Requiem for a Last-Chance School : EVEN THE BEST IDEAS CAN’T OVERCOME THE BUREAUCRACY, THE BUDGET AND THE APATHY IN A TROUBLED SCHOOL DISTRICT.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER SCHOOL BEGAN LAST YEAR, ETHEL MCCLINTON TOOK HER 17-grandson to see Van Christopher, the new director of alternative education for the Compton Unified School District. McClinton was worried. The teen-ager, Omar Saunders, wasn’t enrolled. He was getting into fights. He insisted that no school was safe for him. He seemed on the verge of dropping out.

Omar, a tall, pudgy and handsome youth with a bad temper, sat silently as his grandmother told Christopher how he had been sent to Juvenile Hall for carrying a butcher knife. He had armed himself after some toughs had jumped him and broken his jaw. He was still worried about another run-in with his street enemies.

McClinton, a spry woman with nine children, 24 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, had more on her mind. She was going into the hospital for triple-bypass surgery the next day. But for now getting Omar into school was all that mattered. “I have to get him enrolled before his juvenile court date next Monday,” she said.

As he listened, Christopher, a haughty, bearded man, was reminded of how deeply he hated the public education system. He hated the impersonal, mass-production mentality that so often gave up on a teen-ager like this. Hell, he was fond of saying, The System wants them to drop out.

Christopher, 62, burned with the conviction that no potential dropout was beyond redemption if schools would only pay more attention to the violence and poverty that surrounded inner-city children. A lot of educators said the same thing. The difference was that as the 1991-’92 school year dawned, Christopher was being given a rare, high-profile chance to put up or shut up.

The Compton school district, one of the lowest-achieving urban school systems in California, had hired Christopher for $77,000 a year to repair and expand its network of loosely structured alternative-education classrooms. These four-hour-a-day high school programs were aimed at misfits, kids judged too violent or hyperactive or irresponsible for regular school, the ones most likely to drop out and drift through life.

With a $1.3-million budget, Christopher had recruited a team dedicated to keeping potential dropouts in school and luring others back. Fred Williams, a onetime gang member who gained widespread attention by retrieving hundreds of dropouts while working as a teacher’s assistant in Watts, would now comb Compton’s streets. Cheryl Greer, a teen-age mother in Compton two decades ago, would run the district’s teen mothers program. Cassie Holman, who’d taught 24 years in the Compton district before quitting in disgust a year earlier, would return to create a “middle college” high school, aimed at salvaging students like Omar Saunders, who were in danger of washing out but had the smarts to get back on track. Mattie Harris-Evans, another teacher who’d left the district, would walk the halls of Compton’s juvenile court, making sure young criminals were placed in an alternative school after they served their time. Howard Holt, an educational consultant who specialized in computerized student assessment, would methodically test each child to chart improvement.

Together, they vowed, they would build an educational sanctuary. They would put children first. They would make The System work.

It did not turn out that way. Their dreams went to hell, splattered with the bickering and bitterness that have become the hallmark of the 28,000-student Compton school district, a system whose reputation hit rock bottom in late September when Gov. Pete Wilson threatened to put it under state control if it didn’t improve its academic and financial performance.

The children Christopher had targeted for redemption wound up in a glorified holding tank. Promises made to them were broken. Progress, when it came, was agonizingly slow. More than half the approximately 500 students who enrolled in the alternative education program during the school year dropped out before June.

The System--the educational bureaucracy--failed. Not because it was bloodless, but because it was a collection of human beings who were caught up in myriad personal drives, solemnly professing devotion to the welfare of children, yet often so obsessed with their own survival that they ignored them.

When places like Compton burned during last April’s riots, many rioters’unspoken checklists of anger included the belief that inner-city schools are inferior, hopeless caverns that process young people rather than educating them. When Molotov cocktails were being thrown at markets, nobody yelled, “This is for the school system!” Nobody had to.

“WHO DO YOU LIVE WITH, SON?” CHRISTOPHER ASKED OMAR SAUNDERS ON that morning last fall.

