Reading for a Future : Drug Center’s Program Brings Words to Functional Illiterates

When a friend threw a book into his jail cell and told him he was “exercising the wrong muscles,” Ismael Garcia, 31, thought it was time to get his life on the right track.

Garcia, a resident of the Golden Hill House, Crash Inc., a drug rehabilitation center in San Diego, is battling two problems that often go hand in hand: drug addiction and functional illiteracy, defined as having reading ability on a kindergarten to fifth-grade level.

Like many others who are functionally illiterate, Garcia wasn’t encouraged to read as a child. He felt “awkward, like a freak,” because he couldn’t keep up with his fellow students and was skipped over when it was time to read aloud.

Because his parents never completed elementary school, they couldn’t help him with his homework. Garcia felt his only answer was drugs.

“In junior high school, my escape was drugs because I didn’t like feeling the way I felt,” Garcia said, exposing his arms, elaborately decorated with tattoos he received from a prison buddy. “A counselor told me I was too big and too old to stay in junior high, so he passed me. I felt really inadequate because I couldn’t read, and I used (drugs) a lot.”

Garcia and 23 other Golden Hill House residents are changing their lives through a 2-year-old partnership between READ/San Diego and Crash Inc., (which stands for Community Resources and Self Help), in which volunteers and “learners” are matched according to their similar interests and spend three hours a week together improving reading and writing skills.

Almost half of the house’s 55 residents, who agree to live at the Golden Hill House for at least one year when they enter the free program, are functionally illiterate.

The literacy program at the Golden Hill House is one of two such READ/San Diego programs at three county-funded drug rehabilitation centers.

Audrey Escalderon, residential coordinator at the Golden Hill House, said learning to read is an integral part of drug rehabilitation because it builds self-esteem. “With drug addicts, self-esteem is so poor, and reading becomes a key issue in rehabilitation,” she said.

Because much of drug rehabilitation is reading self-help books, knowing how to read is almost imperative, Golden Hill House residents say.

READ/San Diego Coordinator Chris McFadden said there is a direct correlation between drug abuse and illiteracy.

“When you’re untrainable, under-educated and economically dependent, there’s got to be some correlations there,” McFadden said. “So you turn to substances to escape these frustrations. The correlation between crime and illiteracy is proven, and the crimes are drug-related, so, wherever there’s drugs, there will be illiteracy.”

But functional illiteracy is not just a problem for drug addicts. People with master’s degrees, chief executive officers and school teachers are not immune, McFadden said. One in five U.S. adults is functionally illiterate, studies say, and it is estimated that 350,000 adults in San Diego County cannot read and write well enough to meet everyday needs, he said.

People who are labeled illiterate cannot decode words, McFadden said, while functionally illiterate people read at anywhere from a kindergarten to a fifth-grade level. Many functionally illiterate people are unemployed because they can’t complete a job application, he said.

A Crash resident for nearly eight months, Kenny Delozier, 31, said he could hardly read the most simple books before his tutoring sessions with volunteer John Weinsheim. Like Garcia, who has been at Crash for 14 months, Delozier was ashamed of his low reading level and had been teased by his classmates. “My reading problem started in the fourth grade, when my father left, and I started ‘huffin’ (sniffing) glue,” he said. “I liked going to school, but I had no interest in reading. As I got older, I gave up on reading as long as I could make money.”

Delozier, a San Diego native, said a teacher once threw an eraser at him because he couldn’t read, so he threw a chair at her. The other students just laughed. Delozier was expelled out of every grade but fifth, and dropped out of school when he was a sophomore. Delozier got his high school diploma by cheating--he paid a man with heroin to take the General Equivalency Diploma exam for him.

“I’ve even cried and prayed before that I could read,” he said.

After being in and out of prison for the last 10 years, cheating his way through driver’s license tests and being a heroin addict, Delozier, a husband and father, is now doing what he once only dreamed about. He is reading at a sixth-grade level, wants to keep on reading for the rest of his life and become a truck driver, he said.

Garcia, who introduced Delozier to the Crash program when he met him at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, said he feels like a new man.

“I am turning my weaknesses into strengths. It was hard in the beginning,” Garcia said. “There have been many painful tragedies in my life.”

Garcia said he was once addicted to cocaine, heroin and methadone, a drug prescribed to help him quit using heroin.

“I have become a positive role model for my immediate family,” he said. “I know I need to be honest and accept what has happened and say it for what it is. . . . Before I got here, I lived in my car. It got that bad for me. I lost everything, I had no self worth and my self esteem was shot.

“Today I am proud of myself, and my self-esteem has boosted up a whole lot. I love what life is about now that I have a choice and have a clean and beautiful life, a productive life.”

Garcia, who expects to graduate from the Golden Hill House in April, said his reading comprehension skills were low before he sought help. He is now in his first semester at San Diego City College and wants to become a counselor.

Both men have nothing but praise for their reading tutors, and Weinsheim even calls himself Delozier’s confidant.

“My only challenge is being able to deliver to him,” Weinsheim said. “He is rip-roaring and ready to go. He wants to read as much as he can. . . . I’m learning a lot from Kenny about folks who have been in his position. He’s got a lot of guts.”