Stopping the Skid : Mission Program Uses Computers to Help Homeless Learn Basic Skills

After five years of homeless existence on the streets of San Francisco and Southern California, Robert Johnson-Bey staggered into the Los Angeles Mission on Skid Row last year, 30 pounds underweight, his once-quick mind numbed by alcohol and cocaine.

The people of the mission gave him a room. And when the haze of drug abuse had lifted, they placed him before a computer terminal. He tapped at the keyboard, focusing intently on the words and lessons on the screen before him. Slowly he began to learn.

Now Johnson-Bey is about to become a high school graduate at age 39, earning the diploma that eluded him when he was a fast-living teen-ager in Cleveland, Ohio. He is one of 100 men and women enrolled in a Skid Row program that uses computers to help the homeless learn basic skills and earn their high school equivalency papers.

“A lot of homeless people figure they can’t get help from nobody, they think nobody cares” Johnson-Bey said as he lingered over a grammar lesson. “But if you just give them a chance . . .”

Mission workers, who began the program last year, say they hope to help dozens of formerly destitute men and women re-enter the work force, armed with the skills that they never picked up from public schools.

In fact, program instructors have learned that the vast majority of men in the mission have learning disabilities, a condition that has likely contributed to their homelessness.

“When they were kids, their teachers told them the same thing: ‘You’re stupid, you’re lazy, you’re rebellious,’ ” said Jeff Levinson, a law student and program volunteer. “If you’re told over and over again that you’re a failure, after a while you start to believe it.”

Johnson-Bey traces his problems to high school and his teen-age years. “I didn’t like school,” he said. “It was boring. The teachers really didn’t care for you as an individual. They would get frustrated with you. Now I feel I’m competent in something. I kind of like going to school now.”

The mission’s learning center is in a basement of its headquarters at 5th and Wall streets on downtown’s east side. Only a few months old, the program has yet to graduate anyone. Still, a visit to the center provides insights into the talents and learning deficiencies of the men and women who are the most destitute of Los Angeles’ residents.

On a recent afternoon, one young man was confidently manipulating a complex array of numbers and tables on a computer spreadsheet program. Just a few cubicles away, a man with swept-back gray hair and an alcoholic’s reddened complexion was struggling with basic phonetics. An alphabet primer was spread on the table before him.

“Ssssame,” he pronounced slowly, placing his finger on a large “s” in his textbook. “Ssssay.”

Program director Ronald Gonzales explains that although some students have formal educations--a handful are college graduates--the vast majority never graduated from high school. Many are illiterate.

“Homelessness is just a symptom of the cause,” Gonzales said. “Their learning problems are overlooked.”

With little education, they spend most of their working lives moving from one minimum wage, low-skill job to the next, just hanging on until their low self-esteem helps propel them into drug and alcohol abuse, Gonzales said.

The young life of David Crenshaw, 24, fits this pattern. A high school dropout from Vermont, he moved to Los Angeles to better his prospects, but could only find work in fast-food restaurants. He later became a security guard, but then wound up on Skid Row shortly after last year’s riots, when his cash-strapped employer laid him off.

Crenshaw and other students spend about two hours a day in the learning lab, mostly in self-guided computer instruction programs. They enter as part of the mission’s housing and rehabilitation program, which includes religious instruction.

“I know (the Lord) wants me to stay here to get my life together,” Crenshaw said. “He wants me to be strong so I can go back into the world where there is drugs and alcohol.”

Crenshaw said that after leaving the mission he hopes to study business management or computer maintenance.

Johnson-Bey, meanwhile, is slowly getting his life in order. He hopes that the last five years on the streets were a nightmare from which he has finally awakened.

He recently re-established contact with his two daughters, who have been living with his ex-wife in Ohio. He asked the girls to forgive his long absence.

After he leaves the mission in a few months, Johnson-Bey said he would like to learn a trade, maybe horticulture. But first, he needs to sharpen his grammar skills.

“My spelling is really bad,” he says. “I need to work on it.”