A School’s Glaring Absence

Inside an Audubon Middle School office decorated with posters of Frederick Douglass, Bill Cosby and Booker T. Washington, Kevin Dailey surveys a list of student detentions.

“There he is again,” the dean sighs on this April afternoon, marking a star by the name Tyree Francis.

This is Tyree’s second detention of the day. Notes from a teacher say he is “repeatedly tardy and refuses to cooperate.” The husky eighth-grader, cuffed black jeans dragging on the floor, chats with other students in the office, seemingly oblivious.

The dean stands up. “Can you close your mouths!” he shouts. He glares at Tyree. “You, who seem to be here every day.”

“I didn’t do nothing!” Tyree says, tossing his hands up.

For months now, Tyree’s single mother has tried to get her 13-year-old son to behave. He’s failing and skipping classes. He’s defiant toward teachers and sometimes toward her.

Torrence Brannon-Reese, who runs a campus program for fatherless boys called See a Man, Be a Man, has talked to Tyree many times. He mentors boys and shares his experiences of growing up without a father. Tyree showed up often at the meetings back in seventh grade. Reese took him swimming or on field trips, bought him hot chocolate and gave him Dodger tickets.

These days, Tyree says he would rather race mini-motorcycles, known as pocket bikes, than follow rules under Reese’s watchful eye. Lately, his defiance has turned toward Reese too. Tyree’s life mirrors that of many Audubon students: He is a child of a low-income, working mother and knows nothing of his father, not even his name.

By Reese’s count, 80% of Audubon students do not have fathers at home. He may be exaggerating, but a Times analysis shows that Audubon serves an area with the second-highest percentage of students without fathers among the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 78 middle schools. Of households with children under 18 within Audubon’s attendance boundaries, 46% are headed by a single mother.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Audubon is among the lowest performing schools in the state, in the bottom 10% on the state academic performance index.

At Audubon, Dailey spends much of his time listening to pleas from desperate mothers who tell him: “I just need help.” He says 99.9% of the parents he deals with are mothers or grandmothers.

“You think we can have a father-and-son event at this school?” Dailey says. “Nobody would come.”

The bell rings in the dean’s office, and school lets out. Tyree darts outside and joins a crowd of students. They are watching as two girls are wheeled into an ambulance. Spectators say school staff caught the girls stumbling drunk.

Tyree lingers.

He should be on his way to See a Man, Be a Man, like he told his mother he would.

In back of the campus, Reese is gathering a group of boys for a trip to Leimert Park.

Tyree does not show up.

*

Later, inside a dim Leimert Park theater where Reese has led them, 10 boys fidget. One student’s father has been in prison since the boy was a baby. Another student’s brother was killed two years ago.

“My goal in life,” says one 11-year-old, “is to be a football player, a basketball player or a break-dancer.”

Sitting in back of the room wearing a “Harlem” baseball cap, with arms crossed like a case-hardened judge, Reese shakes his head. He wishes these boys dreamed beyond becoming sports stars or rappers.

Reese, 45, grew up in New Orleans, where his mother owned a nightclub. As a child, his role models were pimps, hustlers and drug dealers. But Reese found himself more fascinated with books like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Manchild in the Promised Land” by Claude Brown. He chose to look up to those male characters instead.

“Stop looking at all that bling, bling,” Reese tells them. It’s more likely they won’t “have any chance to be a professional athlete.”

“Aw,” one boy moans, “how you gonna say that?”

Regardless of athletic talent, Reese explains, they need a backup plan.

“I want to be a lawyer,” says the boy whose brother was slain.

Reese asks him: “What is a challenge, today, you are trying to overcome?”

“Gangbanging,” the boy replies.

*

In 1997, the city of Los Angeles launched the L.A. Bridges after-school program to deter students from joining gangs by offering sports, tutoring, field trips and anger-management classes. L.A. Bridges serves more than 4,000 students a year at 27 middle schools.

Reese, a former community counselor, was hired under contract by the city in 2000 to run Bridges at Audubon. He developed See a Man, Be a Man after working with angry boys whose fathers were missing and whose mothers were trying to discipline their children alone.

It is designed to teach young men responsibility, cleanliness, and the relevance of education and caring for women and families. He invites doctors, lawyers, businessmen and pastors to mentor the boys.

Reese is therapist, enforcer, baby-sitter and buddy. He searches for students who have run away from home, talks to classes where teachers can’t control kids, consoles mothers whose children have been arrested, bargains with a dean to give a troubled kid another chance.

Three years after a city review found low attendance in the Bridges program, Reese has made improvements. On any given day, about 50 boys and girls show up after school. Reese works with others, such as Tyree, less regularly.

The majority of the students who show up regularly are sixth- or seventh-graders. After they turn 13, their involvement drops. It is the age when boys start “to pull away from their mothers,” Reese says, “and graduate toward the street.”

Reese says he didn’t realize the effect of growing up without a father until he had children of his own: four girls. He didn’t ask his mother for his father’s name until he was 35.

“It’s just like having half of a story told to you,” Reese says. “What’s the other half about?”

Reese says he won’t give up on these boys. Last year’s death of 13-year-old Devin Brown, an Audubon student, reminds him of that pledge every day.

