Abraham Lincoln High School

Lincoln High School is a place where teachers encourage you to learn and challenge you to think. Their career pathways give students different opportunities to explore their career interests. Students are challenged to rise to their highest academic potential. On top of their strong academic program, their athletics department gives student-​athletes the chance to soar. Their softball team continuously wins League Champion titles. Their baseball team just won the Los angeles City Championship. Go Tigers!

Lincoln HS is the second oldest public high school in Los Angeles. It is located on N. Broadway a couple miles northeast of Chinatown.
The school’s demographic is primarily Latino-​American, with a small percentage of Asian Americans, and very few (if any) of other nationalities.
When I first came here the school was overcrowded, there were kids constantly walking around truant, and there was very little respect for teachers. The big activities were football and cheer.
Nowadays, students are involved with many more activities. The music program returned in 2007 (when I got hired) after being non-​existent for 3 – 4 years. Students are achieving at a higher level, and truancy/​attendance issues have dropped significantly to a couple «all-​stars» here and there.
The one thing that I’ve seen out of the students here is their pride for their school and community. Lincoln students are proud to be Tigers, and they wear their colors with pride.
Go Tiger!

I went here for summer school. I felt like I had to be on my toes all the time.
I was taking an economics class and there was like 10 people in the class. The teacher reminded me of edward james olmos from stand and deliver, except he was a bad teacher.
sux.

I was here for four long years; 9^th to 12^th grades.
[getting out her cane]
Back in my day, LAUSD wasn’t a bad school district. Really, now that I think about it, I learned the importance of education. I know basic math (enough to figure out restaurant math, anyway). I can read and write. But I thought my high school was weird.
No one cared about football games. Or cheerleaders.
No one was the class clown. I’m not even sure we had one.
No one made fun of the goth kids.
No one really cared about «cliques.»
I guess we would have made a boring high school movie.
My time was spent in Advance Placement classes, managing the school paper, writing for the school magazine, running for student body presidency (with the captain of the basketball team as my V.P.) and generally loafing about. We didn’t win (damn non-​voters!) but I ended up on the student Supreme Court as a judge.
I managed the boy’s tennis team but decided to decline the management of the girls’ volleyball team. I also learned how to play a couple of musical instruments badly.
By the time I was a senior, I was so over school I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go to college. I had so many activities and so little time for myself. Our school would raise money by going to local TV show tapings. They paid the school to bus in kids. I saw a lot of shows being taped back then.
We had our prom at the Biltmore in Downtown. I went stag. And graduation night was at Disneyland. Was this a typical LA teenager’s dream? I don’t think so.
I flipped through my yearbook the other day. Who are these people who signed it? Were they the people I learned to play poker with from a book borrowed from the library? Or the ones I kicked it with at the movies, McDonald’s, the donut shop across the park from the tennis courts or bowling with? Probably, maybe, maybe not.
I only really talk to one other person from high school, my best friend who leads an entirely different life than my own. I suppose her friendship is the one thing I’m thankful for.
One of these days, they’ll dig up our time capsule and wonder about the crap we dumped in there. And they’ll find ashy bits of the school paper with my byline. Go Tigers!