“My grandparents,” the boy replied. “I didn’t get along with my mother’s husband, and my father says it’s too crowded where he lives.”

It was an old story: The parents broke up, or broke down, the grandmothers inherited the children and the school district inherited a child groping as much for direction as education. Did they warn you about this when they handed you your teaching credential, Christopher asked. Hell no. The whole concept of educating kids had to change, he often said. “We’re antiques! Children don’t believe we care about them. We have to treat them like we’re extended family. We ought to be spending half our time in the classroom and half our time in their houses.”

A quarter-century ago, as a high school teacher in South Los Angeles, Christopher had counseled student leaders during their walkouts to protest biased textbooks and a paucity of black administrators. He’d prided himself for being on the side of so-called troublemakers ever since.

Many educators dismissed Christopher himself as a troublemaker. They marked him as a hot-dog with poor administrative skills, a man whose empathy for bad kids blinded him to the hard reality that in this era of shrinking resources, good kids--the ones with a chance to get out of high school and at least get some training at a community college so they could make more than six bucks an hour--needed every drop of attention.

The issue before Christopher was where to put Omar, whose record showed that he had academic promise. Christoper decided to place him at Cassie Holman’s middle college, which was to be set up at Compton Community College. The middle college was a philosophical linchpin of his plan: Put underachieving C and D students and their high school teacher on a two-year college campus. Give them four hours of standard high school courses in a more serious atmosphere that would encourage them to concentrate and think about their futures.

Middle college would begin in a couple of weeks, according to Christopher’s schedule. For the time being, Omar could enroll in Compton’s continuation school at Chester Adult School, where students who’d been tossed out of regular high schools took a half day of daily instruction. Christopher wanted to develop a “transition center” to help violence-prone kids ease into continuation school. They would receive 60 days of intensive, computer-assisted testing, remedial instruction and counseling--sort of a buffer between school and the rage of the outside world.

It was at Chester where real life interfered.

The school sits in the middle of gang turf claimed by Bloods. Omar had grown up in a Crenshaw neighborhood that was Crips turf, and he was--as the kids say--”known” in some Compton neighborhoods. So Omar was enrolled in “independent study,” a home-study program intended for students who had to work or were too socially unstable to be inside a classroom. It was precisely the opposite of what he needed. In the coming weeks, scores of other new alternative-school students who belonged in a classroom, who needed the attention and discipline of a teacher, would be enrolled in independent study simply because they lived in Crips neighborhoods, unable to venture safely into a school in Bloods territory.

Like Omar, they were told that it would be only a couple of weeks until a safe classroom would be ready. The wait turned out to be six months. The wait for a middle college on the grounds of Compton College continues, 13 months later.

THOSE WHO ATTENDED THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL AT CHESTER ADULT School found it to be a joke. A dangerous joke. In previous years, the district had operated continuation schools at each of its three high schools. Now, in 1991, all continuation students were being placed at Chester, with nowhere near enough room to hold them. Kids overflowed the minimal classroom space and did classwork at desks placed in the hallways. They violated the dress code, loitered and got into fights. The district had not assigned an administrator to the site. Independent-study teachers, who met once a week with students who studied at home, were jammed into tiny offices, two teachers per room, with no facilities for private conferences. For teachers, it was immersion in anarchy.

Van Christopher was playing craps with The System. He was gambling that the chaos would be brief. He figured his middle-college and transition-center proposals were so creative that the Compton School Board would immediately provide the extra space for them. He was counting on promptly moving them, along with the regular continuation program, from the crowded Chester campus to a run-down, unused district complex on 118th Street at the edge of Watts. Later, he thought, the middle college would move to Compton College. He was anticipating additional funds to buy computers and software to track the progress of low-skilled students. He was counting on the man who had hired him, Compton School Supt. J. L. Handy, to pressure the board for these advances.

But Handy, who had been hired by the district early in 1991 from the Sacramento City Unified School District, had other things on his mind. His survival, for one. The Compton board, which once had a reputation for letting superintendents have their way, was split between members who wanted to fire Handy for poor administrative performance and those who were satisfied. Handy didn’t have the clout to push for more money. Besides, California school districts weren’t expanding programs, they were slashing them.

