From Tragedy to Stirrings of Hope : Riot Aid Puts Youths to Work at UCLA--and Changes Some Lives

If Alfredo Sepulveda goes back to school after living the last two years as a dropout, you can credit the Los Angeles riots.

Without the riots, Congress would not have passed an emergency $500-million urban aid package last spring. Without the urban aid package, Los Angeles’ youth summer job program would not have been expanded to include UCLA. Without UCLA, Alfredo would not have met Stanley Patrick.

Patrick, the head of the College Library’s circulation department--where Alfredo was assigned to a four-week job--began telling the 16-year-old Eastside youth that he was wasting a good mind. Eventually, Alfredo decided to re-enroll in high school.

“When he told me he’d go back, I was almost in tears,” Patrick said.

To the people who run the employment program, that kind of story justifies a summer of logistic nightmares in which the usual 9,000 summer jobs set aside for Los Angeles city youths expanded to 17,000. Nearly 1,000 public agency work sites in Los Angeles strained to create enough positions to make use of an extra $16 million in federal aid.

The $5.47-an-hour jobs, most of which expire today, are rarely challenging. Their main purpose is to keep poverty-level youths busy.

But in some cases, young people are learning small but critical lessons about the world of work--lessons increasingly difficult to obtain in an economy chronically short on summer jobs: How to fax. How to run a floor buffer. How to call if you are going to be late. How to be polite to a boorish caller. How to file.

“It’s cool being here,” said Ismael Suarez, 18, who is doing clerical work in the university’s international studies office. “It’s my first office job. My typing’s gotten better and they’ve taught me how to work on a computer.”

The extra federal money allowed the city Community Development Department, which supervises the summer jobs program, to experiment.

Although the city traditionally funds hundreds of summer jobs at community colleges and universities in inner-city areas, UCLA--despite its immense resources--had been regarded as an impractical job site because of its distance from the homes of most of the eligible youths.

This summer, though, the city paid for buses to transport groups of 50 youths from several inner-city communities to Westwood. With less than two weeks’ notice after congressional approval of the extra federal money, UCLA officials created 250 jobs around the vast campus and hired a network of college-age counselors to keep in daily touch with the workers.

The university also arranged a series of workshops for the students on subjects ranging from writing resumes to planning their educational futures to deciphering Los Angeles politics.

Many of the young workers were not only receiving their first paychecks but setting foot on a university campus for the first time.

“Just being at college makes the job special--asking students about college, walking around the campus,” said Lakisha Reddic, 18, who is working in UCLA’s advanced academic placement office and will attend community college next fall.

Anthony Glover, 14, assigned to custodial work at the university, summed up his lesson. “This is a good field,” he said, sweat beading on his face as he broke for lunch, “but you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, because some people have a lower view of people who clean up. So you want to go to school and get a higher job. . . . Now I can see how my parents feel when they got to go out and work all day.”

Another 14-year-old, Alexey Klimochkin, who immigrated from Uzbekistan a year and a half ago, said he was asking as many questions as he could of UCLA students because he has decided that he wants to attend college here. “It’s good for me,” he said, lugging a dolly of recycled paper from the Center for Russian and East European Studies.

Davina Jackson, 17, found that work in a budget analyst’s office was less restrictive than she had imagined.

“I had some background on computers, but I’d never worked on an IBM before,” she said. “My boss is going to teach me Quattro Pro.”

One counselor, Darrin McLee--who works nights as a Department of Water and Power field inspector--was so impressed by the workers that he arranged a basketball tournament for them this week. He took half a dozen athletic trophies he had won as a teen-ager, bought new plaques and arranged to give the trophies to the winning competitors.

As in the real-life working world, not every summer worker excelled.

“Some of them haven’t developed good work habits yet,” said another counselor, Rico Barboza. “They have to be on time, and they have to call in if they’ll be late. I dock them for the hours they miss. They say, ‘But . . . ‘ and I say, ‘You didn’t call in. In the real world, nobody cares.’ ”

In the College Library, five youths worked for Stanley Patrick. During a training session, he noticed that Alfredo Sepulveda picked up the Library of Congress and UCLA computer systems as quickly as most of the college students who work in the library.

“He seemed incredibly bright. When he told me he’d dropped out, I told him it was a waste of a great mind. I asked him what he was going to do with his life,” Patrick said.

“He told me a lot of stuff,” said Alfredo, an extremely shy boy who said he stopped going to school after the eighth grade. “He told me if I don’t go to school, I won’t get a good job.”

Patrick made one request.

“I said I’d consider it a favor if he’d go back to school,” the library worker said. “I said I would help him, do whatever I could.

“The following week--when he told me he had decided to go back--it made the whole program worth it to me. I was hoping something like that would come out of it.”