Garden Helps Students Grow Away From Gang Influences

Red wire holds the four corners of the small sign to the chain-link fence that runs alongside Stanford Elementary School here. The sign, only a piece of laminated paper, bears an inscription handwritten in red and black ink.

“We dedicate this small garden,” it says in both English and Spanish, “to (those) who have died because of gang violence. We dedicate ourselves to life, harmony and peace.”

It is 11-year-old Gary Vega’s turn to keep the flower garden thriving under the sizzling summer sun, but the gray plastic pail used to haul water from the faucet to the garden is too heavy to be lugged around by just one pre-adolescent arm.

“Jesse, come on, help me water the plants,” Gary hollers.

Jesse Gomez, a hefty 11-year-old with charcoal black hair and eyes to match, takes off across the asphalt to help carry nourishment to the marigolds, zinnias and few drooping pink petunias that make up the garden.

Eleven-year-old Oscar Precihi, meanwhile, is explaining how he and his sixth-grade classmates at the year-round school did their planting.

“We dug it up first so we could get all the things out, the rocks,” Oscar says. “Then, we put some, like, blue things in.”

“Food,” declares Joana Silva, a 10-year-old who likes to be precise.

The garden, which lies in two strips alongside a short driveway into the school parking lot, originally was to be part of a classroom lesson on the dangers of global warming.

But when Oscar began crying in class recently, the focus switched to something more immediate in the lives of these youngsters, who live on South Gate’s west side, an area barely distinguishable from the gritty South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods next door.

It was a Monday morning when Oscar’s tears overflowed, their teacher Bert Jungmann recalled. He was giving a lesson on the difference between attentive and inattentive listening when he realized his students’ attention was somewhere else.

“He’s crying,” the youngsters began whispering to their teacher.

Jungmann said he saw tears flowing down Oscar’s cheeks. The child’s 21-year-old cousin had been killed the Friday before in West Covina in what police called a gang-related shooting.

Jungmann said he gathered the youngsters into a circle to talk about Oscar’s grief and in the course of the conversations it was revealed that another member of the class, Mark Cabrera, had also lost a relative to gang violence less than a year ago.

Mark’s 30-year-old cousin died last October when gang members fired at a rival in the parking lot of a Los Angeles laundry. Mark’s cousin had just emerged from the laundry with his 1-year-old child, whom he managed to save by shoving the child into his car.

As they talked about grief, violence and gangs, Jungmann said, the youngsters came up with the idea of dedicating the flower garden and the two trees they were planting to those killed in gang violence. The whole class took part in writing the inscription, the youngsters said.

Then they did something else. They wrote a pledge saying they would never join gangs, made individual copies of it and affixed their names.

The pledge says: “Almost every day someone gets killed because of gang violence. In order not to place myself, my family or friends in danger I . . . pledge to myself, to my classmates and my family never to be involved with gangs.”

“When we pass by the garden,” said Gabriela Quinones, “We can remember our pledge not to belong to gangs.”