Compton received a stipend of $4,400 per student from state and federal sources, slightly more than the state average, but it had a history of squandering money. In early 1992, the school board fired the district’s business manager and ordered an audit, which found that staff members responsible for school cafeterias and stadium construction had run up millions of dollars in deficits, kept sloppy records and in some cases lied to the school board to cover up their errors.

Inside the classroom, performance was just as bad. Students throughout the district were scoring lower than 99% of California children in basic achievement tests. A state Department of Education study found a woeful lack of commitment to education among teachers and administrators at many district schools. At one Compton high school, for example, less than 10% of the entering freshmen graduated four years later--and of those who graduated, less than half had a C average or better. The district’s dropout rate rose 35% between 1986 and 1991 while the statewide rate was falling. The parents who sent these children to school were in the bottom sixth of California parents educationally. They were also remarkably transient: In a single year, 5,000 children moved into or out of district schools. The huge influx of Latinos into Southern California had created a student body that was 56% Latino while 70% of the teachers were African-American and most others were white.

THROUGHOUT THE DISTRICT, BUREAUCRATIC TURF WARS AS PRIDEFUL AS street gang rivalries held Christopher’s ideas hostage. The teachers’ union was furious at him for staffing his program with outsiders. Christopher was contemptuous of the union for defending teachers he regarded as lazy or lacking zeal. The union was also upset with Handy, whom it considered an autocrat. And everybody seemed to be upset with Fred Williams, the educational vigilante who wanted to hit the streets, find the kids who weren’t going to school and bring them in.

Williams, 33, a stocky, charismatic man with closely cropped hair, had become a celebrated “dropout retrieval” specialist in Watts. He’d made the Oprah Winfrey show. He’d been a consultant for the film “Boyz N the Hood.” Christopher considered Williams the spiritual foundation of his new program--a fact that frosted many of Christopher’s teachers. Williams didn’t work, they complained, he just roamed. School district cops thought Williams was too supportive of gang kids. Christopher could see a rift developing within his staff but did nothing about it. They didn’t understand Fred’s talent, he’d say. Christopher, who’d met Williams when they both worked at a Watts middle school, had been become enamored of Williams’ hard-edged idealism and microscopic knowledge of gangs.

A week after school started, Williams addressed an assembly of about 100 alternative-school students: kids who didn’t know where Mecca is, or who Ralph Nader is, or who Benedict Arnold was. Kids who, at 15, had trouble not only with reading but with subtraction. Kids who didn’t know how many graduation credits they had and were rarely academically tested because they were absent so often. Kids who hid their insecurities behind a swagger. Kids who were coming out of county juvenile probation camps and faced returning if they didn’t stay in school. Williams wanted to form a bond with them, but he also wanted to challenge them. He spoke haltingly, with a slight stutter.

“If you expecting somebody to fall in love with you because you’re young, you can forget it,” he said. “Ain’t nobody taking care of us at all. We got to come up with our own ways of taking care of business. Ain’t nobody gonna do a damn thing for you.”

They listened quietly as he spoke gravely about the time, at age 14, he’d shot a boy to death. “I still see that boy’s family. They see me all over, and I see this brother’s family, and it hits me--you know what I’m saying? Have any of y’all ever killed anybody? You got no idea how it feels. You got to understand, boy. You ever heard the old saying, count your blessings? I’m counting ‘em right now.”

He asked for a show of hands of students who were familiar with the Regional Occupational Program, a key link in the district’s school-to-workplace training. Of 100 students, perhaps half a dozen raised a hand. Williams was exasperated.

“Y’all too young to waste your time,” he said.

A trio of girls, each wearing gold jewelry, were taunting Williams from the audience, asking whether you got paid when you took ROP classes.

“Yeah, you get paid,” Williams said.

“How much?” one of the girls asked.

“You get paid by getting your school credits!” Williams said impatiently. “Listen: If you spend all your time now trying to make some, you never get your shit right. You’ll be stuck 10 years from now. You tell me--how you gonna make it?”

