The Last Hope : Counselor Kwasi Geiggar Works for the ‘Lost Causes’ of L.A., Giving Them a Final Chance to Stay in School and Out of Trouble; Often, His Efforts Fail

It’s a Monday morning at 8 and Kwasi Geiggar, athletically built but graying at 42, is on the phone with a junior high school principal, telling him to expect a new arrival. Geiggar iscalling on behalf of a 14-year-old boy, just out of juvenile camp on a burglary charge. The principal is not a happy man. By the call’s end, neither is Geiggar.

He recounts the conversation as his co-worker, Mal Neely, nods sympathetically. “The principal said to me, ‘Do I have a choice? I’m not happy about this.’ I told him he had no choice. I told him, ‘He’s not a violent kid.’ The principal knows that as soon as there’s a problem, he can call me or the boy’s probation officer and we’ll take care of it.”

Geiggar is disgusted. The court orders these children to attend school, but try finding one to take them, he says.

His frustration comes from the experience of countless such conversations every day. It is Geiggar’s job to find a spot in Los Angeles schools for students with bad reputations. His charges, just released from juvenile camps run by Los Angeles County, have served time for crimes--everything from vandalism to murder.

School principals often regard such students as “lost causes” who will disrupt the fragile peace of a campus.

But as coordinator of the school district’s little-known Camp Returnee Program, Geiggar sees them another way: They are troubled minors at a crucial turning point. They could continue to slide into lives of crime. Or, with some delicately timed intervention, they could change and salvage their lives.

The litany of urban problems--violence, drugs, gangs, poverty, illiteracy--is a daily reality for Geiggar. But for him, these problems come with names, faces and personalities.

In an effort that can only be described as “hands on,” Geiggar and Neely try to find a place in the school system for society’s most difficult children--those who have been barred from their neighborhood schools and often a few others. In 1989, 3,409 children under 18 from county’s juvenile probation camps needed to re-enroll in school. About one-third of them were funneled through the Camp Returnee Program.

Geiggar starts the day early in his office in the high school administration building, south of downtown. He often begins by calling a reluctant principal to alert him about a new enrollee. Or he might call a parent to find out how a recent placement is working out, or a probation officer who is supervising one of his students. Too often his calls will turn up bad news: A boy who was supposed to be in school hasn’t shown up for days, or has been arrested, or sent to the state Youth Authority. His voice will register resignation more than surprise.

While Geiggar may win a battle now and then and get a principal to accept a high-risk placement, he is almost positive he is not winning the war. Geiggar and Neely know the statistics: 35% of the city’s youths drop out of high school. Among blacks, the rate is 44%.

In his seven years with the district, Geiggar has seen young men he had great hopes for slip through the cracks and end up in prison, or worse. He has eulogized them at their funerals.

The juvenile camps are a legacy of the Depression. They were established by the county in the 1930s to provide shelter and jobs for homeless young men who rode the rails to California looking for work. A decade later, during the ‘40s, they were turned into juvenile detention centers. At that time, the state began picking up half the cost of the program, hoping to keep as many minors as possible out of Youth Authority facilities--the juvenile equivalent of state prison.

With 14 locations--in rural areas of Malibu, Lake Hughes, La Canada Flintridge and Lancaster, among others--the camps are now funded almost entirely by the county and provide a minimum-security alternative to Youth Authority.

Geiggar believes the conventional wisdom of the juvenile justice system: that once a youngster serves time in a Youth Authority facility, it is almost impossible to save him from a downward spiral. Judges weigh a minor’s prior record, the severity of his crime and his circumstances when deciding where he will serve time. Those sent to juvenile camps, it is hoped, can be turned away from a life of harder crimes, and they receive schooling and counseling toward that end.

But this doesn’t always prepare them for the shock of their release, often back into the environment that got them in trouble in the first place. What happens next can often determine their fate. Recognizing this, the Los Angeles Unified School District created an office in 1983 specifically to guide these children upon their release. Currently, Geiggar and Neeley are the sole caretakers for these youngsters.

