Looking for Trouble, and Trying to Stop It : Education: Probation officer supervises at-risk students at two school sites in Inglewood’s tough southeast end.

There is the honor roll student who, with a couple of pals, pedaled back and forth between his Inglewood home and the beach cities, stealing out of garages.

“He’s got a better chance of getting straightened out because he (is) successful in a classroom,” Al Welch said of the young thief.

There is the youth with a cancer-stricken father who committed no crime but became so incorrigible at home and in school that he was made a ward of the court.

“If we do it right,” Welch declared, “and . . . we get the kid to respond, we can keep (him) out of the (criminal) system.”

Then, there is the gifted young athlete who was found riding in a car with an older youth who was a known criminal.

“He’s going to be a star,” said Welch, a former basketball player at San Jose State.

Welch’s job is to straighten out young lives before they become hopelessly twisted into the tragic tapestries of crime and self-destruction that lead to the California Youth Authority, state prison, or, sometimes, an early grave.

A Los Angeles County juvenile probation officer, Welch, 41, is assigned to Morningside High School and Monroe Junior High School, back-to-back school sites in the tough southeast end of the Inglewood Unified School district.

He is one of 19 officers working in a decade-old, highly regarded county program called the School Crime Suppression Unit, which posts officers directly onto school campuses in the belief that the most-effective probation is proximate and early.

“They can provide much more intensive supervision,” said Sandra Moss-Manson, director of the unit, which she calls one of the county’s most successful juvenile programs.

“They see the child every day,” she said. “If the child isn’t in school, they follow up by going to the home. . . . Other probation officers are lucky to see a child even once a month.”

Caseloads for the school officers are 25 to 40 youngsters each--Welch has 35 under his supervision. Other juvenile probation officers carry about 100 youths, Moss-anson said.

In last year’s budget crunch, the unit was slated to suffer cutbacks, but the County Board of Supervisors and area school officials were so convinced of its value that it was left intact, Moss-Manson said.

“What I really want to do,” said Welch, a friendly, tall man who earned a degree in finance but soon afterward switched to juvenile work, “is get to know my kids.”

“He has five sisters. He’s the baby,” he said, describing a youth who was put on probation for carrying a gun.

“His uncle is raising him, stout Jehovah’s Witness,” Welch said of another, a learning disabled boy caught breaking into a school.

“He used to ride buses all over Los Angeles (County),” he said referring to a third youth, a chronic truant until he came under Welch’s wing.

Welch is mindful of the often bleak circumstances--be it poverty, fatherless homes, or drug and gang-infested neighborhoods--that loom large in shaping the lives of his probationers.

“But I’m not one to make excuses for kids,” he said.

“I don’t want to see you ditching. I want to see you going back and forth to class,” he tells one Morningside student.

“What’s happening? How are the grades?,” he will ask over and again at the daily conferences with his Morningside probationers in the small cubicle in the school library that passes for his office.

If Welch is careful to make it clear to his mostly male roster of clients that he is dogging their day-to-day performance, he is equally careful to convey a sense of caring and affection.

“He’s very much like a surrogate father,” said Inglewood School Superintendent George J. McKenna. “He’s a good daddy.”

McKenna and Welch first met when McKenna was principal of Washington High School in Los Angeles, where Welch had some of his probationers.

When a probation officer is assigned full time to one school site, however, he or she becomes far more valuable to the district and to the youngsters, McKenna said.

“He can check their attendance, he can check their conduct, their grades and intervene,” the superintendent said. “Al cares and he seems to go above and beyond. He goes to their activities at night and on weekends, their athletic events, the awards ceremonies.”

Inglewood is the first district in the county program to put probation officers on junior high school campuses. In addition to Monroe, there is also an officer assigned to counsel probationers at the other Inglewood junior high, George W. Crozier.

Increasingly the focus is on early intervention.

“If you can divert children from 7 to 11 (years old), you can probably rescue them,” McKenna said. “Very few children will join a gang when they’re seniors in high school. (It is) at the junior high level . . . where the kids are the wanna-bes. They imitate the (gang) behavior.”

The district and the county have made Welch an integral part of the school staff. Besides his probationers, he regularly counsels about 30 other youngsters who are judged to be at-risk for dropping out or becoming delinquents.

As part of the school community, Welch is also available to talk with teachers and parents.

“This morning I got a phone call from a parent whose daughter didn’t come in until 1 a.m.,” said Welch, who had never before met the mother or the daughter. The mother, convinced that her daughter was becoming difficult to handle, asked a school police officer for advice. The officer steered her to Welch.

“I’m . . . viewed as a person who can help kids,” Welch said. “They see me as probation officer, they see me as a counselor, and I hope they see me as a role model.”