The Imaginary Finish Line (a HS survival story)

That Problem School

2011-03-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

During that 2004-05 school year, the one we thought we be our last one together, all the laughs and good times contained a degree of sadness and even the unpleasant moments seemed worth somehow enjoying. Some days we’d start school late because no one wanted to walk away from wherever we were gathered—the truck, the lunch tables, wherever we were casually talking, teachers and students, we didn’t want it to end.

I think we were all falling behind on lesson plans and marking papers. I know I was. I guess I always try to assign too much work and if most students comply then I get buried in it (I’m buried in it right now as I write this).

For some reason our first ten week report card was always printed after about seven weeks—still is—and that sudden dead-line usually forces me to get caught up. This time it helped distract me from all the turmoil about our future. Then I got an Email from Chris Baker who had just graduated in June and was at Grambling University.

Dear Dad

Heard Charlap is on his death bed and the school is closing next month. Any of this correct?

Grambling is cool. I’m going to get a teaching credential and come take your job if they don’t close middle college.

I don’t know why that note got to me the way it did. Thinking back now, there is so much to it. Of course, the overstatement of Charlap’s health—which, it turns out, was sadly prophetic—along with the overstatement about the school closing and just the simple gesture of calling me Dad. Somehow it got me fired up.

I remembered when our district superintendant, Roy Romer—the former governor of Colorado—sent an Email out to all the teachers and other employees offering an open exchange of ideas about how to do things better, suggesting we shoot him an email whenever we have something to say to him. So now I had something to say to him. Midnight on the night of Tuesday October 28^th when I sent this:

Dear Governor Romer:

I’m a 12 year veteran of LAUSD, a national board certified language arts teacher. I created the AP English program at my school where I am also the journalism teacher (we produce, I think, the only weekly school newspaper in the district), athletic director, cross country and boys varsity basketball coach. As you might imagine I work at one of our smallest high schools, Middle College High School, the one on the campus of LA Southwest College, the one with an uncertain future.

Of course, I would like to see you or someone in LAUSD or the community college districts—or both—devise a plan to preserve what I will argue is a school worth saving. I can imagine some of the reasons not to save our school. Actually, from the community college point of view I cannot imagine why they would want us off their campus. We provide LASC with their best college students. We bring life to an otherwise dead campus. But that is something about which I imagine you and LAUSD can do very little. I also imagine that preserving our school in some other form at some alternate location would be costly and that distributing us all—teachers, students, administrators, support staff, instructional materials and equipment—throughout the district might be more cost effective. But I’m not sure that formula really works. I mean that I believe what we have created here at Middle College is much greater than the sum total of all its parts.

You know as well as anyone that there are a number of good schools in this district. Even within problem schools there are good teachers, good programs, and good students. Middle College is a great school. I do not merely say this to be self-serving. Nor can I assume much of the credit for this distinction. It is a great place to work, a great place to practice the art and science of teaching, and it can be a great place for a child to attend school—an oasis in a part of the city where children and parents speak fearfully about their neighborhood high schools.

Last year’s graduating class is full of examples. One young man told me he was considering dropping out in the 8^th grade. He said there was no way he could have survived four years at Fremont, his neighborhood school. He’s at the University of Idaho now. Middle College is also a place for troubled students to get the kind of adult attention they need to survive, to thrive. We’ve been a reason for homeless students to stay in school, for mediocre students to become scholars, for lost souls to get found through a rigorous student-centered education. Most of our students go to college after they graduate. All of them believe they can. This is a stark contrast to what I encountered this summer teaching at my own neighborhood school, Venice Senior High. Both of my classes were full of great kids but many of them had low expectations for themselves. I do not blame this on their teachers or administrators. I believe the size of the school makes it impossible to reach out enough to create an academic climate for all students.

If MCHS closes and I have to find another position somewhere, I know I’ll be an asset to that school in every way I can. The same is probably true for my colleagues and even for many of our students. But something special will be lost.

I’m not sure what our options are—the district’s, I mean, given the June 30^th expiration of our school’s lease with LASC. Find a vacant lot and drop some bungalows into it. Make Henry Clay a 6-12 school, something like Elizabeth Street and Foshay. I think that the college component of our school has been a great thing (more than 30 students have graduated our high school with their AA degree from southwest college) but even without the college I believe our school is worth preserving. At the athletics meeting August 31^st, Jeff Helpern mentioned how many new high schools were going to be opening in the coming years. I’ve also read about your commitment to creating small learning communities and while I think that two or three hundred is better than five or seven hundred students and that stand alone schools would be better than small schools carved out of big ones, I understand the budgetary limitations with which you and the board are faced. In any case, I hope you realize that you’ve already got a very successful small learning community worth preserving and that you’ll work on finding a way to preserve it.

Respectfully,

Larry Strauss

Middle College HS

629246

Did it matter that I wrote this letter and sent it to Superintendant Romer? He never answered it. I guess there is a good chance he never read it. But I’m glad I wrote it because it needed to get written and Romer should have responded.

Ultimately, of course, it all worked out and LAUSD will probably one day—when that new building is complete—take credit for saving our school, but they will be lying. They really did not go very far out of their way for us until they had to. We were a nuisance. If they could have ignored us, if we would have just gone away, they would have let that happen.

But we didn’t just go away.

About a year later, our current principal, Wanda Moats—who had just been hired to replace Pam Jackson—met Superintendant Romer. When he heard what school she was principal of, he said, “Oh, yeah, that problem school I keep hearing about.”

“Fuck you,” Ms. Moats told him. Not really—but she should have.

Second Chances

2010-12-24T00:50:00.000-08:00

The year that this was all going on—2004-05 school year—I kept a diary of what was going on and it actually continued into the next year, until I got to page 824 and got an electronic warning message on my computer that the file was too big and in danger of crashing.

I haven’t looked much at what I wrote, mostly just calling upon what I remembered, but recently I started scrolling through it to help with that remembering. I saw the name Kevin Moncrief [not really, I changed the name] and stopped to read about his antics that fall.

Kevin had graduated in 2003 after four tumultuous years vexing teachers—including one short-timer who attributed his departure from MCHS to his dealings with Kevin—with his smart mouth and mischief, smoking weed, selling weed, breaking hearts—inspiring girls to fight each other—organizing crap games and card games, sports books, and pay-per-view live boxing in the handicapped stall of the men’s room.

His mother was secretary to one of the college vice presidents, one of many college employees who enrolled their children or other relatives at MCHS. LA Southwest College didn’t want us in its midst but the people who worked for the college kept entrusting us with their children.

Since "graduation," Kevin had been a full-time LA Southwest student and for all we knew was still selling drugs to some of our students. He had at least one girlfriend attending our school. A year ago, his first year after graduation, he’d spend a semester as a uniformed police cadet on campus writing parking tickets on the cars of HS teachers he hadn’t much liked and harassing the basketball team on which he’d once played. When they stood up to him, he’d called for backup. Three squad cars of LA County Sheriffs descended on my basketball practice (I think one or two might have still had powdered sugar and jelly on their mustaches) and nearly made two arrests before realizing that their cadet had been abusing his uniform and his radio.

Kevin made it up to his former teammates, though, donating his DJ services during our first game of last season, scratching and bumping records and taunting the players on the other team with his microphone until a referee ejected him from the building.

Now, a year later, he seemed to have sobered—in pretty much every way. I saw him sitting on the wheelchair ramp shredding documents outside the registration bungalow. I teased him about the cigarette in his hand. He says, “Yeah, I got to quit or I’ll end up looking as old as you.” He’s never formally thanked me or Ms. Jackson or anyone else for all the second and third and fourth chances we gave him at MCHS, all the encouragement and tolerance and second chances, including the letter I wrote to a judge on his behalf after he got arrested the first week of his senior year. And I’m not sure he quite saw the irony now, in the fall of 2005, when he said, as I was walking away, “Hey, I hear y’all about to get kicked out of here.”

Last month Kevin came back to MCHS—after more than seven years. He returned as a volunteer drug counselor, preaching sobriety to our students. He gave a presentation in my homeroom and a few others. I watched him nervously talking to my students. Afterwards, I showed him where our new school building is going to be. He was very excited for us.