“ I’m getting paid,” one of the girls said.

“What do you do? Do you work?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t pay no rent.”

“But I’m getting paid, baby,” the girl said darkly. Williams and everybody else knew the jargon: She was selling drugs.

“Hey,” Williams said. “Look at the long run! That’s why we ain’t making it now! Most of you will bullshit and joke. What you need to do is make some plans for your life. Look at this stuff!” he said, holding up the ROP literature. “Check it out! Occupational programs! The future!”

CHRISTOPHER’S PLEA FOR DISTRICT OFFICIALS TO BREAK THE LOGJAM AT Chester by opening up the 118th Street complex for his alternative-education kids wasn’t going anywhere. The message kept coming back: Stay at Chester, work with what you have.

But what Christopher had wasn’t working.

One day at Chester, an overweight 14-year-old Latino gang kid named Jorge got mad at a black gang member, left school in his old Cutlass Supreme and came back with several guns under the front seat. Fred Williams caught him and dragged nine members of the two gangs into an office. There’d been some off-campus gunfire between the gangs. Nerves were on edge. Jorge said the black gang member had insulted him.

“All I said to him was, ‘Whassup?’ ” the black gang member said.

“He said, ‘Whassup, big boy ?’ ” said Jorge. “I know I’m big. He don’t have to say that.”

After admonishing Jorge and the others, Williams went back to Christopher’s office to report the confrontation. Howard Holt, Christopher’s computer-assessment expert, shook his head. They were playing with dynamite. The kids at Chester should have been evaluated, tested and sorted out from Day 1, not herded together. The gang members should have been segregated. Many of the kids, Holt figured, were reading at third- and fourth-grade levels, some worse than that. Even the smarter ones were going through the motions in the chaotic environment at the overcrowded school. The alarming thing was that some kids said they preferred the Chester environment to the district’s three regular high school campuses.

Gradually, many students who had been enrolled in continuation school at Chester drifted away. Statistics showed that 200 were enrolled, but daily attendance fell to 100, then 50, sometimes lower. Teachers steeled themselves to ignore the odds and disappointment, but they couldn’t help noticing how the world had changed. You couldn’t blame financial poverty alone. A spiritual poverty weighed down upon many of these kids.

Mattie Harris-Evans, the district’s juvenile court liaison, had been raised poor in Mississippi, helping her mother clean other people’s houses. Now she was a woman polished in the world of educational philosophy. She would marvel some days at what she had seen in Compton. A few years ago, one of her junior high school students had brought her a present, in wrapping paper: a .38-caliber revolver. So no one would hurt her, he explained. To teach these kind of children, you had to be a parent and a counselor as well. You had to be able to hug the children or playfully punch them in the stomach.

John Kurokawa, an independent-studies teacher who’d spent 22 years in the district, understood. He was the kind of man kids liked because he was hip without trying to act hip. “Do you think your father had a harder time in adolescence than you?” he’d ask a troubled kid. “Write me an essay on it. Where’s he from? Mexico? Talk to him about it, what it was like. Ask him!”

“I think 70% of the people who teach don’t belong in teaching,” Kurokawa said laconically. “Teaching is a gift.” Kurokawa--”Ku-man,” as some of the kids called him--had learned the tricks of dealing with urban education. He scavenged for used textbooks--a commodity in short supply--so that his students wouldn’t have to rely on photocopied pages to take home.

LESS THAN 10% OF COMPTON’S 54,000 REGISTERED VOTERS WENT TO THE polls last November to choose new school board members. They ousted board President Mary Henry, despite endorsements by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Jesse Jackson, and elected a Compton College administrator named Amen Rahh. Growing up in the 1960s in adjacent Willowbrook, Amen Rahh was known as Arthur Montgomery, a 6-foot-5 self-described thug whose ability to play basketball got him into Cal State Long Beach. Christopher, who’d known Rahh for years, saw his election as a glimmer of hope to get his program moving. He began scheduling weekly breakfast sessions with Rahh to plead his case.

