Student Activism Returns With a New Look in ‘90s : Trends: Santa Monica youths focus on community problems and are willing to work within the system.

For retirees on their way to early bird dinners or actors pausing for cappuccino at trendy cafes, there is a menacing sight in the beach community of Santa Monica. Several downtown storefront buildings have been covered with graffiti and taken over by a group of tough-looking teen-agers.

Nearly every weekday afternoon the youths gather to kill time and hash out ways to thwart the local school board, the police and anyone else who gets in their way. Some girls strut around in tight jeans, combat boots and fingernails painted shocking shades of purple and green. Some boys don baggy pants, Raiders jackets and baseball caps turned backward.

Despite appearances, these youths are not Crips or Little Locos or members of any of Southern California’s notorious gangs. They are participants in Kids City, a youth activist program established in 1990 by the city of Santa Monica as “organizing headquarters” for dozens of youths, ages 11 to 18.

Unlike young people in the ‘80s who passively watched their communities deteriorate or college students in the ‘60s who fought the Establishment over a war in a distant land, these 1990s teen-agers are working with adults to solve knotty problems affecting their lives.

This winter, Kids City kids persuaded the school board that teen pregnancy and AIDS posed such serious health hazards that all high school students should be provided with condoms on request. Two weeks later, the youths got the City Council to kill a plan by the Police Department to impose a curfew on minors.

A more effective way to combat crime and drive out gangs, the teens said, would be to build a community youth center on the bottom level of a city parking structure, which the youths at Kids City are now designing with the help of city architects.

It may be fitting that such activities, even on the part of teen-agers, would flourish in a community that has been dubbed the People’s Republic of Santa Monica because of its liberal politics and grass-roots activism.

Kids City is certainly unusual, but it is also part of a national trend: a growing number of youths tackling community problems.

Whether voicing opinions in teen news publications or participating in local politics, today’s youths are getting more involved in more issues--at a younger age--than ever before, according to experts.

“We are witnessing the emergence of a small but rapidly growing minority of students who are concerned about a variety of social issues and who are inclined to become actively involved in working with these issues,” said Alexander S. Astin, a UCLA professor of education, who has directed an annual survey of college freshmen for the past 25 years.

Reviewing the trends over 25 years, Astin and his colleagues have found what they describe as “a resurgence of student interest in influencing social values and changing the political structure” and a simultaneous decline in the “excessive materialism and competitiveness” that they say had characterized youths of the past two decades.

The current crop of college freshmen, according to the survey, is “more protest-prone even than students in the late 1960s. Not only have more of them participated in demonstrations in high school, but more of them anticipate getting involved in protests during their college years.”

Based on responses from 210,739 youngsters as they begin their freshmen year of college, the UCLA survey, co-sponsored by the American Council on Education, is perhaps the most authoritative measure of student attitudes nationwide.

Today’s youth are often troubled by the same issues that concern adults, and perhaps the single biggest worry is the environment. The percentage of students in the UCLA-ACE survey who said it “essential” or “very important” that they do their part in cleaning up the air and saving the rain forests in Brazil has doubled over the past four years, to nearly 34%.

From Irvine to Indianapolis, students as young as 12 and 13 are not just voicing opinions but are seeking solutions to problems such as crime, unemployment and drugs. In some cases, youths are doing what they have always done. They are volunteering their services to those less fortunate. But in other cases, they are getting involved in community politics.

In Orange County, teen-agers have collected thousands of dollars worth of food for the homeless, shoes for the poor and books for the children of war-torn countries. Students also have organized self-help drug and alcohol programs and appeared in anti-drug public service films that have run in movie theaters.

Junior high and high school students in Indianapolis are organizing opposition to city cuts in social service and recreational programs for youths. And they are trying to establish a youth activist organization that will take on issues similar to those tackled by Kids City.

Cuts in education, social services and recreational programs have combined with rising crime and unemployment to make many neighborhoods almost unlivable for today’s youths.

“It’s reassuring, given that adults haven’t been able to solve these problems, that young people themselves are beginning to search for answers,” said Robert Clampitt, founder of Children’s Express, a syndicated youth news service started in New York 16 years ago.

The first step often is articulating what the problems are, which students are doing through a new kind of publication: the youth community newspaper. More of these publications have sprung up as budget cuts in recent years have forced school newspapers to fold.

Children’s Express--with staff members ranging in age from 13 to 18--has bureaus and school-based programs operating in Atlanta, Boston, Harlem, Indianapolis, Louisville, Oakland and San Diego, with similar ventures planned for several other cities.

