Retiree Wants to Teach Life’s Lessons at Sea : Education: A former teacher proposes a two-week sailing program to help inner-city youths learn teamwork and responsibility. He has a yacht to use. Now he needs to raise the money to get his idea afloat.

Few inner-city children ever get a chance to feel the biting Pacific Ocean breeze while steering a 65-foot schooner to Santa Catalina Island. But if Jim Gladson gets his way, a donated yacht will become a classroom for 20 students during two weeks each year.

The recently retired Los Angeles Unified School District science teacher used sailing as a teaching tool for 20 years, since he first bribed a class with a sailing trip to get the students to settle down and concentrate.

“Frankly, I felt I was giving the kids a boat ride,” Gladson said. “But it became clear to me that I had an educational venue that was made-to-order. The kids saw it as an adventure--the real world.”

Gladson, a San Pedro resident, is determined to make that adventure available to disadvantaged youth with a new program he plans to launch in September called the California Consortium for Ocean Academic Sail Training, or COAST. But the fate of the program depends on whether Gladson gets funding for the project.

He believes that youths who might be attracted to street gangs for a sense of identity could find wholesome adventure in sailing. In performing individual tasks on the boat and learning to conquer the ocean, the youths can’t help but learn teamwork and responsibility, he said.

“Everyone comes on board with a clean slate,” Gladson said. “It doesn’t matter what your reputation was on the street or in school; it all disappears when you come on board.”

After 32 years as a science teacher at alternative schools, Gladson retired in December and now works as a full-time volunteer at the Los Angeles Maritime Institute.

He established the institute in January to create programs to introduce youths to sailing. The Maritime Institute is affiliated with the Los Angeles Maritime Museum and has donated office space to Gladson’s program.

For the past 20 years, Gladson coordinated sailing programs in the alternative schools, taking students on daylong trips along the coast once a week and weeklong trips to Santa Catalina Island once a semester. The youths organized bake sales and car washes to raise money for food on the excursions. The cost was usually about $5 a day per child, Gladson said.

When he retired from Mid-City Alternative School near downtown Los Angeles, Gladson decided to make the opportunity available to youths who would otherwise never experience sailing but needed a positive way to satisfy their hunger for adventure.

“In the business of changing from a kid to an adult, there comes a time when you reach out and do things a little bit scary,” Gladson said. “There is a need for growing and getting away from the nest, and there is definitely a need to set your own path.”

Gladson said his program will be an attempt to provide a positive opportunity for adolescents to test themselves.

“As soon as they realize the ocean is deeper than they can stand, they feel the sense of adventure,” he said.

For the first week of the proposed two-week program, the students would take daylong sailing trips around the Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor, during which they would “learn the ropes and become familiar with the vessel and its motion,” Gladson said.

On the last day of the first week, the group would decide where it wants to go for the following week’s five-day voyage. During that time, the youths could sail to Santa Catalina Island, Newport Beach, Santa Barbara or San Diego, Gladson said.

To get youths for the program, Gladson will rely heavily on church and community leaders, as well as counselors of programs for disadvantaged youths to recruit students between the ages of 10 and 13. Although the program will target students who would like the experience but cannot afford it, Gladson will not turn down students who can afford the full fee. He projects the daily cost per student will be $40.

Larry Green, owner of Protocol Engines Inc., a computer-chip manufacturing company based in Santa Clara County, is willing to donate his 65-foot Herreshoff schooner, the Gallant, to the program provided that Gladson can raise $50,000 to move the vessel from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles Harbor, bring it up to Coast Guard standards and cover basic operating expenses. The repair work would include adding new wiring and installing additional lifesaving equipment.

“I intend to put the vessel in Jim’s hands so inner-city children can enjoy it,” Green said. “I’ve observed serious problems in the inner city, and I think a sail-training program is a step in the right direction. It teaches seamanship, teamwork and self-esteem.”

If Gladson does not raise the necessary funds, he plans to use his own 42-foot ketch, the Dubloon, for the classes. However, because his boat is smaller, he would have to cut the number of students from 20 to fewer than 10. He hopes donations will cover expenses for food and water on the five-day excursions.

The cost to the students? Nothing. They would just show up, Gladson said. He and his volunteer assistant, Shelle McDole, have applied for corporate grants and are asking for donations to launch the program.

In addition to applying to major corporations, “we are targeting all shipping and sailing companies in the area,” McDole said.

Gerald Garner, a science specialist for the Los Angeles School District who is familiar with Gladson’s sailing program at Mid-City Alternative School, said he was impressed with how Gladson wove physical science, meteorology and marine biology into the sailing expeditions.

The students also developed a positive self-image and a sense of responsibility by “getting kids who have never been challenged to do something they are capable of doing,” Garner said.

“The program will stretch individuals to do things they would not be exposed to,” he said. “For kids never placed in a situation to function in a cooperative manner for the group good, the synergy that will come out of this is important.”

Nataka Spencer, a 17-year-old junior at Mid-City Alternative School, signed up for his first sailing class with Gladson when he was 14 years old.

“I took the class because everyone said it was fun and I should try it,” he said.

Spencer continued to sign up for the class for two years. “Sailing made me more open to what’s around me,” he said, adding that he began to appreciate the small things, like the weather.

“You notice the sky is blue,” Spencer said, whereas before “I’d just put on a jacket, walk outside and keep going.”

Chipper Pastron signed up for Gladson’s sailing class 16 years ago at Area D Alternative School in Mar Vista.

“It was the first time I had been in a situation where I had to deal with peers--we had to work together to achieve what needed to be done,” the 29-year-old restaurant entrepreneur said.

He said Gladson taught him about leadership and working together toward a common goal, qualities he still uses in managing seven restaurants sprinkled throughout Pasadena, Burbank and Thousand Oaks.

“Sometimes you take a class and it’s an uplifting educational experience that turns you on to learning,” Pastron said. “Sailing did that for me.”