As Christmas vacation approached, Christopher’s staff grew resigned to disappointment. Cassie Holman kept telling the students targeted for the middle college program that they’d have to be patient--the Compton College site was still not available. Holman joked sardonically that the system was making her hair turn gray. “I’ve got stock in Clairol,” she said. In Sacramento, Compton’s state assemblyman, Willard H. Murray Jr., introduced a bill calling on the state Department of Education to take over the district’s educational program. Back in Compton, a parents group distrustful of district administrators formed their own committee to raise student achievement scores. “They’re squabbling over the carcasses of our dead children,” one father said of the administrators.

The love affair between Van Christopher and Fred Williams came to an end. Williams, who worried from the start that working for a school bureaucracy would restrict his street-level approach to education, felt Christopher was betraying him by not taking Williams’ side in disputes with other alternative-school staffers. Christopher, in turn, was angry at Williams for not showing up for work on time. Williams, who was being paid a $4,200-a-month consulting salary, far more money than he’d ever made, quit in bitterness.

“Compton is cursed,” Williams spat. “It isn’t fair I have to fight these grown folks and deal with these wild kids.”

By January, Howard Holt had grown so desperate to create a computer lab that he moved out of Christopher’s office in one of the district’s satellite offices and set up shop at Chester Adult School, using eight old personal computers and software programs, all decade-old technology.

“I’m not going to waste the year sitting around waiting,” he said.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the word came down through district channels: Christopher could have the complex on 118th Street at the end of January. Preparations were made. Furniture orders were taken. Anticipation ran high.

Then, after the new furniture had been moved in, word came down from the superintendent’s office: The building is unsafe. Move the furniture out. Do not move in.

Christopher was convinced that the new school board president, John Steward, the leader of the board faction that wanted to fire Handy, was lobbying against his program. “They don’t give a damn about children!” he said.

Steward denied in an interview that he had lobbied against the move to 118th Street. But he clearly opposed expanding alternative education. Top priority, Steward insisted, had to go to regular high schools to create “an atmosphere of success.” To argue, as Christopher often did, that the majority of Compton’s children were too socially traumatized to benefit from traditional education made Steward blanch.

“I’ve heard those theories all along,” he said. “That’s like saying because my father was an illiterate murderer, I’m destined to be a murderer and I’m not capable of getting a master’s degree.”

It was this kind of philosophical stalemate that paralyzed the alternative education program. Then, in late February, after some lobbying by new board member Rahh, a letter from Handy finally made its way down bureaucratic channels: Move the alternative education program out of Chester and into the 118th Street complex in three weeks. “There is a lot of work that needs to be done,” the memo said.

The program’s new home was a mess. The old, graffiti-scarred buildings on 118th Street were in horrible shape. The hard rains of March caused leaks. Students who were Blood gang members were nervous because this section of 118th Street was Crips territory. The continuation school teachers flatly refused to transfer their classes there. Christopher let them stay at Chester. But, at last, the middle college had a place to begin operations. Omar Saunders was there. So was Tara Dawkins, a pastor’s daughter who had dropped out of one of the Compton high schools for several weeks in January because she was appalled by violence and the burned-out teachers. And Umika Jones, a bright 15-year-old girl whose determination to succeed confounded all odds. She had been shuttled from a drug-using mother to a foster home to Juvenile Hall to grandmother to great-grandmother, yet still burned with keen enthusiasm.

There was plenty of room for Howard Holt’s computer lab at 118th Street, but still no money for new computers. So Holt began scouting and found a couple dozen unused ones at a regular high school. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Independent-studies teacher Kurokawa began requiring his students, who checked in for an hour a week, to attend more often and spend up to 15 hours a week on the self-instructional computer learning programs. Cassie Holman took her middle-college students on a field trip to Big Bear. For some it was the first time they’d seen snow. Compton College was still resisting the plan to let the students operate there, but this was better than nothing.

A month later, the policemen who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted. Compton, like Los Angeles, erupted and burned. The remainder of the spring faded into a quaking rhythm of survival, for the kids and for the administrators. It was clear the year had been wasted. Teachers would take their pleasure in small victories, like Omar Saunders, who was showing up at middle college so regularly that he would win an attendance award, get his diploma and set his sights on community college.