Short-Timers

2010-12-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

At the rate I’m going, the new Middle College HS will be completed long before I finish telling the story of how it got there. But maybe I can step up the pace a little though there is a part of me that wants to tell the whole story of the school, everything I can remember from every year—and I know that as I skip ahead, some students will feel left out. But, again, I invite anyone reading this to add their recollections and insights to the story, a story which is anything but mine alone to tell.

I often find myself explaining to students, teachers, and others how it is that our school has changed over the years—and I wonder always whether those changes were for the best.

A few years ago, when our students were getting mugged regularly by students from nearby Henry Clay Middle School and Washington High School I was reminded of how, the year I came to MCHS, some of our students were banished from a daily school bus for picking on students from Washington.

How did we go from being (our students anyway) the bullies to the bullied?

It was a fairly slow process—and perhaps an inevitable one. My wife who worked at the original Middle College HS in New York saw a similar thing happen there—the school’s concept of “at risk” broadening to accommodate teacher and administrator temperament. She saw it happen at another alternative school in New York City. Other alternative educators we know tell similar stories.

It goes something like this:

-A school opens to served students no one else is serving—at risk, undisciplined, violent (I can recall at least half a dozen of our students who had come to MCHS after assaulting a teacher or administrator at another high school).

-The school may have success with some, perhaps even most, of its students, but never all of them and the losses are sometimes heartbreaking. The work is rewarding but extremely challenging and quite draining.

-Less challenging students begin to find their way to the school—either because the school is convenient, because it is small, because they know someone attending the school, or, as in our case, this school with all these dangerous and potentially dangerous students ironically—because of being small and having a really committed staff—becomes a relatively safe school.

-These less challenging students make the more challenging ones seem like even more of a burden.

-Teachers burn out—or leave for other reasons—and the new teachers have no ownership (and may even have no knowledge) of the original mission. Tolerance for the most challenging students continue to erode.

-Policies are enacted to kick students out of the school that was supposed to be a school for students who had been kicked out of somewhere else.

-Intake policies keeping those challenging students from ever entering the school.

In our case much of this was justified by our desire to please LA Southwest College so that they would tolerate our school’s existence. So it is ironic that in 2005 they conspired to obliterate us anyway.

I wonder sometimes whether we could have won the battle to save our school if we’d stuck to our original mission—or if we would even have lasted until 2005. I doubt it.

I suppose one could argue that we hadn’t abandoned our mission at all, that we still did—and still do—serve at risk students. In South L.A., pretty much everyone is at risk. And many of our students still come from difficult situations—single-parent or no parent, foster care, poverty, abuse. They’ve seen and been victimized by violence. But most of the students we see now have never been sucked under by the streets, a testament to their own resilience and perhaps their parents or guardians and some teachers they had before coming to our school. One of those teachers, Mr. Negrete—who a number of our students have credited with helping them survive three years at Bethune Middle School—is a 1992 graduate of ours.

Still, when I think about that original mission of MCHS—to help at risk student with academic potential who might be awakened in a college environment—I cannot help thinking about two of the smartest young men we had and how one ended up a career sailor never attending college and the other is in a federal penitentiary.

My Boucher and I and some of the other old-timers used to argue with our newer colleagues about preserving—or going back to—or original mission and about the identity of our school but maybe we were just being romantic about it. Maybe we were never as good as we thought we were at helping the most at-risk students. We definitely got to some of them and made a difference but we lost a lot of them too. Some came back years later and said that we had helped them even though it hadn’t seemed like it at the time. One guy said that he’d spent three years in prison and that while he was alone in his thoughts during those years, he kept hearing our voices and that it had meant a lot to him.

I don’t begrudge any student who has ever attended our school and I’m honored to teach every class assigned to me—and my job, of course, is much easier now that I am teaching students who are more easily motivated—but sometimes I see those lost boys (and girls) strutting past our school toward Henry Clay MS or Washington HS and I wish someone was doing more for them. And I’m afraid that once our beautiful new building is up, there will be even less chance of us ever helping anyone like that again.

By the fall of 2004, the beginning of the school year we were told would be our school’s last—about half the teachers who had been my mostly crazy and idealistic colleagues when I came to Middle College were gone. Burn-out, career ambition, retirement.

Most were replaced, at least for a while, by what Charlap [my English-teaching colleague] called, “Short-timers.” Longterm sub wouldbe actors and musicians, deadbeats and revolutionaries or just regular teachers unable to put up with the disorder and intenseness of working in a small school with no buffer between us and the students.

Battersbee herself had retired in 2002 and some of us had wondered then what would become of our school. Her replacement, Pam Jackson had seemed, at first, determined to whip us into shape—but seemed almost immediately to appreciate what we’d been doing and became our strongest ally. She organized things and figured out ways to get us in compliance with the education code we’d for so long been ignoring, but she did it in a way that didn’t intrude on our free-wheeling style. She found filled the gaps in our staff with teachers who mostly fit in with all us passionate misfits and brought stability to the faculty. She used to tell us that Middle College was the best place anyone could ever work and most of us agreed with her. She used to say that when she was really old that this was the place she was going to, in her senile delirium, insist she needed to go.

Still, in the fall of 2004 she was philosophical about our impending demise. She had been a student, a teacher, and an administrator in the LA Unified School District for most of her life and understood the political concrete of this bureaucracy—and of the LA Community College District, which had once been part of LAUSD.

She did, however, enroll the largest freshman class in our school’s history—nearly 120 of them (to replace only about 80 graduating seniors)—in the fall of 2004. She told some of us, in private, that if the school districts intended to shut us down, she wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them.

I remember, in mid-September, when she confirmed all the rumors and told all those 9^th graders that they and their parents needed to start thinking about another school for next year. Some of the kids seemed not to be able to get their minds around it—they couldn’t think that far ahead—while others looked visibly scared. Some cursed aloud to express their anger and Ms. Jackson told them they should be angry and that they could direct their anger at her but that they needed to continue to work hard and have a good school year no matter what happened. One girl checked out of the school the next day and enrolled at Washington High School a few blocks away. She returned a day after that, begging Jackson to let her back in. Later, the girl described to me classes in disarray and a lunchtime food fight that had left her and others covered in macaroni and cheese.

A few days after that, a former student from the early 90s approached me with his nephew who his family was desperate to get into our school after he’d been repeatedly beaten, robbed, and threatened at his neighborhood high school. This happened at least once every year and Pam was almost always sympathetic. This year we had to caution the boy and his family that we could not offer him more than one year.

But mostly we all went about our business and the ticking clock became white noise while we all but forgot that we were now all short-timers.

The Spot

2010-11-22T22:46:00.000-08:00

I‘m not sure whether this photo was taken my first day at MCHS but I’m pretty sure it was my first week. A lot of these guys had a rough road but I hear from a few and they still remember all the fun we had inventing a basketball team out of nothing.

A few years after that picture was taken, the backboards and their poles were uprooted and the yard filled up with old equipment and furniture and other trash. We called it the “bone yard,” and occasionally found treasures we could recycle for our classrooms. Years later the refuse was cleared from that spot and a shipping and receiving dock was built there. Now that structure has been demolished to make way for our new school building.

I paid some serious dues my months at MCHS.

Those overpopulated classes were like teaching in a crowded elevator. They wore me out. I knew I wasn’t reaching everyone and it weighed on me. I tried to keep them all busy and on task. I gave out jobs—writing discussion notes on the board, passing out this, collecting that, looking up words, I even assigned one boy to perform sound effects if we read a story aloud. When, toward the end of one short story we were reading, a car exploded, my sound-effects master detonated a firecracker.

My room became a lunchtime hangout, and then I never had a break from the kids—from their noise, their hysteria, and their profane bravado—but it was what I needed, to be immersed in the energy of the kids. Those chaotic lunches provided teaching opportunities. Students encircled my desk and we would talk—and they would listen much better than during class, and I began to believe that I could do more teaching in these informal moments, once the charade of a class no longer bound me or my students. I broke up fights by hurling my body between the slugging students and miraculously never got seriously hurt. It was the thing I did best, and I had a lot of practice—probably because I never reported the fights and thus the kids knew they could do battle in my room with impunity. Sometimes I had to chase after a boy to talk him out of “dropping a dime,” calling “the homies” in order to carry out some vengeance for an offense no one would probably ever remember. I should have reported anyone who threatened to make such a call but I believed so strongly in the underlying goodness of these kids that I just wasn’t willing to give up on anyone, even if it meant risking my safety, my credential, and the lives of a lot of people I had no business risking. Thank God nothing ever happened because of my recklessness.

