He Gets With the Program : Lawyer Gives Computers, Staff to Teach Students at Inner-City Schools

Richard Riordan, a wealthy Los Angeles lawyer and businessman, told Mayor Tom Bradley during a dinner six weeks ago that he was obsessed with the dream of helping every inner-city child learn to read and write by the second grade.

The next morning, Riordan, whose business ventures include ownership of the Original Pantry Cafe in downtown Los Angeles, got a phone call from school board President Rita Walters, who offered him a chance to help make that dream come true for some of Los Angeles’ most disadvantaged youngsters.

As a result of their conversations, Riordan agreed to outfit 11 inner-city elementary schools with $275,000 worth of IBM computers, software and other equipment, as well as with a small staff to help the schools learn to use them.

“It’s truly marvelous,” Walters said Thursday after Riordan was introduced to the teachers and principals of 10 of the schools during a gathering at Markham Junior High School in Watts. They gave him a standing ovation.

This has been the Los Angeles school district’s year for unexpected gifts. Last month, the district received a commitment from a wealthy San Marino woman, Win Rhodes-Bea, to invest $1.5 million in the education of 200 South-Central Los Angeles sixth-graders.

Riordan said his computers will be delivered to the schools in time for the beginning of the fall term. His gift fits neatly into an ambitious new program the district launched this week to raise the academic performance of children in 10 of the lowest-achieving inner-city schools.

The program emphasizes teaching the youngsters oral and written communications skills, especially how to speak and read standard English.

The approach appealed to Riordan, 57, a product of Eastern parochial schools who says he has long been interested in education.

“I’ve always felt that the earlier you get to the child, the more chance you have of not having them be a problem adult,” he said.

He discovered the value of computers in education when he visited St. Brendan’s, a Catholic school in Central Los Angeles, and saw what a teacher there, who was using them, had accomplished with her class of minority youngsters. As a result, he has provided fully equipped computer laboratories to two schools in New York, where he was born, and to 55 inner-city Catholic schools in Los Angeles.

According to Walters, the computers he is donating to the public schools will be equipped with a program that is specifically geared to teaching kindergarten through second-grade youngsters how to read, write and speak correct English.

Pupils will also use the computers for writing stories. The computer will check their spelling and assist them in pronunciation through a voice activator.

Riordan also is supplying a small staff to make sure that teachers learn how to use the equipment, because too often, he said, computers have been given to schools and then have been abandoned to a dusty corner because no one knew what to do with them.

During the last year, he said he has received about 200 letters from students who have directly benefitted from his philanthropy. In one letter, a girl named Jennifer thanked him for giving her school the computers. She wrote, “The computer makes me feel good. It tells me I’m right, not that I’m wrong.”