At Fresno High School, for instance, two-thirds of the students accumulated so many unexcused absences last year that they should have been deemed "habitual truants," attendance records show. Nearly 1,500 Fresno High students chalked up unexcused absences that ranged from 25 to 150 and more. The school's written guidelines dictate that these students should have been classified as habitual truants and referred to SARB for intervention. But fewer than one out of four were, records show.

At the same time, statistics show, about 60% of the freshmen enrolled throughout Fresno Unified last year -- both true freshmen and those retained as freshmen from the previous year -- had flunked one or more classes and were already behind in their credits, a predictor of future dropouts.

"There's a crisis in this city, and no one is talking about it," said Mary Van Vleet, a veteran educator who teaches advanced-placement psychology and history at McLane High School. "If 900 freshmen are entering McLane each year, four years later, when it's all said and done, only 300 to 350 of them are graduating. That's not even 40%. It's stunning."

She works long days trying to reach students who have been let down at every level -- family, school, society. By the 10th grade, many of them are so disaffected, she said, that they've thrown in the towel.

"I'm teaching sophomores right now with nothing but glazed looks in their eyes. 'What are you talking about, lady? I'm just putting in my time.' They've got poor attendance and no interest in schoolwork. And there is absolutely no intervention for them that's being done by the school district.

"I'd love it if there was a vocational tech program I could send them to. They'd have some hope. Right now, the biggest demographic we're losing are the Latino males. They're like the walking wounded. Survivors of poverty, divorce, gangs, drugs, jail. I'm talking in class about freedoms and democracy and war and realities, and it means absolutely nothing to them. Just blank faces."

Hispanic community leaders say the life and death of Junior Villarreal, and the murder trial that now awaits 18-year-old Ramiro Santana in adult court, are part of a much larger and complex tragedy for the city. More than 66% of the students enrolled in Fresno Unified are Hispanic. Fresno's future, Hispanic leaders say, is tied to the success or failure of these children.

When more than half the Hispanic students entering middle school fail to graduate six years later -- upward of 2,000 Hispanic dropouts every year -- the dimensions of the social problems facing Fresno are too big to ignore, they say.

"When the majority or close to the majority of Latino students aren't graduating from high school, you're talking about a problem with tremendous implications for the present and the future," said Hugo Morales, a Harvard Law School graduate and executive director of Radio Bilingüe.

Sometimes, the societal costs play out in public tragedy: the death of Junior Villarreal or the killings in the past two years of 15-year-old Nico Quiroz, 18-year-old Antonio Lopez and 18-year-old Wesley Sardin -- each one a dropout or struggling student.

More often, though, the consequences of a failed education are so commonplace that they've become an accepted part of the landscape. A kind of civic inertia has settled over Fresno when it comes to high dropout rates, community activists say. The problem is so attached to one side of town that the rest of the city hardly sees the fallout -- thousands of lives diminished every day by crime, drugs, teen births, joblessness, incarceration and generation-to-generation poverty.