It almost did. One day a huge fight involving six guys wound up in my room. It had started outside and then moved like a hurricane through several other rooms before bursting through the door of mine as if into a safe house. Before I could intervene a police officer charged in and grabbed one of the combatants. The young man struggled and the cop put him in a choke hold. The students in my class that period, already terrified —though also exhilarated—watched in horror as one of their peers fought against the night stick at his throat. I pleaded with the officer to let go, to ease up, but he seemed, like the student, to be caught in an adrenal trance. I yelled at the young man to stop, to relax, but that seemed impossible. I leaned up to his ear and in an irrational but inspired moment, whispered to him:

“We love you, man. Everybody loves you.”

I hardly knew him, just from those ragged basketball practices. But those simple words from a virtual stranger meant something to him in that moment. He stopped fighting—and the officer stopped trying to kill him.

Battersbee had a zero-tolerance policy about fighting and so all six of those boys were kicked out of the school. One of them died of AIDS a few years later. Another went to jail a few weeks later. The day after that Roger Butcher and I drove to his grandmother’s house to retrieve the basketball uniform we’d issued him for our upcoming season. Someone fired a gun somewhere behind us as we stood on his porch. We didn’t think it was at us. We stood there together and smiled at each other stupidly while the grandmother looked through her linen closet.

The boy who was almost choked to death—I’ll call him Brian Thomas (not his real name)—was exiled to a continuation school but told he could come back at the end of the semester if he’d exhibited good behavior. There was no other safe high school for him. He’d severed his gang affiliation and now Crips and Bloods alike considered him an enemy.

I let him continue to practice with the basketball team, even though he no longer attended our school. It was the only thing that mattered to him. He had been the one who’d organized the team, who’d gotten all the other boys to agree to practice together and had then badgered Mr. Butcher to be their coach. After practice one day, Brian got in another fight and knocked a teammate down. I helped cover that up. I was so impressed with Brian’s courage—to me he was such a magnificent exemplar for having defected from the cycle of gang violence that in one way or another plagued virtually every student at our school. What did a few post-gang punches matter? He didn’t seem to know how else to respond to conflict. Someone had to teach him. I didn’t know how to do that. I just knew I wanted him to have the chance. And if, in the meantime, he killed someone, (he had been convicted of murder when he was eleven), then the blood would be on my hands.

For those of you waiting for me to get through all this history and tell the story of how we saved the school, I’m almost there—I think. But it is important to note that 2005 was not the first time MCHS was nearly closed. That first semester, in the fall of 1992, LA Southwest College informed us that they would be demolishing the old bungalows that housed our school. The rumor spread wildly throughout the school and students bolted from classrooms as if from a bomb scare. Kids were crying in the office. We tried to reassure them but no ne of had much faith in our future. Soon the turmoil of our students’ lives eclipsed the crisis of our school, which was all but forgotten. And then somehow the college forgot to demolish the bungalows—or just changed their minds and forgot to tell us.

Reaching for the Sky

2010-11-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

This morning, the construction crew raised the crane that will help build our new school. Dark clouds enshrouded for awhile but soon the sun burned through and the yellow steel glinted against a blue sky. I remember, in the spring of 2005, how insulted our students felt that our classrooms would be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Soon I’ll be able to look out from my new classroom and see that parking lot and remember when we fought for those crappy old bungalows. I’ll also remember my first days at Middle College. The Friday before my first day, I was invited to the faculty meeting.

When I arrived, teachers were filing into Principal Battersbee’s office for a meeting, walking up the concrete steps the led directly into her third of a dilapidated gray bulgalow. Inside, a thin layer of carpet lay over the plywood floor. Old metal chairs were arranged in a semi-circle. Battersbee introduced me to the rest of the staff as the bright new instructor who was going to finally bring some fresh teaching to our school. Afterwards, no one would speak to me.

I got a key to what would be my classroom. It was a disaster in there. Junk was piled high in the corners, including a shattered old console TV. Graffiti scrawled across one wall. It said, “SHOOT TO KILL.” The word “Gumby” was carved into several desks. At first I didn’t notice the substitute teacher I was replacing, a short bald guy with an angry face. He sat on an uneven table and seemed to blend in against the dirty white wall. He ate a burrito and waited for 3 p.m. so that he could collect the full day’s sub pay. He glared at me with puffy eyes and flicked bits of rice off his bushy mustache, then he got up and chucked a ball of foil through the open doorway and followed me around the room as I tried to get oriented. He told me that he’d been there two weeks and was glad to be leaving.

“These kids are nasty,” he said. “They don’t want to learn.” He said they accused him of racism, then showed me a snapshot of his wedding to a black woman. He said that the teacher before him had been driven from the class by “bad kids.”

I rearranged some frayed paperback books on a dented metal bookshelf. Stenciled on the top in dingy white spray paint was “South Gate HS.” Some of the books had that same insignia stamped on them. Others wore the insignia of Jordan HS, Hope High School, Rollin 60s, East Coast Crips, Main Street Bloods.

Kevin Kennedy came up the crumbling steps and introduced himself to me. He was a stocky man, a cannonball with waves of gray hair and a Santa Claus beard. He’d been a teacher since the early 1970s, started out at Jordan HS in Watts, then Polytechnic in the east San Fernando Valley where he’d been head football coach. Battersbee had referred to him as the assistant principal, though I later found out the title was fake. He was a teacher. Battersbee was exploiting his career ambitions in order to make him do some of her administrative work. He wanted me to know about the school, that things weren’t exactly the way that Battersbee portrayed them. He tried to be polite about it but I could tell he thought she was full of shit and that I was a fool. He said that giving students the freedom to come and go as they pleased had not—at least not yet—compelled those kids to attend class regularly or take academics seioursly. The sub I was replacing—I think his name was Ron—agreed with Kennedy. He said, bitterly, that these kids were out of control and that if you tried to do anything about it they would call you a racist and the principal would back them up.

Kennedy ignored the guy but I didn’t let it go. I said that it was natural for minority children to play the race card, to test your response. I had learned that much as a student teacher. There were effective ways to trump the race card—if, of course, you really weren’t a racist. That shut the guy up. Kennedy said that these kids mostly led lives of chaos and desperation and came to school in search of stability, structure, and discipline.

“What about inspiration?” I asked.

The sub sneered in the background. Kennedy pulled on his beard and gave me the once-over, as if he’d just noticed I was there.

“Yeah, that sure as fucking hell wouldn’t hurt them.”

Then Kennedy said good luck and left me there.

I took home a wad of unmarked student papers I’d found buried amidst a pile of gummed-up old newspapers and McDonalds wrappers and hoped they would inform me about the students I would face on Monday morning, but without knowing the kids their papers just confused me. Still, I assigned point values to each of them. On Monday morning I told everyone that we would be starting fresh. Those who had been slacking would get a second chance. Those who had turned in work would get extra credit. I was generous with points. What the hell. Then I made a big deal about how this would be their only second chance, and hoped I had the fortitude to back that up. I told my students that I thought it was a terrible thing that the school hadn’t provided them with a reliable English teacher.

“We ran them punks out the classroom,” said a boy named Thomas, a tattooed banger with a lazy eye.

I feigned surprise, told them they all seemed too nice to do such a thing.

That got a laugh, and Thomas’s sidekick, Ernest, said that maybe the same thing would happen to me.

“Well, first,” I said, “I have an assignment for you.”

I asked them to describe my predecessors in this class and what they had been doing. A girl named Maria asked if they could cuss and I made a speech about how profanity was a cop out, a symptom of intellectual atrophy.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

I wasn’t sure where this was going but soon they were all writing. Suddenly I was aching with ideas. Tyranny and liberation through language would be our theme. We would read 1984 and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—though God knows how I would get enough copies. I got a little too excited and tried to tell students of my plans.

