An L.A. ‘posse’ passes its Iowa test

The phone rang at 10:30 p.m. Lauro Franco picked up and heard panic in the voice of his friend.

“I’m leaving,” Sandra Herrera said. “I don’t belong here.”

Dressed only in pajamas despite the winter chill, Franco sprinted from his dorm room at Grinnell College to Herrera’s a floor below. She opened her door and burst into tears.

Herrera told Franco she was tired of the cold, exhausted by school and worried about her father, who was sick back home in Carson.

“We’re going to make it, Sandra,” Franco said as he hugged his friend and shared his own concerns about his mother in Pacoima.

And so the pair hit on a plan: They would spend Saturdays at the library and break the monotony with occasional trips to the mall, 50 miles west in Des Moines.

Franco’s late-night rescue that sophomore year may have saved Herrera’s college career, both now say -- just as recruiters from the New York-based Posse Foundation had hoped.

Franco and Herrera entered tiny, idyllic Grinnell four years ago as members of a “posse” of 10 disadvantaged but promising high school graduates from Los Angeles.

By banding together, the students would help one another navigate unfamiliar academic and social terrain in this remote college town surrounded by fields of corn.

Grinnell would cover their tuition -- $1 million worth -- and in return get a little more diversity on its campus of 1,500 students, virtually all of them white.

The preparation for their journey was chronicled in a Times story in 2004. Over the four years that followed, academic demands reduced some of the “posse scholars” to tears. Cultural differences left a few feeling like outsiders. Homesickness was a constant, especially in the midst of bone-chilling winters.

The pressure drove one student to quit. Two others fell behind in their coursework.

But most found opportunities they never would have imagined back at high schools better known for producing dropouts than graduates.

Evelyn Gandara found her calling during a summer of study abroad before her senior year. She dreamed of becoming a doctor in a developing country and ventured to Ecuador for what she thought would be an internship in a rural hospital. She wound up treating patients.

That was a turning point for Gandara, a top student in high school who was surprised that her hard work at the prestigious liberal-arts college often produced only average results.

“Ecuador made all my frustrations and my hardships worthwhile,” she said. “It just confirmed that I’m on the right path and I have the right spirit.”

Gandara’s posse-mate, Nikisha Glenn, had to overcome an unlikely obstacle: her mother.

Afraid to let her daughter go, Paula Moss delivered Glenn late to her high school posse interview in hopes of torpedoing her chances.

Glenn, who came from Locke High near Watts, wound up studying physics under a professor who treated her like a daughter -- checking up on her when she was sick, making sure she got a paid internship for a research project on quantum optics.

Glenn stayed in school even after two of her cousins were killed in drive-by shootings during one of her summer vacations back home. Through it all, she clung to Herrera and another posse member, Jessica Starling, two of her roommates during senior year.

“There is no way you can survive alone without a close knit of friends,” she said.

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The Los Angeles students found an extended network at Grinnell, which was gradually adding four posses from Los Angeles and four more from Washington, D.C. -- with a goal of 80 students in all.

Daniel Zamora, an aspiring artist, grew close to three friends from Washington. They bonded over their love of art and their urban backgrounds, jokingly calling themselves “the three black chicks and the sassy Hispanic guy.”

The friends from opposite coasts would hang out at a Dairy Queen near campus, commiserating occasionally about fellow students’ questioning if they had made it to Grinnell only because of the posse.

“They are my family here,” Zamora said of his Washington friends. “In my eyes, they are my posse.”

Zamora and his posse friends enjoyed other support on campus. Posse offices in Los Angeles and Washington sent trainers several times a year to check in with the students. Grinnell assigned a staff mentor to meet regularly with them.

Frank Thomas, a senior counselor at the college, spent hours talking to Zamora and the others in the L.A. posse about their fears and doubts. He drove them in the snow to the airport or train station and fed them turkey and sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving at his Des Moines home.

An African American and a Grinnell graduate, Thomas confronted the students after hearing that they weren’t speaking up in class. “You cannot hide in a Grinnell classroom,” he told them.

Yet despite his efforts, Thomas could not seem to reach Nakeyia Poitier.

She fell behind early on in a required class for new students that covered basic writing and research skills. Poitier’s papers would come back with notes instead of grades at the top: “Come see me.”

She went -- but would leave confused each time. She couldn’t seem to get the hang of Grinnell, even after Thomas and the writing advisor met with her. She began missing deadlines, then cutting class.

As the end of first semester approached, Poitier was failing the writing class as well as an education course, and pulling a D in calculus.

Grinnell suspended her. She could return in the fall on academic probation, requiring at least a C in every class.

When fall arrived, Thomas met with Poitier to make sure she understood the ground rules. He told her that he was in her corner, that he would read her papers or help any way he could. But she again started cutting class and missing deadlines.

“Why do you want to stay here?” Thomas finally asked Poitier.

“Well, I like it,” Poitier said.

“Look, we can’t afford to spend $30,000 a year because you like it here,” he said. “You need to make a decision.”

