ANOTHER WORLD: After overcoming many hurdles, a...

ANOTHER WORLD: After overcoming many hurdles, a Pacoima teacher takes her third graders to UC Santa Barbara today, showing them a world they can dream of beyond the mean streets (B1). . . .The teacher’s motivation: She asked the children what they wanted to do when they grew up and a 10-year-old boy replied: “Go on welfare like my mom.”

MOON WALK: Eddie Barber of Sherman Oaks is not a movie studio chief or a dying child, but this un-glitzy civilian got a rare invitation to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch. As the winner of an MTV contest, Barber and a few press hangers-on hung out at the gloved one’s fantasyland. . . . They found that the longer you spend in Neverland, the less weird it seems. F1

WET ART: Jim Toring (above), student of art history and America’s top teen-age water polo player, is a Renaissance man in trunks. Two weeks after graduating with honors from academically tough Harvard-Westlake in Studio City, Toring is competing on both the senior and junior U. S. teams (C8). . . . The coach of the U. S. Olympic water polo team predicts that Toring will be an American Olympic competitor through the year 2004.

HOME STRETCH: Amy doesn’t get around much any more. After she embezzled $13,000 from her employer, she had her choice between a few months in jail or a nine-month sentence at home, monitored by an electronic device affixed to her ankle. Street Beat (B2) visits the trim, young mother who needs a temporary parole to leave the Sherman Oaks apartment where she is “jailed” with her baby son.

HIGH HOPES: It’s graduation time. A time for expectations, dreams and, some graduates admit, worry. . . . But some students remain optimistic, despite the economy and other ills of the modern city. They have hope. Says one simply: “I don’t think the future is as bad as it seems.” See Valley Briefing (B5).