Antidote to Despair : Families fractured by poverty, crime find a little salvation through school’s ‘one-stop’approach to life.

Minnie Nesmith’s 28-year-old daughter is out there somewhere in this fifth poorest city in America, “in the street, mostly,” and on drugs. “Yeah, you bet.”

And so, rather than see her six grandchildren scattered in foster homes, Nesmith has taken over. At a time when generations are telescoping as maternal ages plummet, it’s not an uncommon saga. But for this 49-year-old single grandmother, the blessing is that her whole brood has found a daytime haven at the local elementary school, Coopers Poynt.

Dead in the middle of Camden’s roughest neighborhood, the school has changed dramatically since Nesmith’s own six children were students there. Two years ago, Coopers Poynt was reconfigured as a “family school.” This means that while her grandchildren--who range in age from 8 months to 14 years--are in their own classrooms, Nesmith is under the same roof, pursuing her high school equivalency diploma.

Definitions of family school abound as the term buzzes through the vocabulary of public education. In an “at risk” neighborhood like this one, it means that the school acts as a kind of extended family, blending the delivery of social services with traditional classroom learning--at no cost to families.

Coopers Poynt does not close when the bell rings at 3 o’clock. Instead, the family school is open from early morning until well after the sun goes down, offering early intervention day care and preschool, health and nutritional services, family planning, prenatal care, legal services, parenting classes and academic programs for family members. An open-door policy invites parents and grandparents to participate; extended hours help make such involvement possible.

The principal, Annie B. Rubin, calls the school a “one-stop deal” where the academic and non-academic needs of children, parents and grandparents are addressed with equal attentiveness.

Minnie Nesmith calls the place a godsend.

“If the family is falling apart outside, it can be together here,” she says.

The concept is similar at the much-acclaimed Vaughn Street School in Pacoima, where teachers and parents share decision-making powers and where children of different ages are taught in “clusters.” The bold transformation at Vaughn Street was made possible in part by last year’s Charter School’s Act, through which the state Legislature sought to remove state and local regulations to give local school administrators a wide hand in raising student achievement levels.

Here in Camden--where the school district serves a predominantly minority population--Superintendent Arnold Webster says the family school was born of necessity. With its burned-out storefronts and boarded-up houses, Camden is widely described as a city of the underclass. There is persistent and high unemployment. Teen pregnancy is widespread. Youth gangs and drug traffic terrorize the community.

The same description might apply to many downtrodden communities in America, large portions of Los Angeles included. Too often, in so many of these areas, the woes befalling the family have become a source of befuddlement for social service administrators and a rhetorical field day for politicians.

In Camden, it was Webster who proposed multigenerational education as an antidote to domestic despair. Five elementary and middle schools were restructured to encompass grades kindergarten through eighth. More significant, parents were invited into the schools--to be educated themselves, to be part of the school process, to improve their access to service agencies and to be close to their children. In human terms, the schools became what Webster calls “not a supplement to the family, not a replacement, but an extension.”

Webster says he has used traditional funding--state and federal money, supplemented by some private grants--to institute family schools. He says the project has cost the school district nothing. “If anything, we’ve saved some money,” he says.

Similar efforts have been launched recently in a handful of California communities, says Linda Forsythe of the state Department of Education. She praises the idea as “absolutely the direction of the future.”

In addition to its other benefits, Forsythe, who runs the state’s CalServe programs, says the potential efficiency of the family school idea means “it will probably cost a lot less in the long haul.”

But in some places, attempts to develop similar programs have often been hampered by an overabundance of experts and by excessive planning. Bill Eglinton, an Albuquerque., N.M., businessman who heads a regional coalition working to improve public schools, says the ad hoc fashion in which the family school sprang up in Camden was probably its salvation.

More typically, “you bring in all these agencies, and they start thinking the goal is to run the agency,” Eglinton says. “People start arguing over the color of the curtains and they forget the fact that the building is on fire.”

Eglinton points out that demands of public education have changed significantly in recent years, to the point where “most people expect schools to do what the family and church used to do--and that is, produce students who are fed and warm and who are not abused, and who are there with pencils sharpened and are eager to learn.”

