Save-a-Youth Project Helps Dropouts Get a Fresh Start : Education: Anaheim program finds its students in the barrios and gives them specialized attention to return them to education’s mainstream.

On a ride through the heart of the barrio, Jerry Kill sounded much like a cabdriver pointing out landmarks to a visitor as he detailed the boundaries of gang turfs.

“Anything south of La Palma, that’s Travelers” turf, Kill said as he crossed Harbor Boulevard. “Back that way, that’s Jungle.” And down the block, he added, was the territory of a gang that has dubbed itself Vatos Locos, or crazy guys.

Kill sounded a lot like a cop as he described the various gang territories, but he’s not in law enforcement. However, his job does require him to be part detective.

As director of alternative education for the Anaheim Union High School District, part of Kill’s job is to find dropouts and try to lure them back to school. And in the alleys and hangouts of the barrio, that is much easier said than done.

Anaheim and other cities around the county are rife with youngsters who are sacrificing their education for the more immediate concerns of day-to-day life. Sometimes they are gang members who refuse to attend classes because their assigned school lies in a rival gang’s turf, and other times they are workers who have been forced into day jobs because of poor economic conditions at home.

In one instance, a girl was pulled out of school to care for a newborn sibling while her mother worked, Kill said. In another case, an 18-year-old girl described by an instructional aide as “really very smart” dropped out simply because “she didn’t like school.” Others become involved with gangs or drugs, and leave school.

That’s where Project SAY--for Save a Youth--comes in.

The project, originally funded with a federal grant and later split into separate programs run by the city and the Anaheim Union High School District, “is high school instruction for youths unable to attend classes at comprehensive school sites and who need an alternative program located in their neighborhood,” according to the school district’s description. The program, which allows students to study at their own pace and earn high school credits, meets twice a week during after-school hours and is designed for students ages 13 to 19.

While SAY does serve some students unable to attend regular high schools, as the program description says, many of its students are actually more unwilling than unable to go to school.

“I was just bored (at Anaheim High School), I wasn’t doing my work,” said Frank, 17, a student enrolled in a SAY class held at Sycamore Junior High School. (At the request of district officials, The Times is withholding the students’ last names.) “I was hanging around with the wrong people. I would go to school, but I would not go to class.”

Eventually, Frank, a sophomore, stopped going to school. That’s when Frances Martinez, an instructional aide with the SAY program and a translator at Anaheim High, sought out Frank and his parents.

“They (students) want to get a better education, and they are encouraged by the parents,” said Martinez, whom Kill described as “part cop, part mother, part tough guy.” But sometimes the peer pressure is so high that they think more about the peer pressure than their education.

“They all say the same thing,” Martinez added. “ ‘The teachers don’t understand me, the teachers don’t like me, they don’t care.’ But I go out and talk to them and to the parents. I know them personally.”

Frank said that while Martinez has a no-nonsense attitude, “she’s nice and everything--she talks to us and makes us understand. I been doing my work so I could go back to regular high school.” That sort of individual attention is essential to the program’s success, Kill said. The small class sizes--no more than nine students are enrolled in any class--and the independent study format help to pump up the youths’ often low self-esteem and open their eyes to the futility of gang life, he said.

“All they have to do is watch the older” gang members, Kill said. “They see that they wind up in the slammer, or dead.”

Another student, George, 16, a junior, said the smaller classes and personal attention of the SAY program eliminated that intense peer pressure he was subjected to at Anaheim High.

“I didn’t like it (there)--too many gangs,” George said. “My friends . . . were hanging around with them. I told my mom that I didn’t want to go there anymore.”

Even in the SAY program, George is surrounded by gang members. The difference, however, is that gang members are warned to leave their colors and turf battles outside.

“I tell them when they’re here, I want them to do their work,” Martinez said.

While getting the youths to do their class work is a difficult task at any of the four SAY sites scattered through Anaheim, Kill noted that it is even harder at Sycamore, where, because of its proximity to different gang territories, members of as many as three rival gangs often find themselves in the same classroom. Martinez’s close ties to the community, and the efforts of outreach workers who help track down delinquent kids, makes the program work, Kill said.

He added that sites for the other centers, which are scattered around Anaheim, were carefully chosen to assure that they would be in areas deemed neutral turf by rival gangs. Kill said outreach workers also screen prospective students to ensure that they will not be placed at sites where they would have to cross through a rival gang’s territory.

Martinez, who has been with the SAY program for two years, said that four of her nine students returned to high school last year--a success rate of less than 50%, but still considered an achievement in a neighborhood where just getting kids off the street and into any kind of classroom is a mark of distinction.

“There have been some students who have fallen out of the cracks,” Martinez said. “We can’t help everybody. But if we can help four of these nine students, that’s four more students back in school.”