Students Find Means to Grab Their Dreams

He may never see the cash but a special program that has promised him and dozens of his pals college scholarships when they need them already has made 13-year-old DeVon Logan feel like a million dollars.

Just look at the seventh-grader from John Muir Junior High, decked out in a coat and tie. Listen to him talk about the “I Have a Dream” scholarship program, which started changing his life a year ago.

The program, he said, “improved my vocabulary and the way I conducted myself. . . . I was a young man, true, but this made me see myself differently. I feel better about myself. . . . It picked up my grades a lot--from a D to a B in certain classes.”

Denita Hartfield, a 13-year-old whose mother has died and who now lives with her paralyzed grandfather and her grandmother, said the scholarship offer gave her hope. “I wanted to go to college, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to, so I didn’t think about it,” she said.

But Hartfield--who became a B+ student at Audubon Junior High this year--Logan and other select alums of the 52nd Street Elementary School now have collegiate dreams, courtesy of Win Rhodes-Bea, a descendant of Max Whittier, the oilman who developed much of Beverly Hills.

Rhodes-Bea, of San Marino, attended the 52nd Street and Holmes Avenue Elementary School graduation ceremonies about this time last year. There, in a surprising move modeled after the actions of Eugene M. Lang, a white-haired New York millionaire, she put up $1.5 million to provide a scholarship to any member of the elementary school classes who graduates from high school and goes to college.

Last November, other benefactors provided similar scholarships for a class at the Hillcrest Drive Elementary School.

The money went into a program, modeled after Lang’s efforts, called “I Have a Dream.” The program--which Lang estimates now involves 7,500 children in 25 cities, including 260 or so inner-city teen-agers locally--already has offered the fortunate Los Angeles youngsters more than money. It has given them weekly counseling, tutoring and field trips.

“I Have a Dream” backers even invited the 52nd Street School graduates to a one-year reunion recently at the spotless auditorium of their inner-city alma mater. There, amid balloons and bright banners, the neatly but informally dressed students saw and participated in a show aimed at reinforcing their long-range goal--to collect their precious scholarships.

At the program, eight of the seventh-graders wore yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the group slogan, “I Have a Dream,” and “Education.” They performed skits proclaiming their belief in themselves and each other. “My parents may not have a dime, but I know I’m something all the time,” one performer told the audience of 125 youngsters and their parents.

Grades Improved

When the skits ended, program administrators served cake while the youngsters discussed their accomplishments of the last year. The administrators said none of the students has dropped out of school and their grades, generally, have improved.

Even the one teen-ager who has had a rocky time--he was charged with carrying a weapon and was transferred to a home for boys--seems to be making progress, his social worker said.

The youngster, who asked not to be identified, agreed. Sitting under banners with drawings of the Statue of Liberty and the Liberty Bell on them, he said he had taken seriously his teachers’ threat that he needed to start studying or else he might be held back a grade. The 13-year-old, in the last three months, has advanced at least two grade levels in reading and math, his social worker said.

The teen-ager said he sometimes works after he is supposed to go to bed. He shines a small light on the chair beside his bed so he can write.

“I was acting like a jerk,” he said. “People kept telling me, ‘Don’t act like this,’ so I changed slowly, because I don’t want to go on like this all my life.”