‘Mr. Fred and Mr. Jim’ in Watts : ‘Outreach’ Team Strives to Find School Dropouts

On 105th Street in Watts, two young men stood at a big ramshackle house and yelled the name of the father again and again, insisting that he come out. They weren’t looking for trouble. They wanted him to send his three boys to school.

Fred Williams and Jim Goins had found this house on a tip from a neighbor, who had noticed that the children had been out of school for months. Williams and Goins had made so many visits here that the father had begun locking the gate that leads to the side door. Yet this day, having entered through the home of another neighbor who lives on adjoining property, the men were knocking on the door again.

On past occasions, the father had cited his work schedule and a desire to educate his children independently as reasons for not enrolling them. Williams and Goins had concluded that it was more a matter of laziness or flakiness. Their outrage was building. Excuses no longer mattered.

“We’re not leaving today without those kids,” Williams vowed, and once again he loudly called the father’s name.

After 20 minutes, the father gave up. Appearing groggy, he opened the door and presented two of his sons, one of them wearing tennis shoes with the toes cut off because they no longer fit. Enroll them, he said.

For victories like this, Williams, a former street gang member, and Goins, a master’s degree student, are paid $8 an hour. They are teacher’s aides at 102nd Street School who, through accident and instinct, have become the Los Angeles Unified School District’s most aggressive dropout counselors, working in a part of town where school is regarded cynically by many parents.

Williams, a husky man with the demeanor of a street-wise Bill Cosby, and Goins, who is smoother, low-key and bearded, signed on at 102nd two years ago primarily to pay their bills. Coincidentally, the school was becoming part of a new district program to statistically track potential dropouts at 24 schools. The teacher’s aides were asked to help push paper.

They wound up pushing parents, walking across Grape Street each day into Jordan Downs, the housing project that feeds the elementary school, to visit homes of chronically absent and unenrolled students.

Imaginative Incentives

They have prodded and cajoled families, given free haircuts and clothing to children, translated the bureaucratese of public education into street English and organized field trips for youngsters whose lives are so isolated that on one visit to Hollywood, some asked if they were out of California.

Williams’ and Goins’ reputation was solidified last fall when their school found itself with a surprisingly low enrollment. “We asked them to go back into the hedges and the highways, and they found enough children who hadn’t been enrolled to allow us to keep several teachers we might have lost,” Principal Melba Coleman said.

At the recommendation of Board of Education member Warren Furutani, district Supt. Leonard Britton recently accompanied Williams and Goins on their rounds.

“We use real big terms like self-esteem when we talk about keeping kids in school, but as Fred and Jim grab onto that term it doesn’t become so lofty,” Furutani said. “You can’t buy that skill. Some of the things they’re doing we need to put into other places in the district.”

The men’s willingness to proclaim themselves ambassadors of the school system has gradually made them celebrities in a sullen, poverty-infested neighborhood that is highly suspicious of outsiders. Mothers and children greet them enthusiastically, and “Mister Fred and Mister Jim,” as everyone calls them, respond in kind. There are pats and hugs for every toddler and warm entreaties to every child who ought to be in school, all of whom swear they’ll be there tomorrow.

The men and their supporters say their door knocking has persuaded hundreds of parents--many of them young welfare mothers or drug dealers--to make sure that their child is awakened in time for school, dressed and sent on his or her way.

Such parental obligations are taken for granted in much of society. In Jordan Downs, where 2,700 people live, and where nearly 30% of the area’s high school students dropped out last year, the obligations are often obliterated by the weight of drugs, alcohol and the fatalistic, self-fulfilling prophecy that the same school system that failed many of the parents and older brothers and sisters will fail this generation.

Fred Williams, 29, thought he understood this. “A lot of people have their priorities screwed up,” he said philosophically. He had been a gun-carrying member of the Harlem 30s, a Crips gang near Exposition Park. He grew out of that by the end of his teens and eventually set up his own youth organization.

The violence he saw in Jordan Downs did not surprise him. The pervasiveness of cocaine traffic and its effect on children did.

“All day long people are being affected by the violence of drug deals or the fact that somebody is using it, the police are always on the scene because of the end result of someone using the drugs or selling, somebody is always getting their house broken into, someone is always being robbed,” he said.

“The children, they understand the condition they’re living in. Children are moved by what other kids say, things they hear. Everything is so negative and down. Children whose parents are either using drugs or alcohol, when that parent is loaded that kid is not getting the kind of attention it needs. When we saw that the majority of children wanted to come to school we were encouraged. But when we saw some of them struggling in the morning to put on whatever piece of rag that’s not clean, or clean, when mama is still asleep--or not home--we knew we had to do some outreach.”

Some of what Williams and Goins reach out to is correctable by the pressure of simple face-to-face reminders to parents. Some is rooted in problems beyond simple solutions.

There is the fifth-grader with an old, tired face who says he has to go home because his clothes are dirty, then admits that he needs to stay with his mother because her boyfriend just beat her up.

There is another, often violent child whose mother--bitter and angry--stops sending him to school after administrators deem him to be a “special education” candidate and transfer him to another elementary school.

There is the child who is frequently missing because his mother is a drug user who steals from her parents and periodically disappears with her son.