“You’re a new teacher, aren’t you?” Maria said, and though I tried to deny it they knew, and then they seemed to forget I was in the room. They were polite about it. No blatant disrespect. They stayed in their seats. But I wasn’t their teacher. They couldn’t trust that I was going to stick around and I couldn’t swear I’d be able to.

It was a strange day—strange and frightening, terrible and revelatory. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing but neither, it seemed, did most of the other teachers. That was invigorating. Try anything. Nothing to lose.

My first class had 32 students. My second class had five. Ten minutes later 25 students were added. Each had a fat stack of assignment sheets called a “contract,” the completion of which would compensate for a class flunked in the 9th grade. Pre-algebra, English, earth science. I was supposed to help them when they needed it and teach my English class at the same time. My next class had 47. Some had to sit on top of someone else’s desk. The class after that had 40. I understood why I was the third teacher this semester. I was surviving, but just barely. At one point, during that fourth class (they called it “4th mod”), I couldn’t get more than half the class quiet at once and a boy named Jerome stood up and approached me. His teeth glinted from the center of his dark face. He wore a huge winter coat with blue Dickeys and matching Chucks (Chuck Taylors, canvas Converse All-Stars, gang shoes). He leaned up to me and whispered:
“I don’t like the way these niggas is disrespecting you. You need to get strapped,” he said, meaning I ought to carry a gun. “I could shut these m’fuckas up with mine.”
I told him no thank you. I thought he might be joking but I didn’t want to know so I didn’t ask. I knew I should have, but I didn’t want to get this kid in trouble. He was the only one so far who had really been nice to me.

I didn’t think I could make it through another overcrowded class so I checked the rosters of my remaining classes. Each listed only one student.

But not for long.

During lunch, Kennedy asked me if I knew anything about basketball. He said that Mr. Butcher, a math teacher, was trying to organize a basketball team and needed some help. After lunch, we “practiced” on a weed-cracked cement court behind the “bone yard” where broken mangled equipment and furniture got piled up. Two backboards faced each other on either side of a jaggedly painted sidelines. The basketball hoops had been stolen and vandalized so many times that we had to hang them up for practice and then take them down afterwards. Only a few guys really knew how to play the game. The rest just slammed each other around and woofed and hollered.

Battersbee found me out there and asked how my classes were going. She reminded me that I was supposed to employ those innovative teaching methods we’d spoken about. This seemed to be a threat. I was working without a contract and could be replaced with a few words and a phone call downtown.

“I want you to do some team teaching,” she said. “We’ve got this really exciting class. It combines English and social studies and foreign language and even some science…. What’s that called archeology or anthropology? The study of bones and culture. It’s called Cultural Heritage class and it’s really going to be great.”

Her voice was as smooth as her polished fingernails. (It turned out that Battersbee herself was supposed to team teach this class but was having second thoughts). She gave me a room number and said, “You’ll be teaching with our foreign language teacher, Ms. Hariton. She’s one of our really dedicated teachers. She’s doing some very special things – especially with some of our Latino students.” She pronounced “Latino” with a Spanish accent.

The basketball hoops took a while to unhinge, so I ended up late to my team teaching assignment. I was filthy and sunburnt, thirsty and out of breath from running there. The door of the bungalow was open and it was dark inside. Coming in from the bright sun I could not, at first, see anything. The collective voices, loud and boisterous and combative surrounded me like a party of ghosts. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw kids sitting in clusters, talking, dealing cards and slamming dominoes, arguing and giggling and smooching. I was nearly hit by a shopping cart with two students hanging from it. Then a pair of rolling office chairs in what seemed to be a demolition derby. There must have been over forty kids in the darkness and I saw no sign of a teacher anywhere.

At the far end of the room was a small television showing something videotaped off PBS: wavy lines, and twisted images of desert landscapes. Loud distortion blurted out in sour spurts. It was as if the teacher – if there really was a teacher in this room – had, rather than try to quiet students, tried to maintain their attention by turning up the volume knob.

There actually was a teacher in the room. A squat woman with narrow shoulders and a big face and huge hair hunched over a small desk in a corner of the room.. A tiny girl sat next to her weeping. The teacher, Ms. Hariton, held the girls hand and tried to console her.

“Maybe you can get them to pay attention,” she said, seeing me. “I’m trying to help Rosa. Her boyfriend was killed by the Florence gang last night. He’s a member of South Los and they’re at war.” She seemed very proud to know all this. “Isn’t that terrible?”

I made eye contact with the poor girl to let her know I sympathized, and tried to imagine what I might do to get everyone to pay attention to those strangled images and strange noises springing from the television – and why anyone would want to pay attention to it. What I really wanted to do was get the hell out of that cave of madness. I thought I’d get fired if I didn’t stay there and “team teach,” whatever that meant, but I was at a complete loss and so instead, I proposed to
Ms. Hariton that we split up the class.

“Oh,” she said and I thought I heard her sneering a little and muttering something about “Mr. Innovative Teacher.” She was probably relieved to be able to get rid of half the kids – and to be able to choose which half. She opened her roll book and started to make a list of the students I would take. At the top of the list was my old friend, Jerome Smith, the boy who had, that morning, offered to brandish a gun in order to assist me with my classroom management. No one ever said anything to me about my refusal to team teach. Nor about anything I did or did not do in my classroom. I could have been teaching straight out of the Communist Manifesto or the Anarchist’s Cookbook. I did, in fact, probably violate some sections of the education code and the school district’s rules that first semester, trying to excite my students about reading and writing. No adults ever visited my classroom. It was just me and the students, and as long as I kept them all confined to the classroom and no one got seriously injured and no one complained about me, it was assumed that I was doing a good job.

All Day Job Interview

2010-11-07T22:17:00.000-08:00

It’s been awhile since my last installment of this story—at this rate, our new building will be up and running by the time I finish. It’s been a hectic fall semester. Hectic but great. I love teaching and love MCHS more than ever. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened if things had turned out differently back in 2005.

But getting back to the old days....

By its third year (fall 1991), LA Southwest Middle College HS increased to 250 students and ten teachers. With some kids talking about applying to UCLA and USC, Battersbee hired a foreign language teacher to help them meet the requirements of those schools. That led to contention among teachers about the purpose of the school—whether the priority ought to be those few kids who excelled academically and might qualify for a university directly out of high school or the large number of students still making the baby steps toward succeeding at community college. Was it possible do both and serve everyone equally? And what ought to be the primary role of the teachers? Some teachers would stop instruction to counsel a student in a crisis. Others believed that the stability and discipline of a well-taught class was the best thing a teacher could offer a student whose father had been deported over the weekend, whose brother had been murdered, whose mother was in jail.

Don Johnson—an unemployed actor, not the one from Miami Vice—taught English and drama that year and managed to organize a production of Romeo & Juliet. His colleagues marveled as he and thirty kids wrestled with Elizabethan English and costumes, interjecting hip-hop, working on inspiration and emotion and faith. As I heard it, Romeo was a no-show the day of the performance—arrested or something—but they did the play anyway, as best they could. Don Johnson was a hero, but the ordeal seemed to have taken its toll on him. At a drama fund-raiser that spring, he handed a girl a can of lighter fluid and told her to use it on a gas barbecue. It blew up and set her on fire. That led to the school’s first lawsuit. LA Southwest Middle College High School had come of age.

Soon after that came the fires of LA’s 1992 uprising. Some of the teachers barely survived their drives home that afternoon. Most of the students, by their own admissions later, participated in the widespread looting. When the schools reopened, they sported their new clothes. One boy spent spent five days helping protect his uncle’s grocery store with automatic weapons on the rooftop. Teachers tried to use what happened as a springboard for learning – about the justice system, about race in America and the legacy of segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles, about the psychology of a mob and the strange alliances between revolutionaries and opportunists, between activists and gang bangers.

______________________________

I was doing the same thing—trying to help make it all make sense to my students at Westchester HS where I was student teaching that spring. Though the school was in Playa Del Rey, many of the students lived in South Central. Some appreciated having me try to help them see it all in a context. Others quickly got sick of talking about it. “Can we all just get along?” they’d say, mocking the tearful words of Rodney King.

