Where would we be without Schools Plus?

Diana Villagomez, an 8th grader at Comstock Middle School, is telling the story Thursday and when she gets to the dramatic sentence - feels a bit like a punch line except she wasn't laughing - you try to pull a word or two out of the air to make her feel better. Except you can't. Embarrassment is not so easily erased.

The Comstock girls are playing a basketball game, Diana can't remember the opponent, and the team is running down the court after a basket. To the side of her, something catches her eye. She turns, sees a teammate and right there, in plain view for everyone, it happens.

"A letter on her uniform fell off," Villagomez said. She believes it was the letter "T" from "COMSTOCK."

The uniform was so old, so ragged, it was falling apart right there in the middle of a game. No one had bumped into her teammate. No one had drug their fingers across the jersey front. It just fell off, landed on the floor, it had given up the long, hard fight for respectability. The same might be said about the wearer.

Villagomez lowered her eyes when she told the story. Embarrassment, humiliation, diminished self-worth, no teenager anywhere is comfortable looking into the eyes of anyone when telling a story like that.

So when people hear the news about what Schools Plus has done this year and for the previous 21 years, they shouldn't breeze on past the news. They shouldn't shrug as if it's inconsequential. And they shouldn't think, they should never think, it doesn't matter.

Schools Plus may be a name that doesn't leap out and beg to be noticed, until you hear the stories. This one time in which money contains a human element, and not just a bank account for a rich, fat cat.

Comstock is one of 11 schools in the Santa Rosa City School system who will be receiving a check from Schools Plus. Five middle schools will receive $6,250 each, with twice that amount to each of the five high schools. Ridgeway Alternative School will receive a middle school check. Half the money is earmarked for arts and music, the other half for athletics. At Comstock part of the athletic monies will provide new basketball uniforms. The upgrade is not just in the quality of new fabric.

It's also in the smell of it. The old, raggedly uniforms had an odor. They weren't washed after every game for fear they would fall apart.

"New uniforms will be nice," said Comstock 7th grader Juan Estrella, a basketball player, "so you won't be embarrassed to play in front of your parents."

Appearances aren't everything but it's a place in which most of us start. For those who may have forgotten, being a teenager contains so much emphasis on appearance, on clothing, on shoes, on hair, on make-up, on looking cool or looking like a geek or a jerk or trash. It's a wonder any of us make it out of our adolescent years with any self-esteem at all.

"I try to look my best," said Melanie Mathewson, an 8th grader at Santa Rosa Middle School who runs track and cross country. "It's especially true of girls. You get judged a lot on how you look. It's sad but true."

Santa Rosa Middle School will be buying new track and cross country uniforms with its Schools Plus check, among other things. Now there's a phrase - among other things. At a time in which money is tighter than Joan Rivers' face, a $6,250 check feels like $62,500 check to coaches and athletic directors who nervously are eating their fingernails to find solutions to very real problems. Problems, by the way, that extend beyond aesthetics.

"I wouldn't put that on my head," a football player last fall told Dominic Wilson of Piner during a game.

The player was referring to the helmet Wilson was wearing. OK, so it wasn't a salad bowl with a chinstrap but it wasn't the kind of protective headgear needed either in the violent game. Wilson said the helmet dug into his skull. The helmet was so old, so ill-fitting, so dangerous, that before football season last fall, the parents of 15 Piner players went out and bought their sons new helmets. Coach John Antonio admitted he felt embarrassed for parents to do what he should have done - if he had the money.

"We need 80 helmets for both our varsity and junior varsity teams," Antonio said, "and in an ideal world, I need to replace 50 of them."

Antonio gets a deal on a new helmet, $250 a pop, but he's not the only coach at Piner looking lovingly at the school's athletic allotment - half of the $12,500 Schools Plus contribution. Girls basketball coach Jim Vargas heard a call to arms from his own son, Mike, who played basketball at Piner. Young Mike looked at the girls uniforms and had to say something to his dad.

"These look exactly like the same type of uniforms when I played here 10 years ago," son told father.