ONE MORNING IN JUNE, MATtie Harris-Evans drove down Wilmington Avenue. She passed a burned-out storefront and thought about the academic year gone by. So often she had wanted to quit in frustration; the promises made about alternative schools and then broken reinforced the unspoken message that children in Compton heard every day: You don’t count.

“No one cares about the child,” she said. “Everyone cares about the adult--the crimes the adult commits, the trouble he causes. They don’t realize the child will become the adult. They don’t realize you have to teach a child that there is hope.”

It was with much satisfaction, therefore, that a few days later Harris-Evans watched one of Cassie Holman’s middle college students, a shy teen-ager named Herbert Miller, address the Compton School Board, urging the board to support expanded alternative education programs.

“I don’t have a speech,” Herbert said. “In regular school, I was always shooting dice, ditching. This program gave me my last chance. I got my education. They taught me you don’t have to ditch, that I could enjoy learning. And now I’m here, sharing with y’all--”

He caught himself.

“I mean, you all ,” he said, and the audience laughed kindly.

“I love this program,” Herbert said. “This is my only way. If I go back to regular school, I’m lost.”

It was a sad, sincere, succinct assessment of regular school, of The System. Nobody tried to expand upon it. Nobody had to.

FROM THERE IT WAS ALL downhill.

Over the summer Christopher tried to expand his domain. He persuaded the school board--despite considerable skepticism from board President Steward--to apply to the state for authority to create a series of small, separate high schools for specialized alternative education programs, a technique that the neighboring Los Angeles school district had used frequently. A separate state revenue formula would provide most of the money to fund the programs. There would be separate, 100-student schools for kids coming out of county juvenile probation camps, for teen mothers, for the middle college--and another one at Compton Airport, inside a big hangar, for students interested in aviation-related careers.

Reality squashed that. There were big-time money problems. Supt. Handy had been boasting all year about the district’s budget balance. He’d contended the district had a $4-million surplus. But during the summer an audit conducted by the Los Angeles County Office of Education chopped that estimate to about $670,000.

To compensate, the Compton school board voted 6 to 1, with Rahh dissenting, to cut $5 million from the district’s $88-million budget, which seemed likely to result in about 100 layoffs.

Among the jobs eliminated, effective Oct. 31, was Van Christopher’s. The best deal he seemed likely to get was a principal’s position with a cut in pay. Mattie Harris-Evans and Cassie Holman figured their time was up too. With district teachers in short supply, they expected to be reassigned to teaching jobs, possibly outside the alternative- education program.

The dream of redemption was dead.

In Sacramento, the Legislature had passed Assemblyman Murray’s bill that would give the state control of the Compton district. On the last day of September, Gov. Wilson vetoed the bill, but not without threatening to sign a similar bill next year if the district did not show “dramatic improvement in the performance of the schools.”

As the new school year began at the 118th Street alternative-ed center last September, fights were breaking out more often, with middle college students still bunched together with slow-learners, gang members and other students with behavioral problems.

In October, Handy ordered classes at 118th Street suspended for three days so the facility could be cleaned and security improved.

Two weeks later, a divided school board took the first formal step toward firing Handy by putting him on a three-month probation for alleged dereliction of duty and mismanagement.

On one of the days that the alternative-school students were barred from the 118th Street facility, Diane King drove to the grounds to complain to officials. Her daughter, a slow learner, was a student there. King had pulled another child out of the Compton district years ago and sent him to a Roman Catholic high school, a move she could afford only because she and her kids lived in her mother’s house. King wanted to blame somebody and she didn’t know who. She walked into Van Christopher’s office and he told her to blame Supt. Handy.

But the blame fell on everyone.

“My child is being cheated,” King said. She told the truth. The cheating of children has, for many years, been an open secret in Compton, and it will not change with one firing. The sad fact is that, for many years, far too few people have been paying attention.

Photographs by Rosemary Kaul/Los Angeles Times