Children of Hope : In Cypress Park, Students at Florence Nightingale School Confront Their Fears and Learn to Value a Legacy of Caring

More often than not--especially these days--Angie Morales says she’s frightened out there in a world she describes as “bad, very bad.”

“It seems like there are all these things happening around here right now, like the 3-year-old who was shot,” says Angie, 12, referring to Stephanie Kuhen, who was killed last week on a dead-end street less than two miles from Angie’s middle school, Florence Nightingale in Cypress Park.

Many students worry when they are walking to school, going to the park or hearing about fights on “The Bridge”--a freeway overpass where schoolchildren walk and outsiders occasionally congregate.

But coming to a school named after Nightingale, the founder of the nursing profession “who stood for kindness and watched over people” is reassuring, Angie says. Especially in a neighborhood that has had its share of violence and publicity, its reputation reverberating around the nation since the fatal ambush and the wounding of Stephanie’s 2-year-old brother.

For many, Florence Nightingale the school, like Florence Nightingale the woman, is a source of comfort amid chaos.

Angie says she and her classmates are proud of their school. And she and many other students say they have learned to accept responsibility--a character trait their new principal, Marylou Amato, has been drilling into them since the first day of school--which means saying no to gangs, befriending the young, impressionable kids on campus who are fresh from elementary school and hitting the books, not each other.

“School should be a safe place,” says Amato, sitting in front of a framed black-and-white poster of the school’s namesake in her office in a school free of graffiti and filled with banners that stress success and unity.

“She’s a lady,” Amato says about Florence Nightingale. “She makes me feel good. She cared for mankind and that’s what I want my kids to do--care about themselves and especially others.”

Amato cares deeply about the safety of her 1,800 students, of whom 75% are Latino, 25% Asian. Florence Nightingale Middle School serves the northeast Los Angeles area that includes Angelus Heights, Chinatown, Cypress Park, Lincoln Heights, Mount Washington and Montecito Heights--communities she says that “seem to be pulling together” since Stephanie’s death.

That’s her hope for Nightingale, too, as a first-time principal at a school where friction among students led to a fight on campus last week between Latinos and Asians; they later took their disagreement to The Bridge, several students say.

“When you have two ethnic groups sharing space, everyone wants to take sides,” says Amato about the incident that shocked her and teachers. “In middle school kids start to see differences more than commonalities,” she says. “Kids have to co-exist. We have to work on that.”

She realizes that middle school is the cusp--the make or break point--for many of her kids.

Sixth-graders, she says, are “a little scared by the big campus of a middle school. It’s a transitional year for them. Eighth-graders have one foot in adolescence and their hormones are activated. And seventh-graders fall in between.

“They’re all, on every level, still exploring with their lives. They haven’t made permanent choices yet. They walk in as children and leave as young adults,” she says.

“That’s why we put a lot of effort on the sixth-graders. The earlier we can reach them, the better. Then by the eighth-grade they will be making good choices,” she says.

Foremost among those choices is making education a top priority, saying no to gang involvement and instead becoming involved in school activities--such as recreational, tutorial, self-esteem and violence-prevention programs. For parents, Amato will stress parenting-skills programs she says will help them get involved with their children and the school, “because parents are stake holders here also.”

Amato will meet in groups with teachers, parents and students next week to hear what’s on their minds, including the Isabel Street ambush of Stephanie. “Our school is so close to this incident, but yet so far,” she says, noting that Isabel Street is not in the school’s attendance area and that as far as she knows, members of the gang accused in the shooting do not attend her school.

She says students “are hearing a lot” in their homes about the Sept. 17 shooting. But at school, “they are not talking about it”--and that worries her because “when they are not able to talk about something, they’ll act it out by being restless, nervous, unable to concentrate on their studies.”

At the meetings, she is hoping to engage students in talk about college, ideas on how to improve and encourage school involvement, and issues such as racism, gangs and ways to stay safe.

One issue they will discuss is uniforms, a much-touted safety measure, she says.

“When our kids are on the street and they are imitating the particular dress of a certain gang, they become a target,” Amato says, adding that the wearing of uniforms at other schools has alleviated discipline problems and improved the environment for learning.

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Luis Lopez, an eighth-grader, likes the idea of wearing a uniform.

“We’d all be alike,” he says. “We’d feel safer, I’m sure, because, out there, on the streets, it’s not too safe.”

Luis, 13, says he was pressured last year by a gang member to ditch classes, which later got him suspended. “I didn’t feel right ditching and tagging. I didn’t like it.” He told his parents about hiding that from them and got back on the right track. Today, he is a member of the school’s Council of Student Affairs. His survival--and safety--skills include being unafraid to say no to joining a gang, even though going to school means “being friends with them,” walking away when he sees trouble and staying busy with school activities “so you don’t go to the dark side.”

His friend, Victor Lopez, (no relation), 12, agrees.

“Sometimes you have to change your attitude about stuff. A bad attitude will attract bad people,” the seventh-grader says. “To be safe, you have to control your attitude and not act tough or have a smart mouth when you don’t have to.”

Violence, he says, doesn’t solve anything: “It makes things worse.” But he figures kids sometimes engage in fights on and off campus to protect themselves, to give them some control over their own sense of safety. “Sometimes, you have to.”

Araceli Robledo, 13, also a council member, admits that her school has its share of problems, including the occasional fistfight during lunchtime or between classes that “lasts less than five minutes”--barely enough time for a teacher or the school’s only on-campus officer to notice. But, it’s times such as those that make her think about “decisions we have to make about not using violence.”

“It’s difficult for us because we’re not children anymore. But we’re also not grown up and we’re not sure about the decisions we make. The best thing I can say is to ask grown-ups for their opinion on stuff.”

Says student Angie Morales: “I talk to sixth-graders about their safety and I tell them that there may be times when people will push you around or threaten you and that’s when you can talk to a student or a teacher.”

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Talk like that pleases Amato and parents Jose Luis Varas and Julia Gomez, volunteers at the school’s parent center.

Says Varas: “It’s up to us, as parents, to be on top of our kids if we want to protect them. We have to know their friends and their friends’ parents. We have to know the school and come to school even if it embarrasses the kids.”

Adds Gomez: “As a parent you have to have a lot of patience, love, perseverance. You need to guide them onto the good road, especially at this age. Look at how they dress, know where they are and whom they are with.”

“Right now, the public has a very negative impression of this community, of the kids,” Amato says. “I want people to know that these kids are nothing like what the public is thinking about Cypress Park. We have really good kids at our school who are trying to learn, get an education. We have teachers providing them with that foundation.”

And, Angie says, she and her classmates have a woman named Florence Nightingale to inspire them.

“Many people say that this world is bad and that we’re in the middle of a crisis. But I say we can make the world a good place,” she says.

How?

“We have to be like Florence Nightingale, a symbol of peace and healing,” Angie says, pointing out that Nightingale was called “the lady with the lamp” when she walked the halls of the hospital at night keeping watch over her patients, keeping them safe.

“In a way,” Angie says, “we have to carry the lamp too.”