Oasis of Help, Hope : Community, School Band Together to Make Life Better in Tough Barrio

At Oak View Elementary School, babies wail at one part of campus while police officers thumb through files at another. A few yards away, volunteers collect cans of food at the campus community center while mothers take a class in parenting skills.

In another room, a social service worker gently talks to a 12-year-old girl, whose back is viciously marked with black and blue lines--inflicted by her mother, who did not believe her story of sexual abuse.

Oak View sits in the center of one of Huntington Beach’s toughest and poorest barrios, where gangs and drug dealers operate amid mammoth apartment complexes. But determined to make life a little easier, the community and the school have banded together to create a unique base of services that makes Oak View a haven in embattled surroundings.

Oak View is the site of a one-of-a-kind program in Orange County, where students and their families can receive social services at a school rather than travel across town or drive to Santa Ana. It has a community center with recreational activities for children and adults, a county-run day care, a police substation and nurses who screen babies and mothers.

“The school is an oasis in the community,” said Fran Andrade, the school’s community liaison. “It is a place to turn to for help.”

While state officials are just beginning to discuss how social services can be centralized in schools, Oak View has been doing it for years, said Andy Roberts, a program analyst for the county Social Services Agency.

“It is among the most innovative programs in the country and the first of its kind in Orange County,” Roberts said.

Indeed, the school is similar to state proposals that call for more integration of educational and social services programs. The proposals are advocated by Gov. Pete Wilson and Maureen DiMarco, state secretary of child development and education,

“It’s the kind of direction we believe we have to move toward,” DiMarco said.

In October, Oak View added another service that will help identify children who are abused or neglected. Social service workers will have offices at the school to give immediate attention to youngsters. The program, funded by a $450,000 grant from the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles, will also integrate all of the social services at the campus under one umbrella.

The new service will add another badly needed dimension to Oak View’s unique program, which Joan B. Buffehr, principal at Oak View for 15 years, said is largely geared toward its large underprivileged student population.

More than 95% of the school’s 700 students are eligible for reduced-price school meals, and nearly 90% of the students do not fully understand English, she said.

Because of those and other factors, many of the students are in culture shock when they arrive at the school, Buffehr said.

Some have never sat at a school desk or eaten American food. The students find comfort in bilingual teachers, who instruct in their native languages before moving them on to English. But when they go home, they have little or no privacy for study. Because their families are so poor, most live in mammoth, overcrowded apartment complexes overrun by gangs and drug dealers.

Sometimes, parents are frustrated and take their anger out on their children, Buffehr said. Every month, the Orange County Child Abuse Registry receives an average of 200 reports of child abuse from the Ocean View School District. Of those, most come from Oak View, she said.

Several local agencies are working with those families, but before the Oak View program, the agencies often failed to communicate with each other and sometimes missed the opportunity to share vital facts about cases, said Carol Kanode, a school trustee at Ocean View Elementary School District.

“We never really had a network between the agencies,” Kanode said. “With a program like this, we can develop a better understanding of what we can do for the families.”

Though operating less than two months, the program for abused and neglected children has already helped several students, said Provie Hull, one of two social service workers stationed at the school.

Take one 12-year-old girl, for example. Teachers at Oak View noticed her black-and-blue marks and immediately went to Hull. In a session with the social worker, the girl confided that a relative was sexually abusing her while he was staying with the family. The mother blamed her daughter for the abuse and whipped her across the back with an electric cord.

“I got a police officer, and we went immediately to the family’s place,” Hull said. “The mother told me that she thought it was up to the daughter to make the man respect her. We told her that it was the man’s fault and not her daughter’s.”

The girl’s mother agreed to evict the man from the apartment. The county would have removed her daughter otherwise, Hull said.

“We were able to take care of the problem right away,” Hull said. “It would have been so traumatic for the girl to sit and wait for us to come to the school. Instead, we were right there to help her.”

School officials eventually hope that the program will be extended to provide free health examinations for students so nurses can identify medical problems and get the children treatment at an earlier age. The nurses would provide head-to-toe physicals, including sophisticated heart-lung screenings.

“This school generates something that you don’t see often,” Roberts said. “Oak View is based on caring. Many of the families have no clothing, no food, and many can’t speak English. The school is clothing them, feeding them and educating them.

“The school goes beyond simple help. They think about the dignity of their children and families.”