GRANADA HILLS : Adult School Students Aid Quake Victims

It’s been more than 20 years since a powerful quake rocked his hometown of Guadalajara, Mexico, but Isaac Sanchez recalls his fear very clearly.

“It was a bad, bad experience,” said Sanchez, 39, now of San Pedro. “So many people needed help.”

So vivid were his memories of damaged homes and helpless people that when Sanchez saw the destruction caused by the Northridge quake, he felt compelled to help out. A student council representative at San Pedro-Narbonne Community Adult School, Sanchez gathered a group of his peers and organized a food drive and fund-raiser to assist his counterparts in the San Fernando Valley who suffered the quake’s wrath.

“We wanted to show them we are with them,” said Alejandra Perez, 20, a student council representative who helped Sanchez organize the effort. “Many people have been through an earthquake and understand how they feel.”

On Wednesday, adult students in the English as a Second Language and high school English classes at the San Pedro school delivered two carloads of supplies to the quake-ravaged Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.

The campus houses the Kennedy San Fernando Community Adult School, which serves more than 20,000 students in five primary locations and 40 smaller branches in the northeast Valley.

Perez, Sanchez and representatives from their school presented boxes filled with diapers, canned vegetables and stuffed animals to Kennedy San Fernando administrators, who will distribute the supplies to their neediest students.

The San Pedro students also brought 500 handmade paper valentines inscribed with hopeful messages and $146.40 in cash.

“Everybody was willing to help,” Perez said.

Most of the adult schools reopened when the majority of the schools in Los Angeles Unified School District did--one week after the quake hit. But the Kennedy Adult School, located on the severely damaged campus of Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, will remain closed until regular high school classes at that school resume.

In the areas hit hardest by the quake, adult school attendance remains low. At the Sylmar location, for example, only about 50% of the students have returned to class. Wayne Morrison, principal of Kennedy San Fernando Adult School, said many students are busy trying to put their lives back together.

“Some are flat plain still in trauma,” Morrison said. “They are really going to appreciate that someone of the other side of town really cares.”