VALUES WATCH : Kid Just Said No

Sixto Perez, 12, often goes hungry. His family is so poor that lunch frequently is nothing except tortillas. He lives with his mother and five sisters and brothers in a crowded trailer in La Puente. They are not on welfare. Sixto makes a few dollars helping at a neighborhood store; his older brother also works. His father, a farm worker, sends money whenever he can. Despite the grinding poverty, the sixth-grader said no to selling drugs.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department honored Sixto on Tuesday for his resolve and honesty. He also received a $500 savings bond from the Bank of California. The boy learned about the evils of drugs through a county program, SANE (Substance Abuse Narcotics Education), conducted in schools by sheriff’s deputies.

Sixto turned down a drug dealer’s offer of $100 to peddle dope at his school. A Times account of his honesty has prompted offers of food, clothes, shoes and money; a Bank of California branch in the City of Industry has offered to set up a trust fund.

The poverty that afflicts children like Sixto is becoming increasingly common as thousands of young families struggle for economic survival in this region of high housing costs. Countless young mothers, often with no help from the fathers, are trapped in poverty, forced to get by on low wages or welfare payments. Their children, like Sixto, go to bed hungry. Their children, like Sixto, go without proper clothes. Many youngsters--rich as well as poor--wouldn’t have resisted the temptation to sell drugs and make some easy money. Sixto did.