December 20, 1992

TEEN VIOLENCE JOLTS IDYLLIC CORAL SPRINGS

PAMELA FERDINAND, NAFTALI BENDAVID And PETER SLEVIN
Herald Staff Writers

A Saturday-night stabbing outside a Dairy Queen. A beating death at a party. An assault charge against a 14-year-old with a gun. Cops and kids in a face-off, authority exerted and adolescence uncorked.

It has been a tough few months in Coral Springs, the drawing-board community where affluent parents tried to purchase a gilt-edged ideal for their kids: good schools, caring friends, an old neighborhood in a modern world.

They migrated in a hopeful stream, 85,000 since 1965, hauling the ambitions, the pressures, the successes and the failings of upscale suburban America. In their tidy man-made mecca carved from a swamp, they found a place where the problems are entirely human, and sadly familiar.

Educators and parents, doctors and clergy are doing a lot of head-scratching these days, trying to figure out where to place the accent on a city that is successful by any standard and troubled beyond expectation.

Fifteen-year-old Joshua Flamm is stabbed Dec. 12 in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Lorraine Dill, a Coral Springs nurse and mother of three, reacts: "That happened there? That's not something that happens there."

Violent crime is among the lowest in Broward -- one murder and 56 sexual assaults in 1991. Median family income -- $43,428 -- and new housing prices -- $259,443 -- are the highest. Test scores and college enrollment rates are among the best in Florida.

Yet a city with eight Cub Scout packs, six Boy Scout troops and a kids' soccer league with 3,300 players also arrests 54 percent more youths than two years ago. It is a city where boozy party goers shouted, "Gook! Gook! Gook!" as Luyen Phan Nguyen was pummeled to death by an unruly bunch.

Parents and leaders in an obsessively planned community -- some neighborhoods prohibit the hanging of wet laundry as too unsightly -- are asking themselves if something has gone wrong with The Plan.

Looking for answers, they see parents who are at the office more than they are home. They see households of abundance where the greatest shortage is time. They see homes where the boundaries are fuzzy, curfews are meaningless and discipline inhabits a sliding scale.

They see a city that is justly celebrated for raising its children -- parents and t heir kids make up nearly two-thirds of the population -- but seems to run out of solutions somewhere between middle school and adulthood.

"It's the perfect place to bring up your child until he becomes a teenager," says Linda Leitner, whose son Erik is a junior at J.P. Taravella High, "and then there's this boredom."

A GRADUAL AWAKENING: Teachers, parents begin to ask what happened

Coral Springs no longer is the enclave once marketed as "The City in the Country." It is a full-fledged city that has outgrown its early intimacy. Since 1980, the population has leaped from 37,000 to 85,000, with another 50,000 due before the city reaches build-out.

"I think the community has grown faster than people can adjust to," says Walton Orth, past leader of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce. "It's like a pot of vegetable soup. You make one pot and it's perfect. You double the recipe and it loses something."

George Mitchell, an English teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, has spent 14 years watching the city become a "victim of its own success." He sees kids "infinitely more passive, more dependent, more likely to expect you to do for them and more easily bored because so much has been done for them."

Like many, he points to the parents.

"People have come into Coral Springs for no other reason than to be saved," he contends. "The parents that we had back in the early '80s were still interested in seeing their kids suffer some pain. Now, parents want the grades and the test scores and the winning teams, plus living in Coral Springs without the kids having to generate anything themselves."

Mayor Jeanne Mills decided something was wrong two years ago, after a student at Taravella High stabbed teacher David Pologruto. Jason Haffizulla was peeved that he had gotten a C on a physics test.

The stabbing was awful, Mills knew, but just as stunning was the absolution offered so quickly by some parents and students. To them, the student was OK and the teacher had it coming and, well, times are hard for kids these days.

"To have the reaction that what he did was not too bad, that we'll just give the boy hugs and put him in another school -- that absolutely blew my mind," Mills said. "The whole table kind of turned, and there was this sympathy for this kid, as opposed to sympathy for this teacher."

Physics teacher Dale Beames is shocked by the talk he overhears in the hallways of Coral Springs High. He speaks of students who cruise on weekends with tire irons and baseball bats, kids who "would use them without a moment's hesitation. They don't have any idea of the consequences -- the pain, the harm, the injury."

Beames taught Nguyen, murdered in August at 19 after he protested racial slurs at a party at the Springside Apartments. He believes that racism is not an adequate explanation.

"I think there is something bleaker and blacker in some of our youth," the teacher says. "It's just a lack of respect for anything. The message is clear: We're missing with some of these young men and women. We're striking out."

This, it goes without saying, was not supposed to happen in Coral Springs. Or, for that matter, in American suburbia. The whole point of suburbia was to escape the confining evils of the city.

ALL FOR THE FAMILY: Parents intended safe, fulfilling lives

Coral Springs figured to be as good as it got.

Before it was a city, Coral Springs was an idea. Designed and marketed by Coral Ridge Properties Inc. as a haven for youthful, active and wholesome families, it would be Our Town come to life in Florida, a latter-day Levittown with cathedral ceilings and backyard pools.

Indeed, it rose invitingly from the scrub parcel on the edge of the Everglades in far northwestern Broward, a place of sculpted hedges and strong saplings and neighborhoods with names like Kensington Gardens, Brookside Villas and Ridgeview: A Private Community.

As recently as last year, Coral Ridge, a division of Westinghouse, pitched a new batch of subdivisions: "All this plus the stability and strength of a community that can rightfully claim to be America's Best Hometown. Coral Springs! The best place for you to live, work, play and, most importantly, to RAISE YOUR FAMILY!"

