‘School days, school days . . .’ : In poetry class, a teen-ager was jubilant. ‘My probation officer told me I’m getting out,’ he said. : Somehow, Education Flourishes Behind High Wall

In the sunlit classrooms, where blackboards turned gray with chalk dust, pupils politely raised their hands, answered questions, whispered, passed notes, misbehaved, giggled and sometimes flirted with each other.

The very picture of normality.

But a closer look revealed a 16-foot, red-brick wall outside the classroom. Students wore county-issued jeans and T-shirts stenciled with identifying letters. They marched to and from class in columns under the watchful eyes of guards.

And one poetry teacher, who said she cherishes her students’ work, also said she counts her pencils after class. A pencil, she said, could become a weapon.

‘Have to Be Cautious’

“No matter how much I like my kids, I still have to be cautious,” said the teacher, Therese Caler, 46.

This is the year-round under-lock-and-key school at San Fernando Valley Juvenile Hall in Sylmar. Here, on the average, 450 inmates, most of them from 11 to 18 years old, are required to attend school during their incarceration. Less than a fifth of the inmates are girls. Most are teen-agers.

The Juvenile Hall is a short-term detention facility run by the Los Angeles County Probation Department for youths whose cases are pending in juvenile court. The average stay is 21 days. Afterward, the youths may be placed at one of 15 Probation Department camps or at other facilities, such as residential group homes or the California Youth Authority.

The school at the Sylmar facility is operated by the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Juvenile Court and Community Schools Division. Classes are held five hours a day, five days a week. Students get vacations only on legal holidays and for a few days at Christmastime.

Although working at such a facility might seem like a teacher’s nightmare, most of the 26 teachers there said they enjoy their jobs and feel safer in the detention hall than in some of the public schools where they have taught.

Caler said at least she knows that students cannot bring weapons or drugs to school.

Barry Lampke, a substitute teacher, said he feels more secure than in a public classroom because probation officers are on duty in hallways and may be summoned by telephones in the classrooms.

Harry Cummings, assistant superintendent at the Juvenile Hall, said no teachers have been assaulted there since he arrived in 1979. But there have been occasional violent confrontations between gang rivals, attacks on probation officers and escapes, he said.

“Every once in a while, you’re going to get a bad dude,” he said. Some youths are so uncontrollable that the Probation Department seeks court orders to move them to the county jail system, Cummings said.

Teachers are told to avoid confrontations with the students--”not to be the heavies”--and to call for help when there is trouble, he said.

Ways to Cope

Solomon Henderson, the school’s principal, said the teachers often discuss how to better understand and deal with their student population. He said that, during monthly in-service training sessions, teachers have met with mental-health experts, Police Department gang specialists or probation officials.

In recruiting, Henderson said, he looks for teachers with broad backgrounds. The most attractive teachers are certified in more than one subject, he said. Experience with children who have special needs is also a plus, he said.

Reading and social studies teacher Vince McGrath, for instance, taught students needing special education before he came to Juvenile Hall.

Humor Defuses Problems

McGrath, 36, said rival gang members sometimes try to mix it up in his classroom. Humor is the best way to defuse the situation, he said.

“If one says something about another’s mother, I say, ‘You don’t even know his mother!’ ” said McGrath, a lanky, soft-spoken man. “It disarms them. It takes the burden off them.”

The school’s former program specialist, Maxine Shepard, 47, said: “I know they have a criminality in their background but I can’t be afraid, or I couldn’t function.”

Now an assistant principal at a probation camp school in Saugus, she said that, when teaching at the Sylmar hall, she wore her keys attached to her clothes, did not turn her back on her students and prevented them from crowding her desk and blocking her vision. And she said she would do the same in a public classroom.

Shepard said she also counted her students and watched the young ones. ‘If they’re little, they’re likely to hide” and try to escape, she said.

This year, four youths have escaped, some by smuggling rocks into the hall, breaking unbarred windows and scaling the wall, Cummings said. All have been returned to custody, he said.