After just one semester at Westchester I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be a teacher anymore. I wasn’t very good at it and so many of the students seemed so disengaged. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

When I received my credential in June, I sent out resumes to some of the schools that weren’t too far from my house. The school district had a big budget shortfall. They had been terminating PE and art teachers and now instituted a hiring freeze. No one in district personnel could explain to me what exactly that meant for a new teacher seeking employment, but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t really care, though. I was in no hurry to get a job in this profession. I was living off the option money of one of my novels, hoping Columbia Pictures would make the damn movie and buy my next novel and hire me to write the screenplay so that I wouldn’t have time for teaching. August came and went. So did the first weeks of school. Then came a call—not from my agent. Someone named Natalie Battersbee wanted to interview me for an English position at a place called Middle College High School. I almost said no. I had substituted in middle schools the year before and had promised myself never to work in one. But no, this was a high school. It was the third week of the semester and they were still looking for a teacher.

Battersbee—Ms. B., as she was known—interviewed me first thing in the morning in her office. It was a hub of activity, full of students who’d been kicked out of class or were having issues of one kind or another. She had me sit in a creaky chair while she scolded and counseled and eventually it seemed she forgot I was there. The interview lasted from 8am until 4pm. With all the interruptions—or maybe I was the interruption—Natalie would keep repeating the same questions to which I’d repeat my answers. At one point, she left me alone in her office for an hour. Perhaps she wanted me to get a feel for the place.

I fell in love with it. I was starving but didn’t want to leave to get lunch. Towards the end of the day her room filled up with students. Leadership class. It impressed me that a principal would be teaching a class. That might not have been such a novel idea, but to me it was revolutionary. She introduced me to the students in that class and had them interview me. I don’t think any of it was planned. She told me, in front of her students, that Middle College HS was supposed to be a place for innovative teaching, breaking down the barriers of traditional education. She asked students if they thought any of that was going on at their school, and they all seemed confused and a little embarrassed. She asked me if I knew how to break down barriers, etc. I had gotten my BA from Antioch University, and had studied with a bunch of radical educators. I knew how to talk progressive pedagogy—even if I still barely knew what to do with an actual classroom full of students. Authentic learning, project-oriented, interdisciplinary blah blah blah…. Battersbee got all excited. A girl named Cinderella Morales asked me if that meant I would give a lot of homework.

School let out and Battersbee had me follow her around as she policed the area for fights and whatnot. She caught two boys shooting craps, confiscated the dice, introduced me to them and let each ask me a question.

“Are you a racist?” was the first question.

“Can I have my dice back?” was the second.

Back in her office Battersbee telephoned district personnel to say that she was hiring me. I heard her arguing with someone about the fact that I wasn’t African American or Latino. Natalie told the person in personnel that minority children needed the best teacher, not the one that looked most like them. She hung up the phone and said that she could only hire me as a long-term substitute; she could not offer a white boy a contract. She didn’t use that term but I understood. She had too many white teachers and there was some rule about that. She told me to return on Friday afternoon, then start work on Monday.

More Dirt Piles

2010-08-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

The story of LA Southwest Middle College HS is literally covered in dirt--

The dirty buildings and classrooms of the early 1990s, the construction dirt that coated us for years while LA Southwest College was built up and we stayed in those dirty buildings, the pile of dirt and rubble to which our buildings were eventually reduced, the semester we spent on the 98th Street defunct elementary school which was coated with a layer of grime--probably from all the jet exhaust from the planes that landed over the campus. Then the piles that surrounded our new campus next to the 105 Freeway--those mountains of dirt that LAUSD officials assured us was, "Clean dirt."

And now, at last, our own mountains of dirt that are the beginnings of our new school building.

During the year of uncertainty--the 2004-05 school year, the year we all had to fight to keep Middle College open--some of us old-timers, especially Mr. Hajjar and Mr. Boucher, kept telling everyone about the building plans for our school, the ones the college had shown our principal and she had shown us back in the late 1990s. I remember Natalie Battersbee sitting behind her desk all smiles on a Friday afternoon faculty meeting--the kind during which we often argued and sometimes slept. Natalie, who had been married to an architect, rolled out those plans and showed them to us as if she'd drawn them. She asked us for suggestions, as if anyone would have listened to us.

In June of that year, as I recall, LASC made its annual change in leadership and the new president apparently dropped those plans.

Dr. Levy, who eventually presided over the attempted eviction of our high school from the LASC campus, said she knew nothing of any plans. She probably didn't. But that wasn't the point. What we were yelling about was that if there had been space for us six or seven years before, why not now?

The answer, we were told, was the discovery of more earthquake faults.

Now, five years later, somehow, earthquake faults and all, they found us a spot.

Guess where those old plans were going to put us?

Same place.

2010-07-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite old LA Southwest photos (scanned from our 1996 yearbook) and epitomizes how easy it was in those years to teach students what irony was.

That and the "Quiet Zone," which was--of course--the noisiest part of the campus.

It was the fall of 1992 that the LA Southwest administration discovered that more than half of the Cox Building (the part in which most of its classrooms were houses) sat directly over an earthquake fault. It was immediately condemned and the college had to scramble to create what they called "the south campus" on what is now the baseball field.

I started at Middle College HS that semester. It was, for me, a crazy and exciting time. The school was like some frontier on the wild west of education--these dilapidated shacks with no bells, this school with virtually no external order or discipline, just these mobs of students moving from room to room and teachers, like me, trying to perform a little magic and make them pay attention to something academic and learn something.

The LA Riot had happened just a few months before and the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video tape were being tried again on civil rights violations. My students were certain they would be found innocent again there would be another riot. I asked them what would happen if the officers were found guilty and a girl said, "Then the white people gonna riot."

I became a basketball coach--my first day, actually--when Mr. Kennedy asked me to go out on the black top and help math teacher Roger Butcher who had agreed to help put a team together.

We practiced on the weed-cracked cement court behind the "bone yard" where broken, mangled equipment and furniture got piled up. Two backboards faced each other on either side of a jaggedly painted sideline. The basketball hoops had been stolen or vandalized so many times that we had to hang them up for practice and then take them down afterwards. Only a few guys really knew how to play the game. The rest just slammed each other around a woofed and hollered.

Somehow, while the college was being deconstructed, Roger and I were building a basketball team--and all of us tried to build a school.

At best we had a tenuous hold on many of our students. Never knew when one would just stop coming--incarceration, violence, family turmoil, a full-time job to mitigate financial catastrophe. We taught them always aware that it might be their last lesson.

One afternoon, a rumor spread that the college was going to tear down our bungalows and close our school. Students panicked. Many of them talked about dropping out of school that day. We told them not to worry and meanwhile we worried. Perhaps the college had decided that as long as the demo crews were coming to tear down the Cox building, they might as well raze these 1967 temporary plywood shacks.

We were the only real stability in the lives of so many of these students.

Not anymore.

Unwanted From the Start

2010-03-29T23:04:00.000-07:00

In the fall of 1989, Los Angeles Middle College High School opened up with 67 sophomores, four teachers and a principal. Almost immediately, this new high school was a source of contention on the LA Southwest College campus. Many of the students had dropped out or been kicked out of other high schools.

Without any external discipline, many of these “at-risk” teenagers became less rebellious. Some even got serious about their education. But most of them, at least initially, seized the opportunity to run amuck—they tagged-up the college, blazed in stairwells and bathrooms, and copulated in remote (and not-so-remote) parts of the campus.

Some members of the LASC faculty circulated a petition to have the high school removed.

College President Laikin rejected the idea but did ask the principal, Dr. Douroux, to modify their student “selection” process for the next year.

Douroux refused. As long as she was principal she would follow the stated mission of Middle College High School and take in students without prejudice or condition. Marilyn Douroux was a part time boxing promoter who, during that first year, brought former heavyweight champion Archie Moore to the school to give boxing clinics to the students and perhaps give them a structure and a discipline into which they could channel their anger and impulsiveness. There were plenty of fights that first semester – with and without Archie Moore. Fists flew, guns were drawn; sometimes in plain sight. Students went to jail and never returned. Others were shot, got patched up, and did return. Others vanished for reasons known and unknown.

Amidst all this tumult, many kids found a home at Middle College HS. They enrolled in and attended college classes and earned passing grades.

But the college administration remained wary. President Laikin threatened to close the school if Douroux didn’t promise to screen incoming students for the next school year.

