Character Builders : Long Beach District’s Gang Prevention Program Now Targets 3rd-Graders

Teresa Chavez shouts at her 9-year-old listeners, pleading with them not to follow the path that has led to death and misery for so many of her friends.

Her throat catches halfway through the lecture, when she talks about Oscar, the 16-year-old gang member who was gunned down a few blocks from her house. Her eyes well up when she recalls seeing her former best friend Sylvia, now a crack addict, panhandle for change.

Four days each week, in 15 different classrooms, she puts herself through this. It is the best way, she says, maybe the only way, to send her message: “If you become a gang member, you will pay the price.”

Chavez, 25, is one of five instructors crisscrossing elementary and middle school campuses this year as part of the Long Beach Unified School District’s gang prevention program.

In a city that already has seen a 13-year-old murder suspect and a 14-year-old robbery suspect this year, instructors are carrying the say-no-to-gangs theme into third-grade classrooms. Previously, the school district limited the program to the fourth and sixth grades.

“We’re trying to hit them as early as we can,” says Theo Viltz, a district truancy administrator who oversees the program. “We’re working the little kid on the corner.”

To fourth-graders who stumble over basic vocabulary, Chavez offers terms such as retaliation and innocent bystander. To students who are still wading through introductory math, Chavez explains economics, listing the cost of various methods of removing gang tattoos. She tells them she is saving up to afford the laser surgery that will burn off the tattoo on her right hand.

“It’s kind of scary we have to do this,” says teacher Ann Weiman, whose fourth-grade class at Frances E. Willard Elementary hears Chavez’s appeals for one hour each week. “But it is necessary.”

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The district’s gang prevention instructors visit each class once a week for nine weeks. In the first session, students take a short quiz about the costs and benefits of gang membership. They answer the same questions at the end of the nine-week cycle.

When asked, “Would you like to be in a gang?” on the first quiz, about 15% of her students respond “yes,” Chavez says. Nine weeks later, less than 1% do.

But she knows she cannot save them all. She acknowledges that what a 9-year-old claims on a test does not necessarily indicate what he or she will do when confronted with the choice on the street.

Many of them will walk out of the classroom and return to households where older siblings or parents may be gang members. Others will feel a need to prove themselves as they reach the end of elementary school. “They are really enamored by the whole subject of gangs,” admits Chavez, who addresses her students as “ladies and gentlemen.”

When she surveys the youngsters, she sees too many faces that have “the look”--the one that tells her they already may be lost.

In fact, gang violence has exploded in Long Beach, as it has throughout Southern California, in the eight years since the district launched the prevention curriculum. Even so, school officials say the program appears to be making a difference.

On a recent day in Weiman’s classroom, students excitedly whispered Chavez’s name as she walked through the door, which was decorated with a pumpkin. They giggled as she began her lesson on violence by pretending to punch one student. But as her voice rose with emotion, they grew silent.

“Young people are dying--dying--over a piece of land that’s not even theirs,” she tells them, a reference to how gangs protect turf.

District officials measure the achievements of the $115,000-per-year program, funded through state and local grants, through the test results and the individual responses of students and teachers. The instructors talk with about 6,500 students each year.

“I think you have helped us not to join a gang,” one fourth-grade boy wrote after the last nine-week session.

“I know what my choice is. I thought about it and I figured out that going in a gang is a bad decision because you might either get hurt or get killed.”

Another graduate of Chavez’s session wrote: “I’ve learned not to be in a gang because you’re not only hurting yourself, you’re also hurting your family. I will remember what you said.”

And a fourth-grade girl wrote, “You showed me the right way to go on with my life.”

Modeled on a curriculum written by Paramount city youth services experts in 1982, the Long Beach program includes lessons dealing with graffiti, the impact of gang membership on families and peer pressure. Instructors may counsel individual students who seem particularly vulnerable to gang influences.

“I’d like to see them give it at birth,” says Cheryl McKnight, a Long Beach youth worker who teaches the curriculum to third-graders. “By the time they get to sixth grade, they’ve already made up their minds.”

In Paramount, instructors deliver the curriculum in the second and fifth grades. “Once a youngster gets into the gang lifestyle, it’s easy to become locked in,” notes Tony Ostos, a youth worker who created his city’s program and trained some of the Long Beach instructors.

But Chavez, who takes classes at Long Beach City College and works a second job, believes that it is never too late to get out. She says she still talks to her two younger brothers, both of whom are gang members, about starting over.

“They made a choice to take another route,” she says.

Of more immediate concern, though, is preventing her students from setting foot on that route. Toward the end of the violence lesson in Weiman’s class, she points to the word consequence written on the board at the front of the classroom and asks what it means.

In unison, the students shout: “Pay the price.”