Thirty years on, Coral Springs -- prosperous, manicured, 87.3 percent white -- must bear the weight of its carefully cultivated image. People notice when things go wrong because trouble, like many things, draws attention in direct proportion to expectations.

"I think the incidents are rarer in those areas, but they stick out more because the contrast to the Beaver Cleaver household is so great," says Dr. Tim Iverson, director of the youth services program at University Pavilion, a private mental hospital in neighboring Tamarac.

When a 1960s fistfight becomes a 1990s drive-by shooting, Iverson points out, "We're moving in a direction that does not bode well for the future."

So, what's up? To hear kids and parents talk about their city -- and each other -- is to perceive very different portraits of reality.

There is the Coral Springs of the soccer fields and the volunteers, the striving community where participation is assumed and winning is understood. This is the Coral Springs of the brochures -- station wagons, Reeboks and backyard cookouts.

"We think it's a lovely place to live," says Donna Wetters, as she stands waiting to collect her 9-year-old daughter, Carolyn, from a soccer game at Mullins Park.

"When he comes home, I'm home every afternoon," Eleanor Finkelstein says of her son Jeff, a Taravella senior who is a member of the city's youth task force. "I don't think any of my friends are neglecting our children. Our children really are the most important things to us. The children are the reason we moved out here."

Finkelstein is upbeat about the city she adopted 16 years ago. She likes her childrens' friends. She speaks highly of the schools and sports programs.

Jeff Finkelstein, however, talks about daily tension among kids that threatens to turn everyday encounters into trouble: "If you go to a movie, you have to watch your back because you don't know who's going to be around the corner."

"The attitudes of people have changed from laid-back and enjoying themselves," says Jeff, 17. "Now people are just on the edge and more hostile toward everyone. It's more like you have to stay in your close-knit group and not deviate from it."

AIMLESS NIGHTS: Bowling, video arcades help break the boredom

This is the Coral Springs of aimless teenage nights, where kids drift from video arcades to parking lots, from movie theaters to bowling alleys to impromptu parties in dark fields or houses where adults are absent.

Many of these teens say they are bored, frustrated, unconvinced of the benefits of Coral Springs living. Even the cost of living gets them down.

"To go out on a date, it costs $12 just for movie tickets and then you buy popcorn. It's $3 for one bowling game, pool is $5 an hour," says Mike Slater, 17, a Coral Springs High senior who works 20 hours a week in a job that gets him home at 10:30 p.m. on weeknights.

Slater lives with his single father. A beeper -- seen more and more among teens -- helps them keep in touch. Eighteen percent of Coral Springs households with children are headed by a single parent.

"I don't push things over the limit. He doesn't worry about me," says Slater, who concedes it's not the greatest set-up.

"There's always that time when you need a little comfort from somebody. Everybody needs that. And it's just . . . that once in awhile, not often . . . you know."

On a weekday afternoon, kids on bicycles and skateboards scoot along concrete sidewalks and zip through parking lots. Those with nowhere to go cluster at video arcades and fast food joints.

At the Coral Springs Mall, merchants suffer a slow season in a silence broken only by piped-in Christmas carols. But, at the other end of the concourse, The New Game Room emits bursts of beeps, buzzes and adolescent curses.

Matt Semensohn, a 15-year-old at Taravella, has been playing Mortal Kombat for hours. As the afternoon wears on, Semensohn, dressed in requisite oversize hooded sweat shirt and baggy trousers, slips quarter after quarter into the machines. He works at Chess King, a clothing store, four nights a week.

"I definitely want to go to college. Kids who don't go to college are losers -- the ones you see at McDonald's with two teeth."

Adolescent aimlessness was hardly invented in suburbia, much less in Coral Springs. Distinguishing age-old growing pains from new troubles is central to the debate. Art Johnson, principal of 2,200 students at Spanish River High School in West Boca Raton, speaks of privileged children who inhabit a "cornucopia generation."

"In some cases it's just as bad to be privileged, spoiled and indulged as it is to be neglected, because you have experienced too much at a young age -- many of the values that are important to being a productive citizen seem lost on an over-indulged teenager."

Johnson's analysis: "Quite frankly, the problem is much greater than one of class or intolerance. It has to do with the value system in this country. I can't overstate the fact that the problems of teenagers stem from the problems of the parents."

WEIGHING TRADE-OFFS: Some teens see downside of affluence

At times, privilege and hardship live side by side.

Parents pay good money to live in Coral Springs. That, in itself, can create a difficult dynamic among some parents who must work extra to pay the mortgage and the child-care costs, as well as the expensive extras dictated by fleeting fashion.

"My mother doesn't know too much about my life and I don't know too much about her," says Dana Sciandra, a senior at Coral Springs High who lives in nearby Margate. "If she goes away, I usually don't know until the day before, when she asks me to take her to the airport."

This is Consuelo Sciandra's side of the story: "When I consider more time with Dana and less time at work to make money, that would then affect the lives of my three daughters that are going to college."

Many parents take pride in their childrens' independence and the sacrifices that afford their families the swimming pools, the schools and the quiet streets. They believe Coral Springs fulfilled the promise of the blueprints.

"Have I been sold a false bill of goods? I don't think so," said Eleanor Finkelstein, who holds down two jobs -- night and day. "I would probably move here again."

Jeff Finkelstein doesn't quite see it that way.

"Right now I don't think that Coral Springs is the ideal community to raise kids in, with the attitudes of the kids now. And I don't see any end in sight. I don't think I'd want to raise my kids here. I'd rather start in a new, all-American city."

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.