Thomas told Poitier that it would look better on her record if she left on her own rather than wait for Grinnell to dismiss her. He told her to talk it over with her mother.

Poitier had kept her posse friends in the dark about her troubles. Her decision to leave stunned them. “We were thinking, ‘This can’t be true,’ ” Herrera said.

On the day Poitier packed up, Herrera and three other posse members rose before dawn and walked across campus to bid her farewell. Through the fog, they could see the headlights of a car and make out Poitier loading her things. They embraced, and then Poitier was gone.

She returned to her childhood apartment on a tough block of 80th Street in South Los Angeles and found a job -- paying $9.50 an hour -- at a check-cashing outlet in Long Beach, thanks to her mother, a manager at the company’s Inglewood branch.

“I punked out,” Poitier said in a recent interview. “I gave up. I regret how I responded to everything.”

Poitier’s friends back at Grinnell kept pictures of her on their apartment walls. They promised to stay in touch, but the phone calls dropped off.

“I just feel like we failed her,” Herrera said later, crying over Poitier’s departure. “That could have been any one of us.”

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As it turned out, another posse member was struggling with his own situation that would test his will to stay in school.

Valentin Jimenez, a track star from Garfield High in East Los Angeles, made Grinnell’s cross-country varsity team as a freshman -- only to suffer a knee injury that sent him into a tailspin.

Surgery to repair his torn cartilage was unaffordable, even with insurance, so he endured months of rehabilitation. But his running career was finished, and so was the routine that had kept him motivated.

Jimenez started skipping class and turning papers in late. His grades, until then A’s and Bs, slipped.

“It was hard for me to manage my time,” he said. “I didn’t have that big component of my life that had guided me all the years. I was no longer going to be that all-star runner.”

Jimenez called his father, who told his son to come home if he wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter if he had a degree, the elder Jimenez said, the family would take care of him.

Jimenez replied that he needed to finish what he started. But he shared little of his turmoil with his posse. He was admittedly stubborn, raised as a traditional Mexican, he’d say, and that meant being self-reliant.

And so he found another outlet: the weight room. Jimenez transformed himself from a lithe runner into a stocky linebacker. He hooked up with new friends, who gathered at his off-campus apartment Wednesday nights to drink beer and watch rap videos on his big-screen television. As time passed, he drifted further from the posse.

“Just because we have the same background doesn’t mean we’re going to be best friends,” he said.

Jimenez didn’t care about earning A’s. His attitude would affect not only his grades but his college career. By the end of senior year, he was two classes short of receiving a diploma. He would be allowed to join in commencement ceremonies but would have to make up the course work in order to formally graduate.

Zamora, the budding artist, who favored drawing over academics, also needed one more class.

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Still, the posse inched toward the finish line. As senior year drew to a close this spring, four years of stress dissolved into euphoria.

Dozens of relatives arrived for graduation weekend in mid-May. Six of Franco’s family members piled into a minivan and drove 35 hours to reach Grinnell, roughly midway between Des Moines and Iowa City.

Posse trainers held an emotional graduation ceremony in English and Spanish the day before Grinnell’s official commencement.

One at a time, students and their parents addressed the group.

Herrera, who had wanted to leave in her sophomore year, spoke of touching her father’s callused hands, knowing they had come from a life of hard work as a welder.

“Those are the values I brought to Grinnell,” she told the gathering. “Those same values helped me recognize that I deserved to be here and I can make it here.”

A psychology major, Herrera made the dean’s list twice and finished with a grade-point average of 3.5, highest of the posse students.

Her father, Luis Herrera, rose tentatively and addressed her in Spanish.

“Gracias,” he said, “for always letting us guide you and for listening and for your responsibility.”

Paula Moss, who had tried to stop daughter Nikisha Glenn from going to Grinnell four years before, also was in the audience. Moss learned that her daughter was among only a handful of African American women in Grinnell’s 162-year history to earn a physics degree.

She was reminded as well that her daughter and Herrera would be entering Pepperdine in a month to earn their teaching credentials and master’s degrees in education.

After the ceremony, Moss, a reserved woman, said simply: “It was worth it.”

The next day, as rain gave way to sunshine, the posse joined the parade of 398 Grinnell graduates in black caps and gowns. They walked through the “gantlet” of robed professors lining the sidewalk, a Grinnell tradition. And there, amid the sycamore and crab apple trees of central campus, they strode onto the stage to collect their diplomas.

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duke.helfand@latimes.com

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On latimes.com

Graduation at Grinnell

Find these features at

latimes.com/columnone:

* Audio: Listen as the students talk about what they learned and how they grew from their Grinnell “posse” experience.

* Video: “You did it!” Watch one family rejoice as they accompany their daughter to the commencement ceremony.

* Photo gallery: View scenes from the campus in Grinnell, Iowa.

* “Posse” primer: Learn more about the Posse Foundation’s work.

* Column One: Read The Times’ original story about the 10 L.A. high school graduates headed to college in Iowa.

* Discuss: Share your thoughts about the “posse” students.

Other recent Column One articles can be accessed as well.