Ex-Gang Member Blossoms as PWT Scholar, Athlete

As a junior high school student in Los Angeles, Walter Orr spent his spare time on the streets, getting into trouble as a gang member. Starting in the ninth grade, he spent his spare time on a bus, traveling to the San Fernando Valley to attend school in the Permit With Transportation program.

Getting out of trouble took a little more time. To discipline Orr for poor attendance and low marks in the 10th grade, administrators at two Valley high schools invoked an “opportunity transfer,” sending him elsewhere. At one point, he had a 0.7 grade-point average on a scale of 4, including five F’s and one D.

But today, as a Reseda High School senior, Orr is what Dimitri Vadetsky, assistant principal in charge of athletics, calls “a classic case” of the value of PWT.

Said Vadetsky, “If he was the only one helped by the program, that would make it worthwhile. Forget about just athletics. I’m talking about a kid getting his head together.”

3.45 Grade-Point Average

That Orr did. He has a 3.45 grade-point average, is planning on going to college to major in accounting and just completed an excellent season as a defensive back and wide receiver on a Reseda football team that made the playoffs. He also is the high school’s nominee for a National Football Foundation award for the community’s most improved scholar-athlete.

“I have friends of all races now,” said Orr, who is black. Before enrolling in the PWT program, “I had a one-sided view. Now I have the whole view.”

Orr said that, in his last year as a junior high school student, he and his mother decided he should enroll in PWT to avoid daily association with neighborhood youth gang members.

He first attended Reseda but, after performing poorly in class, was transferred by Vadetsky to Grant High School in Van Nuys. He had the same problems at Grant and was shuffled back to Reseda for a final chance.

Made Football Team

Back at Reseda, he went out for the football team, nearly half of whose players are PWT students, and made it.

The safer environment allowed him to look at school positively for the first time, he said.

“It turned me around, gave me a different aspect of life. Here I do not have to worry about gangs. If I hadn’t come here, I’d be in a gang now, or I might have been locked up somewhere.”

Orr declined to talk in detail about his gang experiences.

“A lot of the guys I knew have been shot or are in jail,” he said. “You get so used to hanging around them. You want to be with them, so you do what they do. The gangs disliked what I was doing” by getting out of the neighborhood through PWT, he said, and “I still get into fights” at home.

“I try to keep away from them. I just ignore them and keep going about my business. I look at them and know that could have been me. If I had a chance to live my life over, I would never take that road again. I went to school before because I had to. Now I go because I want to. I didn’t want to take orders from no one. Now I need to live on.”

Said Vadetsky, “I tend to get tears in my eyes when I think of what he’s become because I know what the alternative was. A couple of years ago, I didn’t think he would make it through high school alive. He was that kind of a kid. Now, I’m so damn proud of him.”

Joel Schaeffer, Reseda’s football coach, remembered Orr during his first days on the team as a substitute player who was “kind of standoffish, a little bit of a wise guy. Now he is so much more enthusiastic. The other guys on the team joked with him a bit and that kind of brought him out of his shell. Because of all his hard work, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, give Walter a chance’ ” to be a member of the starting line-up.

Basketball Was Outlet

Schaeffer did, putting Orr on three or four special teams in addition to his double-duty work as a defensive back and wide receiver.

“He is now a well-liked young man,” Schaeffer said. “Instead of walking around with a chip on his shoulder, he has found a better way to get in with the group. He got a positive taste as far as education was concerned.”

Sedrick Hannah’s story is another that Reseda coaches cite when talking about PWT.

“There was shooting in my (South-Central) neighborhood,” said Hannah, who is black, “so I went into the gym and played basketball to get away from it.”

That was when he was a junior high student. Hannah volunteered for PWT in the ninth grade, went to Reseda and became an important part of the school’s basketball program during the last two seasons, which produced back-to-back titles in the Los Angeles City 3-A Division.

It was not always such a smooth ride for the busing program at Reseda. Bill Hughes, the school’s basketball coach for both title years, recalled when color was an issue on one of his teams.

Gavin Bradley was a white player who had been performing poorly. “He was making mistakes because he was overly aggressive,” Hughes said. A contingent of black players came to the coach and asked him why he hadn’t benched Bradley. “You wouldn’t start an all-black team,” one player dared him.

“There would be these three-on-three games at lunchtime,” Hughes said. “The black players wouldn’t pick Gavin until I told them to.”

Hughes stuck with Bradley and he eventually became an integral part of the team.

On another occasion, Reseda’s cheerleaders decided to surprise the school’s football players by arriving at their houses early in the morning to take them out to breakfast.

“I knew it would have been impractical for them to have traveled all the way to the inner city, but when I mentioned to the girls that they had only awakened the white players, they felt bad,” Vadetsky said. “It hadn’t even occurred to them.”

Reseda football coach Schaeffer remembered a game played at a predominantly black school where a fight broke out among students. Five of Schaeffer’s black players escorted him to his car and made sure he got out of the parking lot safely, he said.