Hope, Joy & Hard Lessons : Friends gave and thieves took. But no one could steal the spirit at Sixty First Street School.

We are here, again, at the Sixty First Street School for a refresher about soft hearts and hard knocks in the city we love.

This is one of the “31 schools”--Los Angeles grade schools that score lowest on the California Test of Basic Skills. It is located in South-Central. One might say deep in South-Central, to emphasize a neighborhood where the American dream seems so pale it might fade away altogether.

Depending on where you started--say, a thatched village in El Salvador--61st Street and Figueroa could be a rung on a rickety, dangerous ladder. Then again, if you’re the third generation behind these dreary walls and dirty fences, if you’re curled up in the corner with your knees tucked under your silent chin and you’re 9 years old and haven’t learned how to write the number 1, who could convince you there is such a thing as a ladder at all?

So we have come to teacher Donna Schoenkopf’s third-grade class to see what these children are learning about Albert Einstein.

Maybe you remember. Asked once what he thought was the most important question concerning the future of humanity, Einstein replied, “Is the universe friendly?”

“These kids,” Schoenkopf says, “are learning that it is.”

Sort of . . . not always . . . but yes, good things happen, right out of the storybook. If given the opportunity, Southern Californians, despite powerful self-doubts to the contrary, still act as if it is within their power to make their community better. In recent months, people from a 50-mile radius have been touched by this school and this teacher, and they have come forth with more than a sad sign, better than an empty shrug.

But let’s go back a while. Schoenkopf teaches by using the newspaper as a window to the world. Once some reportage of mine from a far-off place prompted a class of hers to write. When I returned to Los Angeles, I came and expressed my thanks. Later, after the riots, I visited her students again to write a story about how the kids were coping. Not too well back then, I’m afraid.

But we became friends, the school and I, the teacher and I. And unexpected things happened after my story: checks showed up in my mail. Here’s $50 to buy the kids some supplies, the senders said. Pass this $25 along to help them reconstruct a classroom garden that vandals had ruined. Unsolicited, more than $400 came to this class, which once had almost nothing in the way of supplies.

Schoenkopf and her class reached out and found other friends, too.

The Stephen Wise Temple, near Mulholland in the Santa Monica Mountains, adopted the school. Temple members collected, washed and donated truckloads of clothes to these children who have so little. The once-bare cupboard at the back of the classroom suddenly filled with every kind of learning game. A computer--imagine that--was installed in the front of the classroom.

“You can’t believe what this last year has meant,” Schoenkopf says. “Poverty is so incredibly stressful. All of these things have brought joy and a feeling of relaxation that permeates the whole school.”

Big and little, the network of friends grew. One man donated compost and worms for a garden to brighten up the cracked asphalt playground. Others sponsored field trips. Up in Thousand Oaks, a Junior Rotary Club pledged volunteers to help with school maintenance and after-hours coaching.

John Preiskel, director of the Mark Rosenberg Community Law Center, an affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, jumped in with a team of attorneys to help the school fight the bureaucracy at Caltrans.

The ongoing Harbor Freeway expansion abuts Schoenkopf’s classroom, and the screams of pile drivers and clouds of dust from bulldozers are diminishing the already difficult circumstances of education here. For Caltrans, it will be just for a few months, sorry. For Cynthia and Michael and Miguel and Alberto and the others, it threatens to be their whole third grade.

North High in Torrance also reached out. Teacher Carole Shakely-Parkman’s 12th-graders drive twice a week to read, tutor and lunch with the third-graders--and, in the process, learn more themselves than anyone expected.

I read their reports on the experience. Here, a city apart, is what the big kids took home from the little ones:

From Ryan: “These kids aren’t like the kids around here. They’re so full of life and character that it’s sometimes hard to believe that they’re not acting out some twisted play.”

From Keilaine: “It all started before I even got there. . . . Driving through the community itself made me wonder and think . . . who should have to live like this? I saw burnt buildings, graffiti, trash, homeless people, homes barred up. It made me appreciate my home and community.”

From Nadia: “The way they survive in that neighborhood is a show of courage on their part. They are really strong kids, and I am positive they will survive. I have seen what they have to face every day and believe me, my heart goes out to them.”

From Marcus: “I’ve been to the school three times, and every time it gets better. I really feel I’m touching and having an influence on these kids. When I first came, (one boy) was the meanest little kid I had ever seen. But each time he gets better and opens up more. And when we left, he even came up to me and gave me a hug.”

North High seniors each donated $3 and bought Schoenkopf’s third-graders a television and a VCR, to sit there in front of the class, proudly next to the new computer.

Mario Hernandez is a second-grade teacher at the Sixty First Street School. Sitting in chalk dust at a small table, he expresses his hopes: “By the time some of these kids get to me, they already have more education than their parents. If we can empower them with critical thinking, they will be one helluva challenge for kids coming out of middle-class schools. Because by the time they are 10 years old, kids here have experienced all those things that others have only seen on TV. They are going to be powerhouses.”

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Parents responded to the support of the outside community. Groups have organized to sort and distribute the clothing donations; parents who had never set foot on the playground were suddenly appearing.

Louise Booker’s three children went to the Sixty First Street School. Now her grandson is in the third grade here.

“He’s going to make it,” she says. “He knows how. As Allstate says: ‘He’s in good hands now.’ ”

The kids felt the spirit. This fall, for the first time, the youngsters of the Sixty First Street School elected their own student council, boys and girls like sixth-grader Maurice McRae, whose campaign platform was: “To do what is in my power to make this school a good learning environment; to keep myself out of trouble and to keep others out of trouble.”

Don’t we wish the story could end here.

But during the same week I came to visit the classroom this holiday season, so did the hoodlums.

They bypassed the caged windows and went for the door with a steel crowbar. Gone are the TV, VCR and computer.

“We cannot be discouraged,” says Schoenkopf, smiling as if she means it.

The theft becomes her lesson plan for today.

“Do you think people who live in a big house with two TVs came down here and stole our things?” she asks the third-graders.

“No,” say the young voices.

Why did they steal from us?

“Because they didn’t have a job and they were poor. . . .”

Why did they want money?

“Drugs.”

Do drugs make you feel good?

“Yes.”

And then what?

“Then you feel bad and steal. . . .”

What can we do?

“Ask for the police.”

What else?

“Write the President and tell him to give them something to do with their time.”

Like what?

“Get them a job. . . .”

What do you need to have to get a job?

“An education.”

So, against long odds, hope lives.

These third-graders know precisely the way up, if they can only make it out, or transform it from within.