EXXCEL Links Home With the School : Education: Pioneer effort by developers, USC and L.A. Unified provides low-rent apartments, on-site tutors and family counselors. Incentives are used in bid to break poverty’s cycle.

Around the first of next month, Camille Deal and her 8-year-old son, Kevin, will move into a brand-new apartment building in a riot-scathed South Los Angeles neighborhood.

They will be getting a lot more than a pleasant, affordable place to live.

They will have daily access to the complex’s study room, stocked with textbooks, computers and reference materials, and staffed with tutors and parent volunteers. Their neighbors will be doctoral students in education, family counseling or psychology--people they can turn to for help with school or personal problems.

They will get a break on the rent--up to $140 a month--if Kevin does well in school and participates in extra learning activities. A’s and Bs will net him cash, movie tickets or trips to Disneyland. And, if he meets minimum college entrance requirements by the time he graduates from high school, he will earn a scholarship to USC.

The Deals and 42 other families are about to become tenants in the EXXCEL (Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations) Apartments, the pioneering project of a couple of Orange County developers who have teamed up with USC and local public schools to help inner-city families find a route out of poverty.

With its coordination with the schools, encouragement of extra study time, required participation by parents and incentives for classroom success, the project incorporates many elements that education reformers have advocated for years. And with the planned addition of such services as a drop-in station for police officers on patrol and a small branch library open to the community, the project seeks to link home, school and community services, another popular reform idea.

“As educators, we’ve tried for a long time to build a closer link between school and home,” said USC School of Education Dean Guilbert C. Hentschke, who believes that this project is the first of its kind in the nation. “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

The university plans to staff the building with graduate students doing internships. The students will get rent-free apartments in exchange for providing such services as family counseling and tutoring. Hentschke said the project, which the university will help evaluate, also will enable researchers to test educational theories.

Hentschke admits that the program is not designed to reach the neediest children--those whose parents are unwilling or unable to help. “But it does offer a lot to those families who are committed to having their children do well but do not have all the resources and support they need,” he said.

The building’s owners, Kent Salveson and Dan Hunter, see the project as a prototype.

Salveson and Hunter have several EXXCEL projects in the pipeline--one in Huntington Park and three more in Los Angeles. Up to half the units in each project will be subsidized for low-income families, and all applicants will be screened for their desire to help their youngsters do well in school.

Using tax breaks and low-interest financing offered by government agencies in return for building affordable homes, the developers expect to reap a profit even with the education-boosting perks they are providing.

Three years of planning have gone into the first EXXCEL building, at 120th Street and Vermont Avenue, near the enclave of gracious homes known as Athens Heights. The four-story, 46-unit building was financed in part by the Century Freeway Housing Program, the first agency to back the developers’ ideas.

Salveson, 42, a former mortgage banker and lawyer in San Juan Capistrano, got the idea for an “academy hall” in 1987, when he teamed up with Hunter to put up an apartment building in the Atwater section of Los Angeles.

Every day he and Hunter, 46, a longtime builder in Dana Point, stopped for lunch at a fast-food restaurant down the street and struck up a running conversation with the woman behind the counter. A single mother of five who held down two minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet, she shared her dreams--and her troubles--with the two men.

“She was really struggling,” Salveson recalled. “She wanted a better life for her kids, wanted them to get a good education. But I realized there was just no way she could do it. She was decent and hard-working and she loved her kids, but she just was not equipped to provide what they needed” to break out of the cycle of poverty.

If families like hers could get help with child-rearing and education, Salveson reasoned, “we could make a fundamental difference in their lives and in our society.”

Salveson took his idea for affordable housing with a strong education and family component to USC, his alma mater, and began working with its School of Education and Upward Bound, a campus organization that helps poor, minority youngsters prepare for college.

When the developers found a site and financing, Salveson went to the neighborhood schools--West Athens Elementary, Henry Clay Junior High and Locke High--for guidance. He is hiring the schools’ part-time instructional aides to increase communication between school and home, help with the young tenants’ tutoring and monitor their attendance and academic performance.

“In the four years I’ve been here, these are the first building owners, other than a parent, who have come to the school and wanted to do something for the community,” said West Athens Principal Peggy Taylor Presley. “They have committed resources that will enrich our children’s lives and have lasting impact.”

Like Taylor Presley, Locke Principal Edward A. Robbs said he appreciated having a say in the education segment of the project from the beginning.

“There are lots of things we can do to connect to the kids’ homes (in the EXXCEL complex),” Robbs said during a recent community meeting on the campus to discuss the project. “If this thing works out the way we expect, it could be a model for the whole country.”

Jeffrey L. Clayton, director of USC’s Educational Opportunity Programs, sees another benefit in EXXCEL children having college students as neighbors or tutors.

“They’ll be almost like a peer group, somebody they can look up to and talk (with) about their goals and aspirations. . . . It will help them say to themselves, ‘Yes, I, too, can do these things,’ ” Clayton said.

The apartment complex was nearly finished when the city was rocked by the riots. On the corner of 120th and Vermont, the Boys market was looted, and a liquor store and a dry-cleaning business were burned down.

But nobody bothered the EXXCEL building.

“I like to think that’s because people know what this is all about,” Hunter said. “The word is out that this is going to be something for the community.”

Not surprisingly, Salveson and Hunter have been swamped with prospective tenants. When they began interviewing applicants this month, they had more than 200 requests for the apartments, which start at $210 a month (subsidized) for one bedroom and go up to $840 a month for three bedrooms. All were rented within days.

As the owners conducted interviews one hectic day recently, applicants peered into the apartments, full of the smells of fresh paint and new carpet. They explored the study room and the balcony-ringed, second-floor courtyard with its tot lot and space for barbecues with neighbors. They admired the security, the air conditioning and the decor.

But none of those was the biggest selling point for those who had just been accepted as tenants.

“Most of all, I like the education program. When they told me about that, that’s when I knew I wanted it,” said Deal as she compared one-bedroom units. Kevin attends a magnet school for gifted children, and she said she wanted to ensure his continued academic success.

“There is so much for the children here,” said Sheritta Glover, a bus driver for the city of Gardena and the single parent of a year-old girl. “I want the best for my child. I want her to grow up to be somebody, have a good job.”

In another corner of the building, Valencia Sowell and Preston Morrell were picking out a two-bedroom apartment for themselves and her daughters--Namesha, 10; LaCherryal, 9, and April, 7.

“My girls love school,” Sowell said. “This gives them a place to study and be with other kids who are studying hard.”

Teresa Sterling, mother of Kenneth, 11, and Keisha, 6, said she had been examining her budget for a way to hire a math tutor for her son.

“But now he can get what he needs right here in his own building,” Sterling said. “When I heard about how much they are helping the kids, that really got me. I knew right there I just had to move here.”