Gang Members Aid Handicapped--and Learn Compassion

In Salvador’s world, there are Long Beach gangs, cars to steal, a tough-talking probation officer, and a 21-year-old man whose body is so twisted by cerebral palsy that he will spend the rest of his life strapped in a wheelchair.

They are an unlikely pair, the 16-year-old gang member and the handicapped man, and until four months ago, chances are they never would have acknowledged one another had they met. But neither of them counted on something special happening on the campus of the Lynn Pace School.

“Salvador was a self-centered, selfish kid who you couldn’t drag to the school steps,” said his probation officer, Cindy Giardina. “Now that kid is bringing me straight A’s. He has learned humility. He has learned compassion. He has learned responsibility. If that isn’t a miracle, then I don’t know what is. This is the kind of result parents spend time on their knees praying for.”

Salvador is one of 32 juvenile felons participating in a program run by the Lynn Pace School for Special Education in Bellflower, a Los Angeles County Department of Education facility, and the Southeast Community Day Center School, a division of the Juvenile Courts and Community Schools. The only program of its kind in the nation, it allows teen-age boys who are on probation to share the school campus with the severely handicapped.

The juvenile felons, most of whom are gang members and have been convicted of crimes including auto theft, burglary and assault with a deadly weapon, choose to go to school at Pace. Besides attending classes, they work for two hours each day as teacher aides in the classrooms for 225 severely handicapped Pace students ranging in age from 3 to 22. Some of the students are autistic; others suffer from Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy.

As teacher aides, the juvenile offenders help the teachers work with the students. They help the students walk, eat, use computers and play.

The idea is simple: The handicapped students have something to offer the juvenile felons, and the felons have something to give to the students. The juveniles may be rehabilitated, and the handicapped may form friendships.

“Our kids don’t have the mental and physical abilities, but they have great emotional strength,” said Cedric Anderson, a Community Day School teacher. “(The juvenile offenders) are just the opposite. They both have strengths and weaknesses, and they capitalize on that.”

During a recent visit, one of the teen-agers bundled an autistic boy into the basket of the school’s three-wheeled bicycle and took him for a spin through all the classrooms. The delighted boy blew kisses to everyone he spotted, pausing occasionally to plant a kiss on the gang member’s forearm.

Outside one classroom, another juvenile offender crouched before a small child who was trying to walk and helped him along. Next to him, a young autistic girl wearing a frilly polka-dot dress and plaster casts on both legs laughed as a gang member named Todd read to her.

Inside the cafeteria, Salvador walked up to Jose, the 21-year-old cerebral palsy victim he has befriended.

“Hey, did you and your brother go drinking in T.J. yesterday? You hung over today?” he asked.

Jose grinned hugely.

“Here, people look at you as a person,” Salvador said later. “They don’t look at you like someone who is going to steal something from them. When someone looks at me like that, I get mad, and I think, ‘Well, if that’s the way you think, I’ll show you,’ because it’s easier to prove them right than prove them wrong. The (handicapped) kids, they don’t look at us like criminals. That’s why we want to come here, because they give us a fresh start. We don’t have to prove anything to them. They need us here.”

Other juvenile offenders talk about how the school is the one place where they can drop their masks, where they are treated with respect, where they feel safe.

So far the results have been extraordinary, Giardina said. According to county probation records, 70% of the juveniles on formal probation commit crimes that land them back in the penal system. In the 19 months that the Pace Community Day Center School has been operating, only 20% of the juveniles sent there have come back into the system.

“It is phenomenal,” Giardina said. “If we were in Las Vegas and rolling craps, we would have lost a long time ago. Here we are beating the house.”

Giardina said she is convinced that the changes that transform the offenders while they are in the Pace program will last them throughout their lives.

“This will go with the kids as long as they live,” she said. “It’s not like a shirt or a fad that they can discard. This is real.”

Despite rave reviews from educators, probation officers, parents and supervisors of the juvenile offenders, the idea that young, violent gang members are working with such vulnerable children makes the program exceptionally fragile, Anderson said.

Teachers at the school frankly admit that they were apprehensive about bringing young felons into their classrooms. Now it seems that they are all sold on the program.

Still, Anderson said, “it only takes one student. . . . Who wants bad boys and girls in the neighborhood? But, by the same token, if we don’t give this an opportunity, we don’t know what will happen.”

Anderson said he is not guaranteeing that the effects of the program will last a lifetime. And he said the odds facing these young offenders are almost insurmountable.

“By no means are they all angels,” he said. “A lot of them have 15 or 16 years of hostility and anger inside them. Our impact is relative to that. We all see so much potential, but we also see reality.”

Reality dictates that these young offenders show up at school each day dressed like gang members. School officials won’t let them wear baseball caps, and they have to keep their belt buckles covered, but other than that, most wear exactly what they wear on the streets: khakis, T-shirts, slick hairstyles and prominent tattoos.

The juveniles can’t change their street styles, said Anderson and Sandy Osborn, a former probation officer and now a Southeast Community Day Center schoolteacher.

“When they leave here they still have to go back to their neighborhoods,” Osborn said. “Dressing in their uniforms saves their lives.”

Reality also dictates that these juvenile offenders face situations in which they might be tempted to fall back into their old lifestyle.

Some can’t resist. Of the 115 juvenile felons who have gone through the Pace School program, about 23 have been expelled or have gone back to a youth camp. Some offenders now enrolled in the program are battling alcoholism and drug abuse, Anderson said. But many, he and Osborn said, are just scared, mixed-up kids, such as Nick.

Nick had just turned 14 when the police caught him with three grams of cocaine. He did not use it himself. He preferred the lazy high of marijuana, but he was hoping to make a few dollars.

The judge sentenced him to three months but put him on probation in the care of his mother. He was caught with cocaine again, and again the judge put him on probation in the care of his mother. When Nick tried to stab a schoolmate with a screwdriver, he was sent to a youth camp. Now, at 15, he is enrolled in the Pace program.

Nick has been at the school only two weeks and is not sure he wants to stay. But he said he wants to graduate from high school because there are many things he wants, such as a high-paying job, a nice car and cool clothes.

Then his expression became serious. “I want to change myself,” he said. “I want to be like I was when I was young.”