It’s a very big order, “and in part it’s about making schools more user-friendly,” says Eglinton, executive vice president of Public Service Co. of New Mexico, a utility company. “You have to have a whole new model, and family schools fit the need to a T.”

At Coopers Poynt, such philosophical intricacies are less compelling than the fact that the family school seems to work. Minnie Nesmith, for example, wonders how she could make it through the day without it.

A high school dropout, Nesmith is now working toward a diploma. She volunteers as a teacher’s aide, relishes her academic classes and personal-development seminars and talks of going on to college so she can work as a teacher or a nurse.

Despite its garrison-like exterior, with high metal fences and barricades on every window, the school exudes calmness, says Nesmith’s friend Miriam Stephenson. “Families around here are fractured,” says Stephenson, who cares for her three elementary school-age grandchildren while their parents work long hours. “If you’re around your children at school, they just have a comfortable feeling.”

For parents and grandparents, “that closeness means a lot,” Stephenson continues. “It’s the bright light.”

And Nesmith, a deeply religious woman who still wrings her hands over her daughter’s situation, has great hopes that the extended-family at Coopers Poynt will help her grandchildren “keep out of trouble.”

Certainly that will be the case if Annie B. Rubin has anything to say. Rubin, one of 11 children of a North Carolina sharecropper, is a large woman whose hands seem perpetually planted on her hips. It’s an imposing image, particularly when the 55-year-old principal blocks the path of a student who is running down the hall and demands: “Are we in a hurry?”

But then, with a smile, she sends the child on his way. With an even bigger smile, Rubin confides, “You know what they say about me?” Her voice has a definite ring of pride. “They say I’m the baddest thing in North Camden.”

Rubin came to Coopers Poynt as a teacher 27 years ago. As principal, one of the first things she did was “cut down on all that clothes competition junk” by requiring uniforms. Then she went one step further, enforcing the same policy for teachers and staff.

The immediate result was a sense of orderliness, a rare commodity in a community that seems to be falling apart before its residents’ eyes. “You live in a society where everything is moving, all the time,” says Rubin, who also makes it her business to inform drug dealers that Coopers Poynt is off-limits. “The school just has to be a place where kids can come and find calm.”

Students in this kind of “hard-core disenfranchised” area (“the bottom of the pit” is another of Rubin’s stingingly accurate descriptions of Camden) confront serious obstacles simply in trying to survive, she observes. At another school in Camden, a children’s graveyard near the playground is a grim reminder of the city’s high child-mortality rate.

“You know, you’ve read all that stuff about the multiple cycles of poverty and the breakdown of the social fabric,” Rubin says. What’s often overlooked, she believes, is that “for every child at risk, there’s also a family at risk.”

Most of the parents and grandparents she meets are young, Rubin says, and many of them fear they will pass on their sense of defeat on to the next generation. “We don’t have any magic formula. We just care,” Rubin says. “And I just feel that if they’re touched by us, they’re all going to do a little better. I don’t have anything to prove that, but I really do believe it.”

Rubin’s gritty determination has clearly played a part in establishing Coopers Poynt School as a point of community respect. Superintendent Webster says the high level of parental involvement is one measure. And on Halloween night, when the town traditionally turns into a giant torch, “the school was not touched,” Webster recalls.

“There were fires all over the place, but at the school, nothing,” he marvels.

Standing in the playground, Rubin says she is hopeful, but also realistic. A school, however well-intentioned, can do only so much.

“You never know what’s lasted,” she says. “But one thing about what we’re doing here--if it doesn’t help, it isn’t going to hurt, either.”

It’s More Than a School System

Family schools seek to provide a comprehensive learning environment that also delivers vital social services. By strengthening the schools in a city that is at risk--making them a hub for the community, and a safe haven--family schools also aim to strengthen the family itself. Key elements of the effort include:

* Early intervention preschool and day care, designed to focus on school readiness.

* Early diagnosis of learning disabilities.

* Prenatal care, as well as classes in parenting and child development.

* Extended-day kindergarten.

* Outreach to parents and grandparents, including evening classes and a full-day Parents’ Center.

* Assignment of older students to serve as tutors for younger pupils.

* Training of parents to serve as volunteer teachers’ aides.

* Cooperative learning groups that will involve parents and children together.

* On-site health and human services.