Douroux believed he was bluffing. With $150,000 of annual state grant money behind them, Middle College HS was—she believed—untouchable. The money was administered through Southwest College, which took half off the top to pay the salary of a “liaison”—an administrator working with the high school. To Marilyn Douroux that was embezzlement of funds intended for “underserved children of color.” She demanded that all the money be used directly for materials, field trips, equipment. She threatened to go to the newspapers if they did not immediately comply.

In January 1990, at the request of the LA Southwest College administration, Marilyn Douroux was reassigned to another school.

Her replacement was Natalie Battersbee, the principal from Duke Ellington Continuation School. Natalie had been the first choice to be principal at Middle College High School. She’d been recruited for the job two years earlier, had assembled a team and visited the original Middle College HS in New York. Then, mysteriously, she had been snubbed in favor or Douroux. Now, without explanation or apology, Bettersbee was back in as Middle College principal.

The Right Idea

2010-03-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

By the late 1980s the original Middle College in New York had become a model of alternative education with graduation rates 50% higher than the rest of the city schools, and many of their graduates going on to higher education. Grant money poured into the school, including $276,000, from the Ford Foundation to replicatethe school across the five boroughs of New York and in other American cities.

The first of these replications were at community colleges in Chicago, Memphis, Richmond, California and at Los Angeles Southwest Community College. LASC was celebrating its twentieth year but was also recovering from its greatest crisis. By the mid-1980s, this college, which had become a cultural center of South Central Los Angeles—with well-respected programs in nursing and administration of justice, an award-winning newspaper, a television studio, a child development center that offered daycare to single parents pursuing an education, and an increasing rate of students successfully transferring to four year universities—had begun to disintegrate. State budget cuts, administrative instability, and the ravages of the crack cocaine epidemic had reduced the school’s enrollment from 8,000 to fewer than 3,000. The campus had fallen into disrepair. Graffiti covered walls. Weeds over-ran the lawns. Some of the maintenance workers were selling crack out of their tool boxes. In 1985 California’s Little Hoover Commission recommended closing the campus. College President Walter McIntosh promptly resigned. The rest of the administration and the faculty were in disarray.

Dr. Thomas Laikin was hired as “acting president.” The term “interim” was not used because it wasn’t clear how many months, weeks, or even days the college would remain open. Students and teachers were jumping as fast as they could from the sinking ship. Laikin fired administrators, replaced the entire maintenance staff and anyone from any other department who was suspected of dealing drugs on the campus. He organized his staff to yank all the weeds from around campus and put on gloves and overalls himself and somehow, together, they began to dig the college out of its miserable state. From the beginning, according to Pat Lewis and others who knew him, Dr. Laikin seemed to have a mission much greater than the daily struggle to keep this college alive. He was determined, Lewis recalls, to do something about the crisis of schools, at all levels, in South Central. His was not only an ethical position but also the most logical one, since the success of a community college is inextricably linked to the quality of the high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools in the community.

The high schools feeding Southwest were a disaster. Dropout rates were near 60%, and nearly everyone who did graduate and attended LASC needed remedial English and mathematics. When, at an education conference, Laikin heard a presentation by Janet Lieberman about Middle College High School replication, he decided, immediately, that Southwest should have one.

Big Plans

2010-02-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

Here is a pic of what our new building is supposed to look like (don't ask me who all those people are) and then a shot of what it looks like now.

What I keep wondering, though, is what is going to happen to our school when we get this facility. Will it still be ours? Or are we just going to become someone's little showpiece?

We just finished our three-year accreditation visit and received a pretty favorable report--having demonstrated that we had addressed all of our "areas of improvement."

But I wonder--how many students have we failed in the last three years?
How many have we kicked out because they annoyed us and we just didn't have the ability to help them?
How many did we just not challenge enough?
More than I think we would like to consider or admit to an accreditation committee.

Middle College HS was supposed to be a school for at-risk students who had academic potential but that mission is a dubious one.

Don't all students have academic potential?
Isn't it just a matter of having the time and resources, the skill and patience to teach them all?

I just hope that when this new building opens we haven't forgotten that.

Big Losses and Big Gains

2010-02-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

Another tough playoff loss for the MCHS Cougars boys basketball team. We blew a six point halftime lead and a chance to retake the lead with 2:00 minutes to go in the game. A sad ending to what was a good season—and maybe could have been a great season.

After the game I had a talk with the coach, AD, and principal from the charter school we had just played—mostly about how broke they are and how difficult it is to afford athletics at a small charter school, and I was reminded of what it was like for us trying to have sports teams in the early days. Not that much has changed since then—the finances are still impossible—but now I’m kind of used to it. We were never supposed to have interscholastic athletics. It wasn’t in the original school plan and money was never budgeted for it. But the students wanted it. They demanded it.

There are now dozens of small charter high schools in L.A.—many of them have sports teams because their student demanded it—and, in a way, every one of these small learning communities is a direct descendent of Middle College High School, the original: New York City (the borough of Queens, Long Island City, to be exact), 1974.

It was an educational revolution for it’s time. Janet Leiberman, a professor at LaGuardia College envisioned what she believed might be a solution to the overwhelming problem of delinquency in the New York City schools. “Students at-risk” was the new term for an old problem. The dropout rate in the city was near 40%. Drugs were rampant. So were violence and apathy.

My wife and I were a high school student in New York at that time and we remember—most kids were just hanging out. School was where kids went to buy drugs, get high or get drunk, flirt with each other, and mess around. Very few teachers or students were engaged in anything educational. Everyone I knew couldn’t wait to get out of that place.

Most of the city’s public schools were warehouses, containment centers trying to keep adolescents off the streets between 8am and 3pm. Pedagogy was as dull as the flat gray walls of these places with most so-called teaching delivered on faded mimeographs. Those teachers who did take an interest in their students or even tried to engage them in some kind of meaningful learning were heroes.

The learning disabled often wound up as undiagnosed outcasts. Some of the brightest students went unnoticed or themselves became outcasts, trouble-makers screaming for a way out of the mind-numbing tedium of rote learning, relentless uniformity and standardization.

It was these students – “at-risk” with high potential, smart and bored, mostly working class and poor, and, in some cases, emotionally and socially troubled, who ought to have been preparing for college but instead were being disillusioned by school – who most concerned Janet Lieberman. Her solution, based upon a finding by the Carnegie Foundation:

- Remove these kids from those large secondary institutions where, according to Lieberman, “…restriction and frustration [from the multitude of rules] resulted in aggression.”

- Put them on a college campus because, according to Lieberman: “Fifteen year olds have more in common with twenty year olds than with twelve year olds.” It was her theory that high school students on a college campus would “subtly modify their behavior to be accepted by the college population.”

- Get them thinking about going to college. In fact, Middle College High School was conceived as spanning the high school sophomore year to the college sophomore year, and students could complete that goal at their own pace.

- Help teenagers realize that they belong in college by letting them take college classes while they are in high school; have them work toward a diploma and a degree at the same time. Provide them with tutoring and other supports so that they are likely to succeed in those college classes.

- And put together a high school program on that college campus that is engaging, with innovative pedagogy, imaginative curriculum delivered by teachers who really give a damn. Include an intensive counseling component and an internship program to help students value their education and to connect their learning with the world around them and, hopefully, with their career goals.

With $95,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and $48,000 from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Janet Lieberman and LaGuardia College President Joseph Shenker brought their first high school cohort of 125 tenth graders to LaGuardia in the fall of 1974.

High school classes were taught in college classrooms by what Lieberman referred to as “teacher-counselors,” subject specialists who took a strong guidance (and in some cases parental) role with a specific group of students. Teachers created interdisciplinary courses. They sought student input and feedback and encouraged students to be on a first name basis with them.

When students did not meet academic expectations, they were given non-credit – rather than the demoralizing F – and allowed to complete the requirements of the class at their own pace.

Students were counseled about their personal struggles and about their educational and professional futures, and given interest-based internships in the public and private sectors throughout the city.

Middle College High School was a place in which these lost souls could find themselves, in which they could ask and answer essential questions about who they were and where they fit in this crazy world.

