A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Today’s Agenda

Looking at the news, it’s easy to forget that there are still quiet towns in urban Southern California, the kind usually described as “a good place to raise kids.” But today, even the most placid suburbs are facing the pressures of change. Witness Downey, the subject of today’s In the Neighborhood. While it’s insulated by two rivers and three freeways from the surrounding megalopolis, this once-Anglo suburb is on the verge of having a majority of minorities. Can Downeyites keep their sense of community while managing their biggest challenge ever?

The quiet surface of Downey covers one sort of upheaval. The public involvement of some corporations in Rebuild L.A. may obscure an even tougher problem. In Community Essay, a black woman who’s a manager at a large L.A. company describes the anger and frustration of watching cash “guilt gifts” go to the rebuilding effort, while qualified people of color are still excluded from the level of upper management that makes real corporate decisions. Without knowing names or seeing statistics, it’s tough to tell how severe or deep this problem is. But the author’s sense of frustration, of having made all the right moves only to hit a brick wall, is palpable.

We’ve got DARE. We’ve got Impact. We’ve heard “Just Say No.”

Drug programs aimed at kids? We’ve got dozens. Do they work? Well, as usual, it’s a complicated answer. Some do, some don’t and nothing works for everyone. What works least are empty slogans that don’t offer kids alternatives, peer support and counseling. That, at any rate, is the conclusion of most of the students we talked to for today’s Youth column. As Phan Duong, 17, put it, “We need interesting programs that capture the attention of both the people people who are on drugs and the people who are drug-free, not the current dull and monotonous ones.” Give us less talk, kids say, and more help, especially from our peers. Who could quarrel with that?

Well, plenty of parents, for openers. The advice that peer counselors give can conflict with the religion, political beliefs or parenting views of adults. Kids often don’t want to talk to adults. Adults often don’t trust the judgment of kids. It was ever thus. But with lives in the balance, the stakes were never so high.

The clearest view of the inequities between rich and poor schools would come from a teacher who worked simultaneously in both schools. We don’t have that, but we have next best: In today’s Testimony, an award-winning teacher in a public school that’s arguably Orange County’s finest talks about his job compared to that of his wife, who teaches in a Santa Ana school with a huge dropout rate.

If your family is threatened by the dangers of your neighborhood, should you leave? Who could say no? Well, the Rev. Warner Traynham of St. John’s Episcopal church in South Los Angeles reminds us in Sermons that if everyone who can leave does so, the people who are capable of saving a community will be gone. And he reminds us that blood family may sometimes be subordinate to a higher sense of family.