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

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

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.