Today’s Agenda

Breathes there a parent--especially a working parent--who hasn’t agonized over day care? The money is a problem. Judging quality and safety are problems. Convenience is a problem. And this is in an ordinary middle-class family. Now take low-income family whose child is handicapped--wheelchair-bound, developmentally disabled, maybe both. What difficulties that family faces. The Jeffrey Foundation, the subject of Making a Difference, offers them a day-care solution, plus an array of family social services. Founded in 1972 by the mother of a disabled child, the day-care center aims to “mainstream” as many of its children as possible, and fully develop their abilities, no matter their disability. Although it’s a private nonprofit group, Jeffrey also provides a central point of access to public social services for the families it serves.

Families with a different sort of problem are the work of Ernestine Myers, who supervises youth programs for El Nido Services in South-Central Los Angeles and Compton. In Testimony, Myers points to the utter lack of recreational facilities--even commercial movie houses--in South-Central. And, she says, “If you know anything about adolescence and what their needs are, they need to have a place to go.” Let’s have movies, she says. And miniature golf. And a skating rink. Then the kids would have not only a place to go, but entry-level jobs taking tickets, selling popcorn, renting skates.

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How do teen-agers, especially minorities, believe they’re portrayed in the news and entertainment media? As a pretty bad lot, they tell us in Youth opinion. Is that accurate? Most of them emphatically say no. “The media has made it hard for responsible teen-agers who want to do something. Adults look at you like your age group is only interested in killing and drugs when it’s really not like that.” But others think there’s some truth to the portrayal: “I think it’s pretty accurate . . . the violence in society is terrible. And every year, the age of kids with guns gets lower and lower. Kids at the age of 9 have guns.”

As for entertainment shows, “Beverly Hills 90210,” takes hits for being unreal, because hardly any kids have guns.

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T wo young women sit in the same community college class, with their separate sorrows. One has just lost her son, a victim of gang gunfire. The other earlier lost her policeman father to a youthful gunman. With their teacher as pivot, they become friends.

That teacher, in Community Essay, concludes that the job of teaching goes far beyond the three Rs to helping his diverse students address their own sense of isolation and powerlessness.

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A nd in Sermon, the Rev. Kenneth Uyeda Fong, a Baptist cleric, wonders about the lack of a distinctly Asian form of Christian worship. “My Chinese-American Christian forebears never created their own brand of music, never established paradigms for the Chinese church like our African-American brethren did,” he laments, and calls for new, Asian ways of looking at liturgy, at church architecture, at songs of worship.