The problem with problem kids is that their pasts often dictate their futures. Arby Hyman, a probation officer for 18 years, knows the scenario well. “I’ll take a kid to school and the dean will say, ‘I can’t have this boy here. He was here and he messed up. I transferred him and he messed up again.’ So he washes his hands of him. But the Probation Department and the school system have ordered minors to attend school. So it becomes a hellified path.” At this point, a child or his probation officer will call Geiggar for help. “He won’t rest,” Hyman says, “until that child is in school.”

Hyman concedes that the school often has good reason to be fearful. “They have valid reasons for not wanting these kids. They have rival gang members there or other kids might get hurt or someone’s been arrested for selling cocaine on campus 14 times. These kids become a problem and the system just doesn’t want to deal with them.”

Geiggar or Neely will try to find a school on neutral gang territory, away from old friends and bad influences, and then persuade the administrator to give the child a chance. “It wouldn’t work without Kwasi or Mal trying to pave the way,” says Ed Davis, who used to supervise the program. “They talk the administrators into giving the kid a shot, with the understanding that they don’t have to keep the kid if it doesn’t work out.”

Often, it doesn’t. “We’ll place a kid and he’ll last three, four days,” Geiggar says. “Then we place him somewhere else and he’ll last two, three weeks, and we get him back again. It’s a real revolving door.”

It’s a job that requires endless patience, tolerance and optimism because, as Geiggar openly admits, success stories are rare--maybe 2% to 3% of the youngsters he encounters. “You can’t think of this as a job for pay,” Geiggar says. “It’s to make a future for us all. If you brush these kids off, one day they’re gonna be at the other end of a gun.”

One recent morning Geiggar is trying to deal with Jabbar, a recalcitrant student who was referred by his probation officer.

Geiggar and Neely, whose professional reputations now exceed their original mandate, often get phone calls from parents, probation officers and children themselves. They never say no.

Jabbar’s probation officer thinks he’s at school, but the principal tells Geiggar that Jabbar hasn’t shown up for two days. And so Geiggar begins a ritual he performs with frustrating frequency.

In his Mazda pickup, in which he logs 50 to 100 miles a day, Geiggar drives to Jabbar’s school, the Community Day Center (CDC) on Jefferson Boulevard. Run by the county Probation Department for children who are no longer welcome in mainstream programs, it is Jabbar’s last chance; if he can’t make it there, he’ll probably just stop going to school. If Geiggar gives up on him, no one else will come looking.

At the Community Day Center, several groups of teen-age boys and girls are inside the single-story, windowless building, some watching TV, some playing cards with a teacher, a few just sitting around talking.

“Not much learning going on in there,” Geiggar says after he leaves with Jabbar’s address. “Maybe it was lunchtime.”

On the drive to Jabbar’s apartment, Geiggar ponders a question: Have teachers come to expect less of such students?

“It’s not that they’ve lowered their expectations.” Geiggar says. “They never had them in the first place. It’s automatically assumed that these kids are not capable of doing what other kids can do. At least that’s what I see. Because that’s the way they treat them. You assume the worst with these kind of kids--they’re academic failures and the system treats them just like that. If you want to teach a kid to be good, don’t tell him how bad he is. Tell him how good he can be.”

“All these kids want to do right,” Geiggar maintains, “but they don’t know the first thing about how to do it. They look around them and what do they see? At 6:30 a.m. you see guys around the liquor store. Kids see this and what makes them think they are going to be any different? If they’ve never seen any other way of life, what do they have to compare this to? This is their life, day in, day out.”

Geiggar is reluctant to blame children such as Jabbar for losing interest in school. He believes schools are a dumping ground. “The school system is not valid any more, not meeting the needs of the kids. All of our kids are not going to go to college. We need transitional programs and skill centers. We need to train machinists, carpenters, train the skills that built the country. It’s our responsibility to place a kid in a place where he can progress, otherwise we’re going to lose him.”

Often, Geiggar lets his frustration do the talking. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wilderness screaming,” he says, “and no one hears the screams.”

But Juanita Pinion, probation officer at Crenshaw High School, credits Geiggar with providing something essential: a positive male role model. “Many of our young men need that,” she says. “There are so many females in their lives. Their male figures are mostly gang members and drug dealers. They need to see some positive black males to see that there’s another way to get respect and earn a living and that they can do something else with their lives besides hang out on street corners and sell drugs.”