History Part TWO: Visionaries and Lunatics

2010-02-14T00:17:00.000-08:00

It was just a little like old times this week at MCHS with Mr. Kennedy, our old assistant principal back as acting principal while current principal Moats was out on family leave. Kennedy left MCHS in 2002 to become an AP at Narbonne, then principal at Gardena High School. Now he works at the local district office. He was one of the founding faculty of our school, the only one still there three years later when I was hired. He was pretty laid back this week. I guess after a few years in charge of Gardena, there isn’t much that happens at our little school that is going to stress him out too much. The funny thing is that after all his big school administrative experiences, he still gets really excited talking about the nuts and bolts of effective teaching. It’s still his passion.

Kind of like the original teachers at LA Southwest College when they opened up in 1967—crusaders from other LA community colleges who had voluntarily transferred to the new school; visionaries determined to bring enlightenment to this neglected part of the city.

Thirteen “bungalows” were been anchored to the soft earth while asphalt was spread above water pipes and electric lines—and on September 10^th of 1967 Los Angeles Southwest College had its first day of classes. It looked more like a trailer park than a school. The bookstore resembled a small town railroad station, the library an army barracks. At night, the grim lamp posts and high surrounding fences suggested an internment camp. Five hundred students attended 49 classes – from Intro Accounting to General Zoology. Early rains made mud of the still untarred ground through which students had to wade. But spirits were neither dampened nor muddied.

“It was very exciting. Exciting and a little bit crazy,” recalls Pat Lewis, one of the original students at Southwest (now one of the professors there). “We were the first ASO [Associated Student Organization]; we put on the first play production, the first everything. We were helping create that school and that made us feel like we could reinvent the rest of the world!”

She remembers how her teachers encouraged everyone to do great things. “We read and performed Shakespeare inside those bungalows. We learned about Socrates and Plato and about our own history. The black professors were the only African Americans I’d ever met with post graduate degrees. I didn’t even know a black person could get a Ph.D.”

By the spring of 1968 the college had 20 cement and plywood “bungalows” to go along with the 13 wooden trailers. Enrollment had swelled to 1200, and the class offerings increased to more than 160, but the overall condition of the place did not change, and by the fall of 1968 many students were disenchanted.

They took offense to the dirt and mud trails that connected classrooms, and to the bleak functionality of the place. There was no grass anywhere; no plants, no trees, no benches or statues. The student lounge had been crammed with wobbly wooden chairs, the “cafeteria” trailer offered a pitiful assortment of non-nutritious food. Campus police, some students believed, were racist and abusive. Student activists wanted them gone. They wanted a voice in the hiring of teachers and other staff to ensure “sensitivity to the needs of Black students” and a say in the selection of classes in the schedule as well as the books in the library.

They wanted their education to be about more than job training. They demanded a Black Studies program and wanted the college named after an African American. The college president, John Grasham, a bespectacled white man with slick hair and tight features, was non-responsive. Students walked out of classes. Others expressed their frustration in class, sometimes causing teachers to walk out. The activists vandalized classrooms; they threw library books on the floor, broke the windows of an administration trailer, hanged an administrator in effigy, and made bomb threats.

The student revolts divided the faculty and administration. The president of the college resigned. His replacement, John Nicklin, closed the school for several days. Faculty members transferred. So did students, some of the brightest among them.

A year later, in the fall of 1969, LASC added eight more concrete temporaries and its first African American college president, Leadie M. Clark. She lasted for two years. The turnover for other administrative positions was equally high. Office space was cramped or non-existent. With nearly 120 faculty members – 64 of them fulltime – many professors worked out of their cars.

By 1973 the enrollment reached 4000 with 400 sections of mostly university transferable classes. By then there were 48 trailers and a football field encircled by a track. LA Southwest not only fielded football and track & field teams, but also competed at baseball and basketball—even though they had to use high school and park facilities for those sports. Plans for permanent buildings included a library and a theater, lecture halls and science labs.

Green lawns colored the campus along with the increasingly eclectic mix of students. The Chosen Few, an African American biker gang in fresh leather jackets and shiny chrome Harley Davidsons would sometimes roll up en mass—even if just one member was on his way to a speech class or football practice. Or the glinting metallic-detailed low-riders of the Compton Camaro club would fill the parking lots. Card games and domino tournaments crowded picnic tables while Black separatists and other radicals, with no official sanction, recruited and organized students in protest of the LAPD and the Vietnam War. Many veterans of that war enrolled in classes—some for the sole purpose of collecting GI Bill cash, others sincerely trying to restart their lives.

“You could get about six-hundred a month,” recalls Moses Robinson, who attended Southwest just after arriving home from the jungles of Vietnam. “I was trying to get my degree, do something, but that place was crawling with vets who never went to class. They’d go the first day and maybe the last. They must have been bribing those professors. You weren’t supposed to get your money unless you attended class and got a grade.”

Moses had applied for the LAPD Academy, taking classes at Southwest while he awaited acceptance. Then, suddenly, he became the single parent of six children and deferred his career plans, taking a job with the city parks department.

Two Riots and a Revolution: An Institutional Genealogy of Our School (PART ONE)

2010-02-08T22:43:00.000-08:00

Of course it all began on a hot August 11 evening in 1965 when a seemingly “routine” traffic stop at 116^th Street and Avalon escalated into a confrontation between police officers and African American residents made angry by years of harassment, brutality, segregation, unemployment, isolation, and poverty. The ensuing violence came to be known as the Watts Riot.

By the third day of looting and burning, nearly fourteen-thousand National Guardsmen occupied the south central sector of the city. They rolled up and down the long flat boulevards, set up checkpoints and enforced a strict curfew. Police Chief William Parker blamed “outside agitators” and later, when the size of the insurrection disproved that claim, said:

“They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

Central Avenue, once a cultural center of jazz clubs, dance halls and theaters, was reduced to ashes. Thirty-four people died and more than 800 were injured. Arrests, depending on who you ask, ranged from three to four thousand. Property damage estimates were between twenty-seven and thirty-five million dollars.

In the political aftermath, an angry community was promised jobs and other opportunities for economic and geographic mobility, a more reasonable police force, and better schools. One promise made good on was a community college in South Central Los Angeles. It was an idea that had been around since 1950, promoted by community residents led by Odessa Cox, activist, lifelong learner (through the city’s community college system), and owner of the Utopia Dry Cleaners -- which was thirteen miles south of the nearest city college.

For years, Cox and other residents of Watts had to ride the Red Car trolley downtown, and then catch a bus west to Vermont Avenue (a two hour trip one way) in order to attend Los Angeles City College. The city government and school district had never cared about any of that, but now, after the conflagrations of August, the LA Unified School District (which then oversaw the community colleges, referring to them as grades 13 and 14) found a piece of land in the Athens Park section of South Central. The land was just a few blocks from where, during the third day of the 1965 insurrection, young men who had looted gun stores brandished their new arsenals and threatened to “invade white neighborhoods.”

On July 11^th of 1967, in the pre-dawn hours, a convoy of trucks hitched a pair of gray wooden trailers, (cast-offs from LA’s oldest city college campus), and towed them down Vermont Avenue, then dumped them onto a depleted oil field that had been sucked dry by Union Oil. 14.2 acres of the field had been sold to LAUSD for a few hundred thousand dollars. The property bordered South Western Avenue to the west and Frances X. Cabrini Church to the east. To the north was Imperial Highway—named for the Imperial Wooly Mammoths to which the neighborhood had once belonged—and to the south were the tracks of a Union Pacific freight line. The land itself, with its dusty slopes, had been known as Devil’s Dip, where boys tried to defy gravity on makeshift dirt bikes and homemade motorcycles, and where, quite possibly, gang bangers had buried the murdered corpses of enemies.

Nearby residents who were awakened by the loud rumble of trucks and the groaning of their wheels could witness a college crawling into the ghetto. It was going to be their college. It would belong to Odessa Cox and everyone who had stood with her. Cox was among the twenty-five people standing in the darkness of this unfolding dream as those first buildings arrived at what would be called South Central College, then, later, Los Angeles Southwest College.

Laying the Foundation

2010-02-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

I want to be clear about this—

The college president who tried to kick our school off the LA Southwest Campus is no longer the president of Southwest College and the current college president, Dr. Jack E. Daniels, had nothing to do with that policy. Daniels, in fact, is part of the reason we are getting a new building—for which, as you can see from this photo, the tractors are laying the foundation .

