All Day Job Interview

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More Dirt Piles

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.

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.