As they begin to cover the 1992 presidential race, the youths who write for Children’s Express are demanding that candidates tell them what they intend to do about family planning, the failure of which results in about 1 million teen pregnancies every year; health insurance, which is unavailable to one in every four children; violent crime and accidents, which take the lives of more than 12,000 youths a year, and education reform, which affects the nation’s nearly 64 million youths.

Youth Communications, a teen news organization created in Chicago in 1977, has recently spawned a dozen local teen newspapers that tackle such issues as incest, police violence and interracial marriage. Among them are Los Angeles-based LA Youth, which last year started El Original, said to be the first bilingual teen community paper in the United States.

Many publications are being supported by foundation grants, and the teen organizations are supported by government grants, sometimes at the prompting of educators and policy-makers who were themselves former activists.

Although there may be similarities between student activism of the ‘60s and the youth involvement of the ‘90s, there also are substantial differences, said Ron Wilkins, 46, a youth organizer at Kids City.

Activists of the ‘60s were more likely to be in college and more willing to fight the system, whereas students today are more likely to be in high school or junior high and are willing, if not eager, to work within the system, Wilkins said.

Today’s activists are “much younger--sort of activists in training,” said Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who as founder of Students for a Democratic Society is one of the city’s most famous graduates of ‘60s activism.

Elena Chavez, program coordinator of Kids City, said her job is to give young people the skills to speak out on whatever issues are important to them--and get some action.

The notion of a Kids City began several years ago when Santa Monica surveyed 1,200 youths and 400 adults to find out how “unlivable” their community had become for children, said Julie Rusk, Santa Monica’s acting community and neighborhood services manager.

As in many communities, the top three problems facing Santa Monica’s teen-agers were substance abuse, gang violence and unemployment, the survey found.

Nearly half of the students--48%--said they could not participate in recreational activities they preferred because they lacked money and transportation and because facilities were inadequate or nonexistent.

With an annual budget of only slightly more than $200,000 for staff salaries, supplies and rent for the old storefront buildings, Kids City runs workshops in political organizing, public speaking, and dealing with public officials and the media. Although city employees provide the initial training, the idea is for youths themselves to be employed part time after school to train other youths.

Rather than relying on the kind of students who usually run for student office, Kids City has tried to draw a range of students, especially members of minority groups.

“It’s kind of a place for the unpopular to make themselves popular . . . just because they take on pretty popular issues,” said one high school student.

But the success of Kids City has surprised even its creators.

“Here I am sitting in City Hall, allowing students to organize, in fact, encouraging students to organize opposition against another city agency,” Rusk said. “It’s crazy, I know, but something very important is happening here.”

This winter when the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District was debating a program that would have required parental permission for teen-agers to get condoms, about two dozen students from Kids City painted a sobering picture of what happens when sexually active teens have unprotected sex.

More than half of the high school’s student body is sexually active, the students said, citing national studies. Many students will not use protection if they have to ask an adult for permission, the students said, citing their own experiences.

Josefina Santiago, a UCLA student who graduated from Santa Monica High School last year and is a trainer at Kids City, told of four friends whose plans were ruined by unwanted pregnancies.

Costa Kerras, 14, said depriving youths of access to condoms is indirectly exposing them to AIDS. “No parent should have the right to condemn their children to death,” he said.

The board agreed to give students access to condoms at school, beginning Friday.

Two weeks after the school board voted, the City Council took up Police Chief James T. Butts’ plan to impose a nightly curfew as a tool to fight gangs. Again, a small and well-organized contingent from Kids City appeared, not with slogans or placards but with reasoned arguments.

Curfews will not curtail gangs much, the youths argued, but would have an enormous impact on other teen-agers, who could not be out late at night without risk of being picked up by police.

They also argued that police would tend to confront minority youths and those who happened to wear fashionable styles--Raiders jackets and baseball caps turned backward--that would cause them to be mistaken for gang members.

The City Council turned down the police chief’s proposal on a 3-3 vote.

There are dozens of other items on the Kids City agenda: race relations (“One or two ‘ethnic heritage’ courses in school will not do the trick,” one youth said) and gang diversion (“Give teen-agers something to do, give them a way to earn a living,” another youth said).

But one of their most important steps, the youths said, will be to change the name of their organization--which was not their invention, but that of adults.

As one young man put it: “Kids City has to go because kids is a derogatory, disrespectful term. . . . You can call us youths or teens or young men but don’t call us kids anymore. We deserve more respect than that.”

SCHOOL OFFERS CONDOMS: Santa Monica High becomes the first school in the county to distribute condoms to students. B1