‘You got to start this young.’

Strolling briskly, heads held high, the two well-dressed men knocked repeatedly at the pink door of the faded, powder-blue cinder-block apartment. Like many of the apartments in the Jordan Downs housing project, its lawn was dead and littered with trash.

“Where’s Edward?” one of the men, Fred Williams, cheerfully asked a disheveled woman who finally appeared at the door.

“He’s gone up to Markham,” she replied.

“What’s he doing there?”

“He always goes there.”

A knowing nod from Williams.

Edward, Williams explained later, is a 15-year-old who has not been to Markham Junior High School in Watts for two years.

Williams and partner Jim Goins might not be able to get Edward back into school, but they will try. So far this school year, the two say, 42 chronically absent youngsters have been cajoled into attending school with some regularity.

Mailing truancy notices or calling parents--half of whom do not have phones in the projects--does not cut it in this part of town. Mr. Jim and Mr. Fred, as they are called by virtually everyone they pass, do.

Three-and-a-half years ago, Goins and Williams started cruising Jordan Downs as campus aides at 102nd Street Elementary School, trying to persuade kids to return to school, following up on those who did and basically gaining the trust required to move freely through the violence-prone projects. They were paid $8 an hour and allotted up to six hours a day.

In September, their status was upgraded. They were paid for the eight hours or more they had been working all along and got a raise to $11 an hour.

Three other schools were also added to their purview: Compton Avenue, Weigand Avenue and Grape Street, as well as the de facto role they play at Markham, where they use an old classroom as an office.

But recently they received a letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District saying that their funding would end Feb. 3. Not so, said Board of Education member Warren Furutani, a big booster of the project.

“It’s going to continue,” he said in an interview, adding that money will be scraped up for the Common Ground project.

He said the program slipped through the bureaucracy because it is so different that it fits no administrative niche. Furutani said he will fight to ensure a permanent role for the program, which now operates like a contract service.

“There’s not a whole lot of people lining up to do what they’re doing,” he said. “We need that in the community.”

The community seems to agree.

Last spring, Goins said, word spread through Jordan that the two were being terminated. Residents collected 1,300 names in one day on a petition to keep them, Goins said.

But their range is not limited to the Downs. During the last nine months, the two have also been hiking through other projects--Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts--working to build the same rapport. They also give haircuts and clothes, which they collect, to youngsters--anything to give them self-respect and remove obstacles to attendence.

Time, however, works against them. Talking to a gap-toothed 5-year-old the other day, Goins looked up and said: “You got to start this young. By the time he’s 8, he’s already a (drug) runner.”