One Small Step

As commencements go, it wasn’t much. The ceremony was held in a classroom, and the main speaker had to squeeze his brief talk in between meetings.

The graduates came mostly in work clothes. There was no stage, no caps and gowns, no vast audience and no public address system. The best they could muster were a few balloons pinned to the wall and a computerized sign that said, “Congratulations Spring 1994 Graduates.”

But make no mistake, there was a kind of glory here.

The 12 students who stepped to the front of the room one by one were making tentative moves toward goals every bit as important in their lives as Ph.D.s. They were guaranteeing themselves jobs.

The occasion was the completion of an apprenticeship preparation program sponsored by the Los Angeles Unified School District, a small step in the direction of the rest of their lives.

Commencement was held in an inconspicuous corner of the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center in the South-Central section of the city. The students were blacks and Latinos.

Twelve weeks of intensive study had prepared them to take apprenticeship tests in the building trades, from drywalling to carpentry. An estimated 70% of the 1,800 students who have completed the course have passed the tests and gotten work.

The principal of the Maxine Waters Center told them after they’d received their certificates, “You’re holding hope in your hands.”

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I was invited to the ceremony by Hank Springer, an ex-print shop teacher who is now apprenticeship coordinator for the school district. He served as president of the L.A. teachers union in the 1970s.

Springer wanted me to see that not all blacks and Latinos were gang members and not all of them were willing to survive on charity.

“I’ve had students living in cars who came in to take this course,” he said. “They’ve gotten themselves careers and gone on to better lives.”

Clearly, this was not a commencement for those who drive to ceremonies in BMWs and celebrate later at lavish receptions. The pale green room held maybe two dozen people, including the students and their guests, and I doubt there was a USC grad among them.

They sat in straight-backed chairs with writing boards attached, the kind students use during classroom sessions. It reminded me of parents night at a public school.

The course is no piece of cake. Those who take it have to learn good English, as well as algebra, geometry and trigonometry . . . and they don’t come from the kinds of backgrounds where trig and good grammar prevail.

“They have more to overcome because they have more to deal with in their world,” an instructor said. “There’s competition out there. They know that.”

What drew me here was the nature of the event. We all need to see pockets of achievement in a city that seems to be giving up on itself. There was no talk of surrender here.

“For people who want to leave Los Angeles, I say go,” school board member Warren Furutani told the graduates. “No one’s saying everything’s perfect. But there’s a challenge here too, an opportunity to change. There’s a window to step through.”

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I can’t count the number of commencement ceremonies I’ve attended, including those I’ve covered and those I’ve gone to for personal reasons. Visions of success were shaped in lofty prose, and parents cried when the strains of a recessional marched their kids out the door and on to tomorrow.

This wasn’t that kind of event. Blue-collar ceremonies are rarely inspiring and hardly ever visionary. Parchment wasn’t the goal here. Jobs were.

Oscar Mathews is a handyman who wants to operate a pile driver. Michele Payan is a part-time cashier who wants to be a plumber. Kevin Ross has been out of work for a year and wants to be an electrician.

“I feel good,” Payan told me later. “I’ve taken the first small step.”

Pride is an element of completion, Springer said to them. He’s a blunt, white-haired man of 58 who created the program eight years ago. “I began it when the unions came to me and said they weren’t getting qualified African American and Latino applicants. . . . They didn’t want them. Now the law says they have to.”

He added: “But if no one hires you, if you never get a job, still feel better about yourself. Show them you do in the way you carry yourself, the way you walk around.”

Almost everyone has a goal. They vary in magnitude according to conditions. What I saw in that small room down a long hall was a goal made grander by its simplicity: self-improvement.

You can’t beat that.