There is the child caught at school with $100 worth of cocaine rocks in his shoe. He has been recruited by a dope dealer who offered him a piece of the action.

There is the young mother who is driving away from the project one morning when Williams and Goins walk across Grape Street to make their visits. Williams flags her down. She has two school-age children in her old car, and she seems unconcerned when Williams good-naturedly reproaches her about not taking them to school. She has a doctor’s appointment, she says, smiling. After she drives off, Williams sighs.

“The kids haven’t been in school for months. Just laziness, man, and other things in her life like boys, drugs, kick back (the current euphemism for relaxing). The kids are falling by the wayside. But the beauty of us being out here is that we can stop and talk to her. When we first met her she cussed us out. . . . She knows I’m gonna be on her until we get the kids in school.”

The delicate part of the job is letting some repulsive parental conduct pass without comment. In a place where laws are routinely flouted and public authority is distrusted, Williams and Goins believe that their credibility rests on their ability to be seen as sympathetic figures. To flat-out remind a parent, for example, that failure to enroll a child in school violates state law would be counterproductive, they believe.

“We’ve taken kids back in the house when brothers and sisters got the stuff (cocaine) on the table,” Goins said.

“We don’t pay any attention to that,” Williams said. “We are so happy that we have those same brothers who are dealing dope who are sending their children back to school.”

“They want their children to learn,” Goins said.

“They just don’t know how to do it,” Williams added.

Williams, jocular and charismatic, and Goins, 24, raised in suburban Riverside and working on a master’s degree in theatrical directing at USC, are an odd couple who play well off each other. Williams, more comfortable in this milieu, usually takes the lead. Goins said it took him several months to adjust to the contrast between the intense poverty around him and the advantages he enjoyed as the son of parents who pushed him academically. At Cal State Dominguez Hills, he majored in English and theater arts and now produces his own plays.

“I see no reason why children should have to live like this,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

So wrong that Williams and Goins found it necessary to buy hair clippers and give haircuts to more than a hundred of the schoolchildren.

“Haircuts!” Williams said, still amazed. To him it illustrates the depth of poverty and parental disregard. “We have come across kids who haven’t had a haircut since the hell they were born! Talking about 7, 8-year-old kids.

“We’d never cut hair before. We just saw the nappy heads, man. The kids were not feeling good about coming to school. We’d go into the house and it’d be all smelly and dirty and we’d ask the kid what was wrong with him and he’d say, ‘Nuttin . . . ‘ and we’d say to ourselves: self esteem. We’d say, ‘Boy, we’re gonna give you a haircut.’ ”

Today many children sport the same Kojak-style trim that Williams has. Among parents, the gesture was an ice-breaker.

“Mister Fred and Mister Jim talk to the children when they’re in trouble; they’re really a lot of help,” said one parent, Jeanette Stickland. “They talk to them about gangs. The things the kids won’t talk to their teachers about, they’ll talk to Mister Fred and Mister Jim about.”

The school district is in the last year of a three-year pilot program to track attendance patterns of thousands of potential dropouts at 24 elementary, junior high and high schools, including 102nd Street School. However, the program does not require the extensive home visits that Williams and Goins make. As a result, the men said, many children simply quit--twice as many vanish from Jordan High as elsewhere in the district--and never return.

An example sits on the step of an apartment in the middle of Jordan Downs, playing a tape player. His name is Darren. He is 16, and for two years he simply has not gone to junior high school. Then, a while back, he trusted Williams and Goins enough to stop them and ask if they could help him get back in. Williams helped him enroll at Jordan High. On this day, as he makes his rounds, Williams sees Darren hanging out.

Smiling warmly, as always, Williams greets Darren.

“How’s school coming?” he asks.

“Coming,” Darren says without expression.

“Look me in the eye,” Williams says. “Problems?”

“Some.”

“Why didn’t you call me? I gave you my home number. You got all your books? Pencils?”

Darren mumbles that he doesn’t have a locker.

“Are you going tomorrow?” Williams asks.

“I didn’t get no clothes for Easter,” Darren says.

“Big deal. So what?”

“My mother had to pay her bills. I cleaned these clothes again.”

“Ain’t but for one day,” Williams says. “You’re going to have to keep washing your clothes out by hand.”

“We don’t have no soap powder, “ the boy says, exasperated. “I tried to tell her. . . . “

Williams softens his voice.

“Listen, Darren, there are some things you’re gonna have to deal with, regardless. You gonna work this summer, right? (Williams has obtained city-funded summer jobs through his youth foundation.) You’re gonna have to get used to getting up and taking care of business or you ain’t gonna be able to handle your job. You have to keep on going anyway.”

“Regardless of the situation,” Goins interjects.

“That’s the way it is, man,” Williams says. “So listen. You call me tonight. You been out two years. You’re starting to go back. Don’t mess it up now.”

But Darren will mess it up. As the days pass, Williams will continue to see him on the stoop. A week later he will concede that his optimism about the boy was premature. After two weeks in school, Darren has quit again.

“He’s lost it,” Williams said, resignation in his voice. He and Goins pride themselves on turning young minds, but sometimes, when they cruise in Goins’ aging Volkswagen Rabbit and see wandering knots of children, they are reminded that they cannot save everyone.

“The kids are out there,” Goins said. “But nobody’s doing the outreach to find them.”