Redefining education for students who need more than academics
Joe Piasecki | 11-9-2009 | Comments |
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SPECIAL REPORT: School of last resort offers teens new lessons that go beyond academics.INGLEWOOD - At 15, Jasmine Hernandez figured her life was pretty much over.
“I used to be in a gang. I used to run around with people I wasn’t supposed to,” says Hernandez, whose early involvement with substance abuse and petty theft took her from her South Los Angeles single-parent home to multiple stints in juvenile hall, probation camps and group foster homes.
The isolation and anonymity of life in L.A. County’s juvenile justice system kept her off the streets but seemed to nurture only a growing sense of hopelessness. “You feel like you’re trapped in a hole and you’re never going to get out. When you’re locked up, your whole spirit dies,“ she recalls. “You’re just a dead person walking. You feel like you don’t want to live anymore.”
Now 17, things are looking up for Hernandez — thanks in no small part to Free L.A. High School, a small Inglewood-based charter school that blends academics and social activism training to reach young people whose lives and educations have been interrupted by the criminal justice system, who have failed at traditional high schools or who are otherwise at risk of dropping out.
Since its inception in September 2007 by the Youth Justice Coalition, a group of parents and teens concerned about juvenile incarceration practices, Free L.A. High students have organized rallies opposing street violence and the confinement of youth in adult jails and hold occasional outreach workshops in county camps and juvenile halls. Recently they were gearing up to engage city officials over proposals to increase criminal penalties for graffiti writers, a topic that has also served as a theme for academic coursework on writing and note-taking skills. Housed in a former industrial building, the school also features a high-ceiling art room where students can express themselves through spray paint on its walls.
“We have a lot of incredible young people here trying to do better with their lives,” says Kruti Parekh, who trained as a social worker and now serves as Free L.A. High’s program coordinator — filling the role of school principal, but with a title designed to connote a more grassroots power dynamic, she explains. “The inception of it was really about young people, and we try to incorporate youth voices in what we’re teaching. Social justice work and social work and education are really all linked.”
An atypical high school
A handful of students, including Hernandez and her 19-year-old sister Karina, take on additional roles as youth organizers who help facilitate group work, class discussions and management of the YJC’s youth center component, which offers access to a computer lab and hosts various social activities.
All of the students appear familiar with the Youth Justice Coalition’s list of demands, a document that sets forth what in other places might be a controversial agenda — including calls to reduce youth incarceration rates and ending adult sentences for juveniles, to rethinking gang injunctions and combating police racism and brutality.
Free L.A. High operates under the umbrella of John Muir Charter School, which combines academic pursuits with vocational training. The Inglewood charter is unique among John Muir’s statewide programs in that community organizing and activism is treated as a vocation, though students are also required to receive additional employment guidance through state-funded Workforce Investment Act career-development programs. These include a job readiness and apprenticeship program in South L.A. managed by the Los Angeles Urban League.
But activism is the heart and soul of education at Free L.A. High, where a statement of purpose declares that disadvantaged youth have the right to “respect, positive opportunities and a future beyond death in the streets or life behind bars.”
Parekh, the school’s coordinator, sees increasing the level of her students’ involvement in their own educations and communities as the most effective way to combat the myriad social hurdles — poverty, broken homes and limited prior academic engagement — that stand between them and hopeful futures that start with a high school diploma.
“I used to mess up in school and stop going to school,” says student Essence Taylor, 17. “I like that [at Free L.A. High] we do more than just academic things. We learn deeper into the street life … deeper into everything in society.”
Free LA’s push against the tide
Among these deeper lessons is that the deck is stacked against the kids of Free L.A. High when it comes to staying out of trouble and getting a good education.
Youth in South Los Angeles are 1.6 times as likely as kids in other neighborhoods to face arrest and incarceration, according to a 2006 report by the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council. Some 20,000 L.A. youth spent time in the county’s 18 probation camps and three juvenile halls in 2003, a year in which more than one-third of incarcerated teen mothers also called South L.A. home.
Nearly all Free L.A. High students are Hispanic or African-American, groups that according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office accounted for more than two-thirds of the state’s roughly 222,000 juvenile arrests in 2005. In L.A., the Children’s Planning Council reported, minority interaction with the juvenile justice system is in even greater disproportion: More than 90 percent of youth housed in juvenile halls and probation camps in 2003 were of Hispanic or African-American descent.
The educational achievement levels of incarcerated youth are also alarming.
“The average kid at [an L.A.-area] juvenile hall or camp is 16 years old and operating at about fourth- to fifth-grade levels in reading and mathematics,” says Mark Lewis, president of the Los Angeles County Education Association, which represents educators assigned to work with incarcerated and probation youth. “Some of that is a result of not being in school on a consistent basis, and some is a result of learning disabilities. At any given time you also have 30 to 40 percent who are deemed special-needs students.”
Young people in custody receive individualized learning plans that attempt to address their specific learning and behavioral needs — special attention that may or may not continue when youth return home.
“Transition planning is a real problem,” says Leslie Heimov, director of the Los Angeles-based Children’s Law Center. “If we’re sending them back into the same family situation as when they got into trouble, it’s not exactly a recipe for success. And then we wonder why they fail when they’re back at home.”
The same can be said for school environments.