Students are grouped in classes of 15 to 19, based on scores on reading and math tests taken when they arrive. The teaching is individualized; students of different ages but similar abilities may end up in the same class, Henderson said.

One of the biggest obstacles to progress, teachers say, is most students’ short stay. “They’re going to have to get it all today, right now,” said Bruce Kundin, who taught science at the school before being transferred to another facility. “Some of the students may not be here tomorrow.”

Unusual Pressures

Teachers say the students experience pressures foreign to public school pupils.

Caler said a student may be depressed or lonely if his or her family has not visited. Shepard said a good or bad court hearing or a judge’s decision can determine a student’s willingness to learn that day.

In Caler’s poetry class, for example, one teen-ager was in a great mood.

“My probation officer told me I’m getting out!” he said, then started strutting and singing, “I’m leaving, leaving on that midnight train . . .” to the pop tune.

Showboating aside, students usually behave politely, often using “sir” and “ma’am” when addressing teachers or counselors.

If they act up, in fact, they may be banished to a sort of solitary confinement that administrators call the “intensive care unit” and that kids call “the box.” It is a series of rooms on a separate wing. Two of the rooms, for dangerous or suicidal youths, are padded and empty of furnishings.

Students have an incentive for attending classes and for behaving well: merit points that can be spent on items such as shampoo, juices and stuffed animals, all available in an area reminiscent of a general store. Students also get merit points for cooperating and behaving outside class.

Some students said they are on their good behavior inside and outside the classroom because they think that it will ease--and perhaps shorten--their stay in the juvenile justice system.

‘I Want to Get Out’

“I just try to stay out of trouble because I want to get out,” said 17-year-old Wayne.

Indeed, school performance reports are sometimes requested by juvenile courts, and a favorable report can help an inmate, Cummings said.

Under state law, students must attend the school, Henderson said. Attendance is 85%, with most of the absentees attending court hearings, receiving health care or talking to visitors, such as family or attorneys, he said.

In contrast, many of the students have spotty attendance records outside the hall. For example, Wayne said he sold drugs and “ditched the last two months” of school before he was arrested on a weapons-possession charge and sent to Sylmar.

“I couldn’t take it,” the 11th-grader recalls of public school. “Too much pressure.”

He said he prefers school behind the wall because it has a more relaxed atmosphere and the teachers “don’t look down on me.” Outside, he said, teachers “try to bust me all the time.”

Another student, Kenny, 15, said: “You still learn as much. There’s just not the freedom part.” Held on an assault charge, Kenny said he wants to graduate and “get out and do something with my life.”

McGrath and other teachers say there are students in their classes who get out only to get in trouble and return.

But there are successes, too, teachers and administrators say.

Attached to the school is a special-treatment wing where youths whose cases have been disposed of and who need therapeutic attention from county mental-health personnel spend up to 90 days on their way to placement at other facilities. Here, students’ progress is sometimes radical, Henderson said, adding that their reading and math skills can rise two grade levels.

Some youths, teachers say, develop a new attitude about themselves and education. “I’ve had kids tell me, “ ‘Because of you I found out that I can be a good student,’ ” McGrath said.

Henderson said: “We plant the seed here so that once they return they can continue to be successful.”

Keeping Track

He said the school is working on better ways to keep track of its former students.

Whether the pupils succeed or return, many educators at the school maintain that the students in the juvenile facility are the same as students anywhere.

“Sometimes I’ll see a couple of my own students,” said Lampke, 50, who teaches at the hall during time off from nearby Sylmar High School. “It’s the same type of kid. Some of these kids just had the misfortune of getting caught.”

Every day, more than 3,900 youths from 6 to 18 years old attend the 41 schools at juvenile halls, probation camps and other facilities run by the county, including Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles.

The schools are accredited by the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, and the curriculum includes all subjects required by the state, Shepard says.

Some students even graduate while in custody, most often at the centers where they are placed after leaving the Sylmar hall.

McGrath said he particularly appreciates that most of his students strive to do well and to behave. Also, it’s year-round work.

And anywhere else, he said, “It would be no challenge.”