Barrio Teacher Goes to Gang Turf : Education: Dropouts and disaffected find schooling in special classes. Getting shot doesn’t keep them away.

In teacher Shirley Neal’s classroom there are surreal twists on such timeworn school rituals as show-and-tell. The other day, for example, a car stereo arrived hidden under the shirt of its new owner, who rides a bicycle. Then there was the knife Neal spied going from hand to hand.

“I’ll give it back,” she assured the owner, but only when class was over.

In Neal’s classroom, even attendance records have bizarre postscripts. “Rudy,” the teacher said, singling out a student for praise, “hasn’t missed a day of class, even when he got shot in the leg.”

Neal works for the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District, teaching in a part-time classroom program conducted in three barrios. So far, about 75 people have taken advantage of the educational opportunity, which is aimed at gang members and other disaffected teen-agers who have dropped out or been expelled from high school.

Classes are held in abandoned schools or in city-owned buildings. Supplies such as paper, pencils and books travel in the trunk of Neal’s car. Every day she teaches a different gang in a different neighborhood, giving her an unmatched perspective on gang rivalry in Norwalk, which is so intense that at the continuation high school, a line in the yard designates where one gang’s territory ends and another’s begins.

Two mornings a week, Neal is on the west side teaching members of a gang known simply as Neighborhood. Afternoons find her in the southern part of the city teaching Varrio Norwalk gang members, one of whom is Ronnie Buzenes, a 17-year-old with a horseshoe-shaped scar on his skull, the result of an attack by rival gang members.

The next day she teaches in the Carmelas, a small barrio that lends its name to a gang which represents Buzenes’ rivals. The Carmelas allegedly beat him with a bat, a crowbar and a bumper jack, because he was trying to visit a girl in their neighborhood.

Most of Neal’s students have been tossed out of conventional high schools because they did not leave their gang activities at the schoolyard gate.

“It’s the only school I got to go to,” Rudy Ramirez said, explaining why he keeps up such a good attendance record in Neal’s class. He and other students were interviewed during class with the district’s approval.

“I got thrown out of every school I went to,” the 17-year-old added. He was seated at a long work table, painstakingly trying to identify the bones on a photocopied human skeleton on his health and science work sheet.

Pablo Cruz, a shy 15-year-old who speaks mostly in one-word sentences, was thrown out of school for fighting and for carrying a knife, he said.

Would he like to attend a regular high school instead of Neal’s part-time class?

“Oh, yeah,” Cruz said softly, lowering his head even closer to the work sheet on the table in front of him.

However, the odds are slim, Neal said, that Cruz or any Carmelas gang members can peacefully return to nearby Glenn High School. It is only about a mile from their barrio, but Carmelas is the smallest gang in the city and Varrio Norwalk, the city’s largest gang, controls Glenn.

“Some of these guys haven’t even gotten to the school to register,” Neal said. “They’ve had fights in front of the school on the sidewalk and gotten tossed out before they ever walked on campus.”

In 1981, faced with a severe budget crunch and declining enrollment, the district closed Excelsior High School, which was the neighborhood school for the Varrio Norwalk gang.

Its members were transferred to Glenn, overwhelming the Carmelas residents, recalled Irene Torres, 23. A lifelong Carmelas resident, she is attending Neal’s class in order to prepare for the state high school equivalency test.

“All of us here,” Torres said, “we’re here for the same reason. We never got to finish our high school because they brought this other neighborhood (there). . . . I ended up getting in two fights, and they end up throwing me out. I didn’t go looking for a fight. I just had to defend myself.”

Torres brings her two children, ages 5 and 4, to Neal’s class. “That’s why I’m coming here so I can do something with myself and move out of here,” Torres said, pointing to her son. “I want him to go to school, something I didn’t get to do because of what they did here.”

Despite their life-threatening competition to protect turf, all of Neal’s students expressed the same intense desire--they want an education.

“We don’t want to be stupid for all of our lives,” said Eddie DeLuna, 17, a Varrio Norwalk gang member decked out in regulation hair net, dark pants and white T-shirt.

The students have taken to the barrio classroom program, said Newton Hart, who is principal of the continuation high school and Neal’s supervisor, because they know this is the last stop for them in the educational system.

“I tell everybody,” Hart said, “these are decent kids. They have a high sense of honor and they are hard workers. They’ll work hard if they believe they are going to be treated fairly.”

Hart said the district may expand the Carmelas program next year to something approaching a full-time program with specialist teachers.

Neal, a tall, outgoing woman with a perpetually cheerful disposition, has worked with what educators call “high-risk” students for years. Until the district allowed her to work directly in the neighborhoods full time, she worked at the continuation high school, specializing in outreach education programs designed to retrieve dropouts.

At present, Neal teaches in each barrio two hours at a time, two days a week. Technically, the students are registered as independent study students, for which the state sends the district money. Overall, the program costs only $80,000 for the school year, Neal said.

As destructive and dangerous as gangs are, Neal said, gang membership is sometimes the most positive aspect of these young people’s lives. She is intimately aware of each student’s personal history. She knows their families, their academic records, and, in many cases, their probation officers.

“Not being able to go to school,” she said, “is like being denied the right to be a child. Kids know that school is (supposed to be) a place where they can be kids, where they can forget about their gang warfare, their parent problems at home.”

Unfortunately, she said, many cannot adjust in either a regular or a continuation school: “They’re kids who have been abandoned by society and they’re angry about it, so, they sometimes react in very hostile ways.”

Neal said that to succeed in the classroom as a teacher she must stay attuned to what is happening outside on the streets.

During periods of gang conflict, she said, “I couldn’t walk in there with a math work sheet.” In such times, Neal said, she switches to lessons that help relieve anxiety and involve the whole group, such as reading plays.