Comfort of Children : Sixth-Graders Offer Merchants Hope After Riots

For a few days in April and May, the children of Audrey McKiver’s sixth-grade class looked to grown-ups for guidance and got little more than disappointment.

It was the grown-ups looting the stores, they said, the adults setting their Hollywood neighborhood on fire.

And so, though they were only children, they decided to set an example. They walked their community’s streets, handing flowers and messages of hope to the people who lost their businesses. And when some of the shop owners cried, it was the children who comforted them.

Those 27 students were among about 70 sixth-graders to graduate from Santa Monica Boulevard Elementary School on Friday. Between commencement speeches and folk dances, the class presented a slide show of what their community had been through and what they had done to ease the pain.

“We felt sad for all of the merchants,” said 12-year-old Shona Gonzales, dressed in white. “We had to take action.”

The action began as a classroom discussion of the riots that followed the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial and evolved into a community project initiated by the sixth-grade class.

School psychologist Rachel Zevit said she spent the days after the unrest talking to students about how they were feeling. “A lot of places were badly scorched and leveled,” Zevit said of the neighborhood. “A lot were looted. The children were able to see the pain firsthand.”

They saw people who lost jobs and familiar places like the bike store and fashion outlet burned.

One of the things the children said caused them the most heartache was seeing adults doing things that they had always been taught were wrong.

“They tell us to get a good education, not to steal,” Shona said, “and look at what they were doing.”

Michael King, 12, remembered walking to a store and seeing someone he knew carrying an armload of stolen jeans. “He was talking about how he was going to sell them,” he said. “I felt sad.”

McKiver, the teacher, said the children decided to sell popcorn, ice cream and punch to raise money. They took a portion of their earnings and bought carnations for local business owners and contributed most of the remaining money to a school fund set up to promote the community project.

The children took a walk through their neighborhood, carrying poems and letters to offer encouragement to shop owners. And for a day, they were role models, acting as big brothers and sisters to a group of second-graders they took with them as they offered solace to the community.

“We felt good because the little kids could see us and do the same thing,” said 12-year-old Leonar Colindres. And he said he felt good for another reason. “We saw a lot of people cry but a lot of people were building.”

The slides showed the multiethnic band of classmates walking down Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue, posing with store owners, gazing at charred ruins and mangled security bars.

They could not communicate the damaged spirit that spawned the unrest, the children said, the poverty and racism that led to such frustration that people would burn down the very places on which they depended for food and services.

But, as they moved on to another grade and another school, they said they still had hope.

“We’re fighting a war against racism,” Leonar said, “and the only way to fight it is with friendship.”