Reviews Mixed for Trial Run of Youth Corps

One steamy afternoon earlier this summer, a dozen young college students were sweeping broken bottles off a basketball court in a rundown park, picking up abandoned trash around a jungle gym and quietly trying to make a difference in the lives of neighborhood children who--in their own way--are castoffs too.

One of the college students, 20-year-old Londa Scott, paused to reflect on the task at hand and on the larger challenge of helping the children and teen-agers who worked alongside her to steer their lives away from the drugs, crime and rootlessness that shadowed their lives.

“You pass the park days later and see that the trash is back, so, in a way, that’s disappointing,” said Scott, a senior at Maryland’s Towson State University. “What’s not disappointing is being a positive role model, day after day, with these kids. It’s one-on-one, up close and personal. It’s not just a job. It means a lot more than that.”

Indeed it does, in more ways than one.

The college students and their less fortunate charges were part of a pilot program run in cities across the country this summer as a kind of shakedown test of AmeriCorps, the Clinton Administration’s new national service program that is scheduled to begin full-scale operation Monday.

The program seeks to apply the altruistic pragmatism of President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps to needy sectors of the United States. It will begin with 20,000 paid volunteers and a first-year budget of $365 million for 330 programs.

Long sought by liberals as a potentially valuable tool for getting at the root causes of crime, gangs, welfare dependency and other problems afflicting America’s poor, AmeriCorps is the only such social program that President Clinton was able to win from a skittish, budget-conscious Congress.

And its success or failure may help determine whether other such programs--shunned in recent years as costly and ineffective experiments in social engineering--are given a second chance.

Judging from the summer test programs, the theoretical benefits could be large, but concrete successes will not be easy to achieve.

About 3,500 college-age volunteers took part in the test run, known as the National Service Summer of Safety. Each received a $1,000 educational stipend in addition to a minimum-wage salary for eight weeks of work. The individual programs varied widely, but the overall goal was to reduce crime.

In Los Angeles, volunteers spent the summer monitoring school playgrounds in dangerous neighborhoods. In San Francisco, the participants were former gang members who patrolled dangerous areas, intervening when trouble brewed and urging gang members away from violence and drugs. In Austin, Tex., the jobs went to public housing residents instead of college students in an effort to improve their work skills while giving them more of a stake in the places where they live. In Denver, college students and would-be college students sought to guide children toward further education and away from crime.

Sometimes program directors had ideas about how to pursue their mission that were not exactly what the program’s creators had in mind. A Summer of Safety group in San Francisco organized 40 other groups for a rally against the crime bill’s “three strikes and you’re out” provision, which the President supported.

Usually, however, the efforts were less political.

While the formal assessments have not yet been made, program participants and government officials said some of the summer projects turned out to be examples of government-run social programs at their best, offering dedicated young people a chance to change their own lives while tangibly improving their communities.

In other cases, the projects fell victim to the pitfalls that have tripped up such programs in the past. Poorly conceived and badly organized, they burned up scarce tax dollars, provided few benefits to anyone and sapped the enthusiasm of young people by putting them into make-work jobs.

For Hector Garcia, a 19-year-old Austin participant whose job was to work with young children at a learning center in a public housing development, Summer of Safety was unexpected proof that he could be part of the solution.

“I didn’t know I could do so much work. Mainly, with me, work was practicing basketball,” he said. “But if you can get to the little kids and show them what’s right before they grow up, that’s what works.

“They consider me a grown-up, so they listen to me pretty well.”

In that same program, however, other participants were sometimes bored and uninspired.

Tammy Clark, a 26-year-old single mother, was posted in the file room of the Austin Police Department.

“It was a waste of time. They wouldn’t let you do anything,” said Clark, who eventually talked her way out of the file room and into the learning center of the housing project where she lives.

The Washington officials who have taken national service from a campaign promise to a federal policy view these lessons soberly.

“AmeriCorps has got to have lasting benefits for the community if it is going to delight the American public,” said Eli Segal, who heads the program for the President.

He conceded that this objective was not always reached during the short summer shakedown, saying that “the real drawback to the summer program is: What can you expect to get done in eight weeks?”

Yet Segal expressed confidence that the public will support the full-scale AmeriCorps as a good use of its tax dollars, both because of the work it will accomplish and the lifelong service ethic it will foster among participants and those they inspire.