Two days before Devin was killed, a principal scolded the boy for his frequent absences and poor grades. Teachers and counselors knew the boy had been grappling with the loss of his father, who died from heart failure a year earlier. Devin’s mother was working two jobs.

At 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning in February 2005, a Los Angeles Police Department officer shot the boy 10 times as he backed a stolen Toyota Camry toward a police car after a brief chase.

Reese says he worked with Devin and tried to persuade him to participate more in his program. He remembers calling Devin’s home one night. He wasn’t home, and his mother didn’t know where he was.

“That is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life,” Reese says. “Maybe a man could have intervened.”

*

For months now, Tyree has been telling his mom he wants a car.

His 14-year-old friend bought a “bucket” off the street for $400, he says. The friend drove Tyree and other kids around town, he says, until police took the car because it didn’t have tags.

“Baby,” Carla Francis tells him, “I can’t have you riding with them.”

“Aw, mama!”

“You’re black,” his mom says. “Anything can happen, and you’re all wearing baggy pants.”

She has threatened to tailor the bottoms of all his jeans.

Francis knows the story of Devin Brown too well. There are times she doesn’t know where her son is.

Once, Tyree spent the night at a friend’s house. A few days later, the clerk at a local liquor store told her Tyree had visited the store about 1 a.m. that night. Francis forbade him from staying over there again.

Francis says she can’t afford to take Tyree to movies or restaurants. So every evening, the mother and son share the small television inside their studio apartment. He sits on one side of the gold couch, she sits on the other. He wants to watch Black Entertainment Television music videos, but she won’t have it. Tyree stretches across three flat pillows on the carpet and falls asleep.

Decorated with African masks and teddy bears, the place offers few hints that a teenager lives there.

Tyree doesn’t realize how lucky he is, Francis says, to have a place both can call their own. Instead, he sulks and complains that she doesn’t let him go outside.

Francis will not allow herself to believe that a father could handle Tyree better.

“I am his mother and his father,” she says firmly.

She does not speak of Tyree’s father, not to her son or anybody else. She will say only that he’s never been a part of Tyree’s life.

A few weeks ago, Tyree asked his mother his father’s name. She told him, but Tyree says he quickly forgot.

He doesn’t need to remember anyway, he says, because he doesn’t care. Tyree says he has enough men to look up to, including rapper Lil’ Wayne, who has a song titled “Grown Man.”

Tyree used to look up to Kobe Bryant, until the Lakers started losing.

Then there’s Reese, the man with the voice smooth as bebop, who Tyree used to hang out with before deciding he had better things to do.

*

Late one afternoon in early May, Tyree’s mother shows up early to pick him up from the program. To her surprise, Tyree is not there. She returns later at 6 p.m., the normal pickup time. He’s waiting outside the school, acting as if he had spent the last few hours with Reese. She orders him into a classroom where Reese is waiting.

“If something happens, I’m going to look stupid,” she says to her son. “I’m thinking you’re one place, and you’re someplace totally different.”

She tells Reese this isn’t the only frustration she’s having. Recently, Tyree’s report card bore Ds and Fs.

Reese makes a deal with Tyree. He will be his tutor. Together, they will raise each of his grades by one letter before the end of the school year. To do this, Tyree must show up after school.

Tyree accepts the challenge.

The following Monday, Tyree reports to Reese as promised. He brings a social studies assignment. He needed to create a timeline with 15 historic events. Reese pulls out his personal copy of “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.”

For the next two hours, Reese helps Tyree research people such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. He talks about Reconstruction, and explains that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

Tyree gets excited. He starts mapping his timeline, saying, “I’m gonna do mine like this.”

The next day, Reese feels hopeful. “I think yesterday was a breakthrough,” he says, “I really do.”

*

May is almost over, and Audubon’s graduation is a few weeks away. Reese hasn’t seen Tyree in two weeks. He figures he’s dropped out of the program.

“It’s his choice. It’s on him,” Reese says. “I can save him, but he can make up in his mind that he doesn’t want to be saved. People have to understand they’re responsible for their own lives at an early age.”

Students begin to trickle into the classroom Reese is using. Some don’t belong to the program, but Reese invites them in anyway.

“What’s this?” a boy asks, hovering outside the door.

“See a Man, Be a Man,” a student replies.

They pull chairs into a lopsided circle around Reese. One says he hasn’t seen his father since he was a baby.

“I remember one time, I came home with a busted eye,” Reese says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, if I had a father he probably would have taught me to fight.’ ”

A few nod in understanding.

Reese turns to a boy whose hair is locked in cornrows. His name is Shannon Penn. At 14, he is bulky and big as a man, but he holds a blue Tony the Tiger backpack.

Reese had not seen Shannon for a couple of weeks. “What’s happening with you?” Reese says, tapping his knee. He knows Shannon’s mother works two jobs.

Shannon rarely sees his father, who lives in Oklahoma. He wishes he and his father could go fishing and that his father could help his mom pay the bills.

“My mom’s stressing,” Shannon replies.

He says his 17-year-old brother went to jail two nights ago. Police came to his home in the middle of the night, and Shannon watched his mother cry as they hauled the teenager off in a police car.

“Are you the only man at home now?”

Shannon nods.

Reese offers to talk to his mother. The session ends, and Shannon thanks Reese for listening. He tells him he plans to show up more often.

*

Times staff researcher and staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.