Geiggar arrives at a small apartment building in the Crenshaw area and spots Jabbar looking out the window. An older man answers the door, then disappears into a back room, not at all curious about the strangers who have just entered the apartment looking for Jabbar. Jabbar and his two sisters are sitting in the living room. Geiggar talks to Jabbar for a while, chastising him about his poor school attendance, telling him that he doesn’t have too many chances left and he needs to get himself back to school.

Jabbar is embarrassed but defensive. “I can read,” he says, trying to prove he’s already smart enough. He picks up a textbook--his sister’s manual on secretarial skills--and begins reading haltingly, without inflection. Geiggar is unimpressed. He asks a question about the passage that Jabbar cannot answer. “You don’t understand a word you’re reading,” Geiggar says. Jabbar stares blankly at the floor.

His teen-age sisters, feisty and talkative, join the chorus. Yes, they say, he hasn’t been going to school. All he wants to do is sleep. They use all the right words, saying that he needs an education, that he has to have the right attitude, that he’s got to prepare himself to get a good job. But neither sister has finished high school. The 19-year-old, a secretarial student at Trade Tech, a city-run, two-year trade college, is pregnant, due in a few months. The 18-year old dropped out when she became pregnant, more than two years ago. Now she stays home with her 2-year-old son. Both girls want to get their Graduate Equivalency Diploma (GED) but don’t know the first thing about how to do it.

Geiggar talks to the sisters about possibilities. He promises to try to get them some information about getting a diploma. They have an explosive spark of life about them. Jabbar, however, sits slumped on the couch, yawning and playing absent-mindedly with his nephew.

Their enthusiasm is not contagious. Rather, Geiggar predicts that it will be the boy’s lethargy that spreads. “That spark will soon die in them,” he says of Jabbar’s sisters, “because there’s no out, no programs set up for them.” In fact, if Geiggar hadn’t come calling for Jabbar, no one would have discovered them. And with his workload, he is often diverted by more pressing problems.

Geiggar leaves the house, looking dejected. “None of them are gonna make it,” he says of the kids, turning up the classical music in his pickup as he heads to his next stop. As he drives off, his eyes fix on a group of youngsters aimlessly walking the streets, dressed gang style in baggy gray pants and T-shirts. It is midmorning.

Geiggar is a product of the Los Angeles ghetto, born on 52nd Street and Long Beach Boulevard and raised with his seven brothers and sisters in the Pueblo del Rio projects of Los Angeles. He was, by his own description, a “miniature terror” as a child, and spent the years from 11 to 13 on his uncle’s farm in Arizona because his parents couldn’t handle him.

Nonetheless, he credits his mother with his success. “She used to sit at the table with me until I finished my work,” he says. “No matter how long that took.” He only occasionally sees that kind of attention from parents today. “When parents have had problem after problem with a child, they just get tired.”

Geiggar started working with children after getting his master’s degree in social work from Arizona State in 1973. He went back to the projects--Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs--and began working with elementary school students who had attendance problems. He often devoted weekends to outings or basketball games with the youngsters, as he still does.

Eventually, he moved on to high school-age children. “I miss the contact with the little kids,” he says. “(But) it made me sad. I moved on because I couldn’t be the father to all those little kids.” His workdays often extend into the evening; he works at a group home for troubled teen-agers at least two nights a week.

“I don’t have a real balance yet. I struggle real hard trying to make a balance. Yesterday, I must’ve ridden my bicycle 25 miles, down to the beach by myself. But then in my thoughts one of these kids will jump up, like a demon. If someone knows the secret, I wish they’d tell me.”

After several years of coordinating the Camp Returnee Program alone, Geiggar welcomed Neely in 1987. Friends since college, both men followed a similar path, starting on the elementary level with inner-city youth more than 15 years ago. In the Camp Returnee Program, they work with older boys--ages 14 to 18--and very few girls. They estimate the ethnic mix to be 50% black and the remaining 50% predominantly Latino, with some whites and Asians. Despite their frustrations, Geiggar and Neely go to work each day hoping to change a few lives.

“It’s in your own best interest to throw a life preserver to a drowning man, before he pulls you in with him,” Geiggar says. “Society has created this monster and now we’re trying to lock ourselves in, afraid that the monster’s gonna get us. I’m always aware that the monster is in me. If circumstances were different, it could be any of us.”