangs."

And she's running out of time to intervene. The boy may clench his jaw tough, but when he's happy, two dimples punctuate his smile. He is also a recent arrival whose English still falters, whose academics lag and who is, Jimenez fears, ideal prey for the gangs of Langley Park.

"I'm worried about you," Jimenez tells him in a follow-up conference. "Do I have reason to be?" The boy whispers his answer, " No sé. " I don't know. The white shirt of his school uniform seems suddenly too big.

Tomorrow he graduates from Langley Park-McCormick Elementary and heads to middle school. With final dismissal at 1:55 p.m., Jimenez will have said goodbye to him and the rest of her 513 students, reluctantly ushering them into one of the school year's most brightly anticipated -- but also dreaded and worrisome -- seasons:

Summer.