While county officials often attempt to return formerly incarcerated youth to the high schools they once attended, such transitions are often problematic, said Lewis, the LA County education association president. Many of L.A.’s crowded public high schools resist re-enrolling probation youth or are underequipped to provide much-needed individual attention, so they often wind up attending county-run community day schools or charter schools.
Why a high school degree still matters
What happens in the classroom may hold the key to reducing juvenile crime rates.
A September report by the nonprofit California Dropout Research Center at UC Santa Barbara suggests a strong correlation between academic failure and juvenile crime. Teens who do not graduate high school are twice as likely to commit crimes as those who do, the group found, leading them to argue that cutting the state’s dropout rate in half would prevent as many as 30,000 juvenile crimes.
But when teens become entangled in the criminal justice system, the barriers toward graduation also tend to grow.
“What hasn’t been well understood is that students who have gone through the camp system or juvenile hall have special needs, and the idea that a comprehensive high school can address these needs is probably not realistic,” says Mikala Rahn, president of Public Works Inc., a Pasadena-based education research firm.
Though interaction with the criminal justice system presents its own challenges, Free L.A. High’s Parekh believes that socio-economic hurdles may be the hardest ones for her students to overcome.
Nearly one in three children in Inglewood and surrounding South L.A. neighborhoods live in poverty, according to Census data, and two in five families are single-parent households. It is a place where, for many, survival is a priority over education, the temptations of street life are plenty and positive guidance is in short supply.
Since its inception, 190 students — some with several semesters worth of academic credits, but the majority much further behind — have enrolled in Free L.A., though on a recent Wednesday morning its classrooms appeared to hold fewer than 60. Many are making slow progress because they fail to attend school regularly, often for lack of consistent housing, prioritizing jobs over education, or drug and alcohol abuse by themselves or family members, says Parekh. This summer, however, the school graduated 25 students, its first graduating class.
Still, the battle is all uphill for both the school and its students. School organizers try to mitigate the crushing effects of inadequate resources, unstable support networks and a high probability for interaction with crime and the criminal justice system — the basic unfairness of it all — by asking students to confront these realities with enough hope to want to improve their lives and communities.
A statement written collectively by Free L.A. High students proclaims: “We’re from the city of L.A., where they answer to ‘Where you from?’ could get you killed … We’re refugees from the war on drugs and the war on gangs … We’re from guilty until proven innocent … We’re from caging people for being colored and poor … We’re from Rampart, poverty pimps and broken promises … We’re the children that rose from the ashes of Watts in ’65 and South Central in ’92. The children that fled from American-made bullets and bombs in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Laos … We’re from ‘been to more funerals than graduations.’ From ‘won’t bury another homey without fighting for justice.’ From ‘we’ve had enough’ to ‘take the system down and build something new.’”
Redefining education, offering new lessons
These aren’t the typical concerns and values that guide a high school, but these are not students who have succeeded at typical high schools.
“So much of this information would fall under civics and life skills. We keep classes separate so that we’re not politicizing them, but it’s about having kids think critically about their own lives and how they can make an impact on the world around them,” says Parekh of her students at Free L.A. High. “Young people are the heart of this organization. It’s their experience that contributes towards the change that needs to happen.”
And social engagement need not always be confrontational.
Youth Justice Coalition members have taken part in a community engagement advisory committee that, under the direction of Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas, led to the development of the nation’s first comprehensive community gang intervention model. Adopted by the L.A. City Council in 2008, the plan codifies standards and practices for community gang intervention programs and laid the groundwork for federal legislation introduced this summer by U.S. Rep. Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles, whose district encompasses large portions of South Los Angeles.
“What I think is amazing is how the kids are able to translate everyday experience into policy,” says Michael De La Rocha, who worked with the Youth Justice Center as Cardenas’ legislative deputy.
“Often times it’s difficult to get access to community voices and perspectives, but I think the Youth Justice Coalition is on the forefront of allowing youth to speak for themselves,” he says. “They played a pivotal role in bringing specific youth perspectives, especially those of young people who have been incarcerated before, and they provided wealth of information about alternatives for detention.”
Why alternatives are important
A makeshift memorial inside the school’s largest classroom is a daily reminder of the importance of alternatives. With candles, photographs, ink and paper, it records the names of dozens of young people who have lost their lives to street violence. Among them are Devin Brown, the 13-year-old killed by police in 2005 after colliding with an L.A.P.D. cruiser while fleeing in a stolen car, and 17-year-old Jeremy Burrell, who in August fell victim to a gang-related shooting in Hyde Park.
A group of students falls relatively silent, however, when asked what this monument means to them. A moment later 18-year-old David Montes, once chronically truant but now on the path to graduate in spring, answers quietly. “It just makes you appreciate life,” he says.
Later, Jasmine Hernandez opens up. “It hurts me because the community doesn’t realize what’s happening to the youth and people of color. To them it’s just another day when a person gets locked up. They don’t see how it affects us and how it affects those people’s families,” she says. “It’s just like when you lose somebody. People say ‘What else could we do about it?’ … But if we could have prevented it, I think that’s where we come in.”
She hopes to become a registered nurse. “If I could just save one life,” says Hernandez, who once struggled to value her own, “I’d be the happiest person ever.”
Tags: free l.a. juvenile justice los angeles high school south los angeles youth justice coalition