Let me also make clear that the manager of plant facilities, the man responsible for the awful conditions of our classrooms in the fall of 2004, is also, thank God, no longer an employee of LA Southwest. The current facilities manager, Randy Craig, is not only extremely competent and professional but a really decent guy.

Institutions and their problems may be larger than individuals—but sometimes people can make a world of difference.

The LAUSD superintendent who was willing to let our school close—either out of indifference or ignorance—retired from that post not long after and his replacement has since resigned. The current superintendent, Ramon Cortinez, has much larger problems to confront right now than the fate of a school with 350 students. Still, when I see those tractors and bulldozers out there every day making way for our new building, I’m glad he’s our superintendent.

I did not imagine any of this would be possible back in September of 2004 when we were like the citizens of an abandoned city.

By the end of that first week, on a sweltering Friday afternoon, my classroom was been overrun by ants.

I emptied a can of Raid in there, closed the door, and met students outside, escorting them to the nearby covered eating area. Plastic cutlery and Styrofoam plates still littered the blue plastic bird-shitted picnic tables where our students were served their federally funded lunch each day.

This was my journalism class. I handed out a questionnaire for them to answer about where they got their news and why newspapers are so important to us. Students complained about having to “do work” on the first day of class and having to do work on Friday afternoon and having to do anything outside, but eventually they were all writing something in their notebooks—or pretending to. Their answers were predictable—and so, probably, were my responses to them. I told everyone how fortunate they were to be in this class and how it made them reporters on our school’s weekly newspaper. There was mild enthusiasm, then the usual questions about how they would be graded. Some students said they didn’t want to be reporters. They hadn’t chosen to be in this class, had no interest in journalism, and demanded to be told the minimum requirements to earn a B or C.

I used to get tired of this argument and think it would be better to reserve the school paper for those with an interest and aptitude. I’d imagine what this publication could become in the hands of our school’s best writers and most active citizens. But in our school, (and perhaps in most, if not all, urban high schools), elective classes do not exist so that students can explore their interests. They exist as a safety net in the schedule, the place where students without a class that period can be deposited.

As usual, my new class told me that last year’s newspaper was boring, what the school needed was a gossip paper—after all, rumors are way more interesting than well-investigated news. I tried to convince them otherwise. Some girls were taking making corn-rows on the head of a boy named Will. I normally don’t allow hair treatments during my classroom rules were a bit difficult to fully enforce without a classroom.

I told the class how democracy requires informed citizens, then told them to brainstorm some ideas for school newspaper reporting.

I’d always wanted the school paper to be written by students for students – and to that end I had always allowed them to devote a certain amount to the perpetuation of their materialistic mythologies, their self-imposed poverty of endless desires – but I always insisted that they devote some time to writing about the kind of issues I found important.

The first year we had a school paper one student got an exclusive interview with her godfather, Dameon Williams, the man accused of the videotaped beating of truck driver Reginald Denny during the initial moments of the 1992 LA Riot. On another occasion, student reporters uncovered fraud committed by a former principal. I told these kids about all that but they all seemed quite unimpressed.

Behind us, a flock of sea gulls and one courageous pigeon were fighting over one of the bright red boxes the college bookstore gave away, one per customer. There didn’t seem to be anything eatable inside of it but they still were going at it, tearing at a bar of soap, ripping open a tube of toothpaste. Two gulls had a condom and stretched it until it snapped. Then they all flew away.

Class was nearly over. I was ready to walk straight to my car, which sat patiently in the parking lot just yards away, and escape into a pleasant family afternoon: a bicycle ride to the beach, a barbecue in the backyard.

The corn-rows were finished. They shined in the afternoon sun. Those two girls had done a really magnificent job, a great accomplishment – much greater, I was afraid, than anything I had taught these kids today. The boy with the rows sat up straight and seemed to be checking them on his pavement shadow. “Hey,” he said, “I got something to put up in your newspaper, Strauss….”

My mind was on the beachfront bicycle path and I almost didn’t hear him say:

“Man, according to a unnamed source named… [and he dropped the names of two of my colleagues] … they say the college bout to close up our school and blow up these buildings.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Class was over but without a bell announcing it, I was trapped. They all watched me and then someone asked if it was true. I supposed that a denial was my professional obligation. I supposed I ought to have done it for the sake of the kids. Protect them from the truth. But I couldn’t do it. Not after everything I’d just told them about the perils of ignorance. So I said it:

“Yes, it’s true – I mean, it’s a possibility, a strong one – that this will be our last year.” A lump formed in my throat and I couldn’t look at the students now. I glanced, instead, at the mangled storm gutters hanging off the cracked awning just above us. I remembered when those awning cracks were hairline and when those storm gutters could still hold water. Lately, during a heavy rain, the perimeter of this place was like a car wash. What a piece of shit this place was, pretty much everything about it, but it was our piece of shit. We’d made it ours in so many ways, my colleagues and I and our students, over the years, had made this a decent school.

“We’re getting punked,” I told my students. “Punked out of our school, your school. And what did you do to deserve that? Did you join a gang? Did you start a race riot? Did you smoke crack?” To that question, some kids pointed at each other, but mostly they just listened. “No,” I said. “You came to school, you went to class, you did your homework—most of you, most of the time— maybe with a kick in the ass first, but you did it. There are a hundred other schools that should be closed before this one, a thousand.” I was out of control and might have kept going but the boy with the fresh corn-rows raised his hand and asked:

“Do I get extra credit for telling everybody?”

“Yeah, sure, maybe.”

“Write it down, Strauss. Write my extra credit in your roll book.”

“I’ll write it down when you write it down—an article about it. Maybe we’ll have our first edition of the paper by next week. Who are you going to interview for this story?”

Someone said he would interview our principal, Ms. Jackson. Someone else offered to talk to our U.S. history teacher because he knew everything about everything. Someone even said she would try to get a statement from the mean old college president. I was proud of them. They had suddenly made such progress!

“Ain’t gonna do nothing anyway,” someone said. “Writing about it’s not gonna keep us open. It ain’t like the mayor or the governor or the school district people read our newspaper. So can we just do a newspaper about gossip? I mean, if they gonna close the school anyway, what difference does it make?”

An incredible stench wafted towards us. It was no mystery; we were directly downwind from the Hyperion Water Treatment plant, to which every toilet in LA County flushed. A few of the boys accused each other of being the source of the odor but no one thought that was very funny.

“I sure ain’t gonna miss that smell,” a girl said, and suddenly the boy next to her—who must have not been paying attention for the past ten minutes— picked his head up and said, with dismay:

“Are they closing our school?”

One of his friends leaned over and punched him and told him he was stupid.

“Hey!” I said, stepping between them. But the boy hadn’t even seemed to notice his friend’s punch. He just sat there, stunned and said:

“Where I’m gonna go?”

And then everyone sat there, trying to figure out their futures.

The other classes had all ended and students disgorged, successively, from all the rooms—the ones with AC or windows – but my students still sat where they were, watching, a little dumbfounded, as all their peers scattered toward the streets of the city.

Ten reasons I’m glad we saved our school:

2010-01-31T09:41:00.000-08:00

1—Well, obviously, because now we’re going to get a fancy new building

2—There is still a place for old students to visit the few of us who are still there

3—There is still a place they can go to get transcripts, etc. if they need them for school or work

4—The lunch truck—even though Antonia and Steve are gone and Gabriel is long gone

5—All the students who, since 2005, have graduated with an AA degree, a year or two of college, or just simply graduated ready for college

6—All the students who would have got beaten down and/or shaken down at their home school. (I won’t name them but they know who they are)

7—It’s fun to go to a school in which the students know more about what is going on than the teachers, a place where we’re not always sure what the schedule is or which room our class is going to meet

8—All the ironies of Middle College and all the laughs, though not nearly as many without Charlap

9—All the crazy angry goofy freshmen

10—The sophomoric sophomores—wearing their immaturity like a badge of honor

11—The juniors seizing their moment—taking over the school, plotting to take over the world

12—The seniors thinking school is already over, remembering it’s not and turning in reams of last minute work, chasing after me as I turn out of the school driveway and tossing their papers into the open window of my car