“We are not going to solve the country’s problems of crime, illiteracy, pollution and disease,” Segal said. “But we are going to make a difference.”

Segal estimated that the program will cost the government $18,000 per participant per year for salary, benefits and program costs, as well as an educational stipend of $4,725. Congress has already allocated $585 million for the second year of the program. Funding for the third year and beyond will depend on what Congress and the public think of the program by then.

In Denver, the summer of 1993 became known by the inglorious title, “the Summer of Violence,” so public officials were eager for as many Summer of Safety participants as they could get. Forty-five nonprofit groups and state and local agencies hired 137 Summer of Safety participants.

However, some of the most troubled sections of Denver did not participate.

“You don’t re-establish grass-roots involvement by dictating what every neighborhood should be doing,” said Lance Clem, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer’s point man on the project. “If they didn’t come in with a proposal, they didn’t get in.”

Officials said it would take time before they could judge the program’s effect, but the anecdotal evidence was encouraging.

Rosita Martinez, 18, spent the summer expanding the horizons of some of the city’s poorest children. They visited the zoo, explored museums, hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park, watched movies and tried in-line skating.

“There was nothing for them to do here,” Martinez said. “So I decided I was going to show them opportunities--something other than despair.”

At the same time, the children, who are primarily Spanish-speaking, were coached in English, self-defense and self-esteem and taught to use a library.

“These kids had never heard of college,” Martinez said. “Now, they are saying things like, ‘When I’m 18, I’m going to college.’ ”

She said she discouraged them from joining gangs and comforted them when they were victims of violence.

One day, a 10-year-old showed her cigarette burns near his wrist that he said his older brother had inflicted in front of friends, who all had laughed.

“Don’t spend time around him when you can help it,” she urged him, promising to speak with his family.

Using the educational stipend, a small scholarship she received and money she plans to save from a clerical job this fall, Martinez hopes to be able to go to community college in the spring.

Many of the volunteers--especially in the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin projects--said they initially were attracted to the program because it was a summer job with decent pay.

“I started out for the money, but by the end I was feeling so good about myself and what I learned I can accomplish,” said Sandra Minjarez, 25.

Minjarez organized a graffiti-and-trash cleanup at the Austin housing project where she lives. She knocked on doors and recruited children and adults to help so that they would have a vested interest in keeping the place clean.

“If I can do this much in eight weeks, think of what I can do with more time,” she said. “It gave me confidence in myself.”

Most of the 40 participants in Austin were welfare recipients. As the project drew to a close, however, almost none had plans for future jobs.

In San Francisco, where most of the participants were ex-gang members and some said they probably would have been dealing drugs if they had not participated in Summer of Safety, that way of life still loomed menacingly.

Alicia Romero, who only has a seventh-grade education and quit a gang just a month before starting the program, said she was amazed by how she and her Summer of Safety colleagues were able to organize movies that members of rival gangs would attend.

“I saw the 24th St. boys walk in and then the Bryant St. gang. And, I thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s gonna happen?” she recalled. “Everybody just sat down in their own corners. It felt good.”

But she asked, “What am I going to do now, where am I going to go?”

There was similar ambivalence at Raymond Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles.

The eight Summer of Safety participants were particularly helpful one day when police called the assistant principal to warn her that a SWAT team was going to assault a nearby house that was the target of a drug case. The raid lasted longer than expected and a class had headed out for recess while it was still under way. The young adults rounded up the children and brought them safely back inside the school.

“We don’t have a working intercom here, so the SOS kids were great,” said Assistant Principal Chiquita Watt.

The downside to the program, Watt said, was that having the volunteers around made her job more difficult: She had eight more people to manage.

The children targeted by the Baltimore project also had mixed opinions on whether it is showing them an alternative to crime.

If he had not spent the summer with the Baltimore Summer of Safety group, one 14-year-old boy said, he would probably have been hanging out with his older brother while he sold drugs. The boy was on probation. Last winter, he broke into a neighbor’s house and stole a television set, a VCR and some Nintendo games. But he left his hat behind and was caught.

“I’m doing good now because I’m on this program,” the boy conceded, taking a break from sweeping up glass. But the program’s activities had little appeal: “It’s hectic, all this waking up early and cleaning. I hate cleaning.”

More important, at least in the brief period, he did not believe that he had formed any lasting attachment to the college students with whom he had worked.

“I don’t know them that much for them to be my role model.”