EAST LOS ANGELES : Direction Sports Back in Operation

Direction Sports, which involves inner-city youths in academic and athletic competition, is on more stable footing after a routine city audit led to a one-month suspension of operations, said its director and founder Tulley N. Brown.

Direction Sports held its championship competition with youths from the Ramona Gardens and Aliso-Pico housing projects last month and is regrouping for a June start-up. Since 1969, Direction Sports has targeted youths in low-income areas to supplement lessons learned in the classroom while attracting the youngsters with sports competition, Brown said.

The June-December program was suspended while the city, which funds $40,000 of the program’s $67,000 annual budget, held up a payment that was due in early October, Brown said.

Brown said he dipped into his savings to fund the program and pay for 28 teen-agers’ minimum-wage salaries for two weeks. But Brown closed the program when the city continued to withhold payment through November.

The program resumed in early December after the city sent its payment.

In a draft report, city auditors recommended the city Recreation and Parks Department collect $17,000--Tulley’s salary for the six-month program--from Direction Sports and that future funding be suspended unless the program meets all the city’s contract requirements.

Brown will be given the opportunity to respond to the audit’s findings, said Tim Lynch, deputy controller.

“There are some findings which might be relevant to a profile of this program and it’s not all particularly flattering,” Lynch said.

He declined further comment until the report is made public later this month.

Brown said the audit will reveal nothing more than portions of minutes missing from a 1990 Direction Sports board meeting that authorizes he be paid from city funds. Since the audit, Brown said he has resubmitted the authorization.

“We take the youth that no one will drive their cars near, and show them that they can do something,” Brown said. “We’re doing the most humane, wondrous things and to our dismay the whole thing was shut down.”

Direction Sports, which has been established in 17 cities nationwide, enrolled 180 children ages 9 to 12 last year in the two Eastside housing projects.

The children form teams for weekly competition and must pass quizzes in math and reading before their teams are allowed to enter the athletic competition.

They are coached and tutored by teen-agers from those same neighborhoods. The coaches and tutors are paid a minimum-wage salary.

The program, one of the few surviving Lyndon B. Johnson Administration programs for youths, has evolved over the years, Brown said.

For example, college students once served as the mentors, coaches and tutors, but Brown said teen-agers, especially those in the inner city, have few opportunities to mentor the younger children. So teen-agers now serve in those positions.

Children, Brown said, have been given less responsibility over the years in building society and that has led to their sense of detachment and hopelessness.

He said he wrote a study on how much time children spend in the classroom, talked with psychologists on children’s issues and molded the program to his findings.

“It became clear in our study of education that children in the past were very involved in their education--such as when they learned in a one-room schoolhouse, they had a lot of chores,” he said.

“The people who went on to build our nation grew up with a sense of making society work, rather than tearing it down. So we said, ‘Why don’t we go out to the most angry, destructive people in the world and give them the chance to change their world?’ ”

The suspension hurt the program’s image among some of its participants, Brown said.

“It takes time to get them back,” he said. “This adds to the disbelief of the urban youth in the system. The whole (feeling) is, ‘Are you going to do it to me again?’ ”