GORE SPENDS FULL DAY IN SCHOOL, SHOWS SELDOM-SEEN LIGHTER SIDE

Center Went From 50% Dropouts To College Goals

CUDAHY -- Vice President Al Gore sat cross-legged on a schoolroom floor
yesterday morning getting clobbered.

As he does almost once a week as the unofficial Democratic presidential
nominee, Gore spent a full day at a school -- in this case the Elizabeth
Learning Center, which has transformed itself into an oasis of educational
excellence amid the crime and poverty of this section of southeast Los
Angeles County.

In Linda Stewart's first-grade class, Gore joined youngsters who were
playing a card game on the floor designed to teach them the proper use of
contractions.

"Got it! Got it!" squealed 6-year-old Aleena Gonzalez, who tossed a card
bearing the appropriate contraction onto the game board. Next word. "Got
it!" Aleena shrieked again and tossed another card.

"No, no," Gore wailed as he jokingly pressed his hand to his forehead.
"What are you doing? Now I'm in last place. You're clobbering me."

Time-consuming though they are, Gore's "school days" offer a way for his
campaign to display the vice president's seldom-seen loose and good-natured
side in contrast to the wooden speaker or harsh attacker usually on display.

"He really gets a sense of what the parents and the kids go through and the
schools go through at every level," said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane. "He
could come in and do a photo op, read a book for a kid, spend 10 or 20
minutes and then go off to a fund-raiser, but he wants to do it differently."

The Gore campaign keeps reporters at bay during school days -- and most
other days, for that matter.

But that doesn't stop troublesome issues from coming up.

During an afternoon meeting at the Elizabeth Learning Center, a high school
student asked Gore's position on medical use of marijuana, saying he had
just finished a science project on the subject and concluded it is a good idea.

Gore demurred. "Right now, the science does not show me, or the experts
whose judgment I trust, that it is the proper medication for pain and that
there are not better alternatives available in every case."

He said medical marijuana, once legal in Tennessee, failed to help his
sister, who died of lung cancer.

"Her doctor prescribed medical marijuana for her and she used it and it
didn't work. He prescribed another medication and it did work much better,"
Gore said.

In December, he seemed to break from the Clinton administration, which
strongly opposes medical marijuana, while campaigning in New Hampshire.

There, he cited his sister's battle with cancer when asked about marijuana
at a town meeting. "Where the alleviation of pain in medical situations is
concerned, we have not given doctors enough flexibility to help patients
who are going through acute pain. Many of us have seen that ourselves," he
said.

Later that night, Gore backtracked, stressing that he opposed legalizing
marijuana and that its possible medicinal uses have not been sufficiently
researched.

Gore said he wanted to visit Elizabeth Learning Center to see how a school
could transform itself from one with a 50 percent dropout rate to one where
90 percent of its mostly Latino students go on to college.

Although Gore did not acknowledge it, the school is a product of former
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson's Healthy Start program, where schooling for
all ages along with child care, health care and mental health services are
linked at a single facility.

"How many of you plan to go to college? Can I see a show of hands?" Gore
asked students gathered on the schoolyard at the end of the day. When
nearly all of the hands shot up, Gore exclaimed, "That's what makes this an
excellent school."

"In my campaign for the presidency I am trying to make a case to the
country that the single most important investment in the future we could
make is to bring revolutionary improvement to all of our public schools and
make all of our schools excellent schools," he said.

After the all-day school visit, the vice president attended two
fund-raising events in Los Angeles that were expected to raise $750,000 for
the Democratic Party.