A Bay Area-wide search is on for Japanese Americans denied a San Francisco high school diploma during World War II because they were forced into internment camps.

Some 200 students of Japanese descent are thought to have been banished from city high schools and sent to wartime camps as part of Executive Order 9066. President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law in February 1942, sending about 110,000 people from California, Arizona, Oregon and Washington into barbed-wire-ringed camps, ostensibly to protect national security.

Now, San Francisco school officials want to find former students -- who should have graduated with the classes of '42, '43, '44 and '45 -- to apologize. And they want to present the overdue diplomas at a ceremony next spring.

"We want to leave no stone unturned," said Leland Yee, the school board member who introduced the resolution Tuesday night directing Superintendent Bill Rojas to carry out the search.

"The school district will never be able to correct the mistake of interning the Japanese Americans," said Yee, who was just elected to a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. "But this is a small step in saying we're sorry."

The idea to award the diplomas belongs to Allen White of Glide Methodist Church. While helping plan the 60th anniversary celebration of Washington High School recently, White thought of his own years there in the early 1950s. He remembered presentations he and another student made in class.

White read a column by Herb Caen. The other student discussed his incarceration.

"It was such a shock," White recalled. "I grew up in the Richmond district while this was happening literally all around me -- and I never heard anything about it. I never forgot that moment."

So White called school board member Yee, who wrote the resolution. It passed unanimously.

O'Connell High Principal Steve Hirabayashi, who was born in an internment camp, is helping the district with its search.

"The people I talked to about this, the ones who were affected by the internment, they were very surprised and kind of overwhelmed that the school district is even considering this," he said. "After 50 years, they thought this was long forgotten. It makes me feel very, very good."

The district has not yet found any former students. But during Tuesday's board meeting, everyone was surprised when the San Francisco sculptor, Ruth Asawa, happened into the auditorium.

As a teenager in Southern California, Asawa was taken from school and sent to an internment camp in Rohwer, Ark.

"The hardest thing was not being able to graduate with my classmates," she said. "I had some very close friends in school who were Dutch and German. But in the camp, we were total strangers. The families came from Lodi and Stockton."

Asawa did get a diploma -- from a camp high school.

"It was very crude," she said. "It was in the barracks. In the winter it was freezing because we just had tar paper on the walls. The pot belly stove was in the front, so you burned if you sat in front and froze if you sat in back."

The school offered the regular curriculum: English, social studies, math and even art. But it had few books. In general, Asawa said, "it was a terrible education."

San Francisco schools are not the first to award overdue diplomas. Los Angeles did so a few years ago, as have others in the Central Valley. Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley have also awarded such diplomas.

Former students who were denied a San Francisco diploma because of Executive Order 9066 may call the school district for more information at (415) 241-6565.