Where the Mayor Should Go to School

The children laughed and played on the Figueroa Street Elementary School yard Wednesday. It has been almost a year since Alfredo Perez was shot in the head while teaching his fifth-grade class there.

When recess was over, the boys and girls returned to their classes, obedient, many of them in school uniforms, marching down perfectly maintained hallways. When the lunch bell rang, the children headed toward the cafeteria in well-disciplined but cheerful groups and lined up for their food. Even the guys behaved.

Outside, only the roar of a power mower broke the late morning silence of 111th Street, lined with neatly kept bungalows and ranch houses.

This school, its tragedy, and this working-class Latino and African American South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood illustrate the complexities of one of the most critical issues in the mayor’s race: crime in the streets and how to control it.

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I had gone to the school to hear Principal Rosemary Lucente, her staff and some parents tell reporters about the year since Perez was shot. Perez, she said, is recovering, and has regained his ability to speak, read, write and walk, with the aid of a cane. As for the children, teacher Gloria Simosky said, “at the end of the year, most of them are doing well.”

The news conference was held in the library where Perez was shot. The bullet, fired from the rough side of Figueroa, where the gang members and prostitutes reign, went through the security screen on the school window, shattered the glass, bypassed all the furniture and struck the teacher in the head. After the shooting, Mayor Richard Riordan and others paid for the installation of bullet-resistant glass.

After the news conference, I walked across Figueroa, near where the bullet was fired, and talked to a neighbor, Verdie White, who was standing in the yard of her apartment house.

Sure, it’s quiet now, she said. The gang members sleep in the morning. But at night, she said, the drug dealers begin work in the alleys, on the side streets and at the prostitution and drug motels along Figueroa’s infamous strip.

Things have improved since the shooting, she said. There are more cops on the street, she said. “When you hear someone running around at night, you call the police and they come out.”

But even with the improvement, she said, the problems that spawned gang violence remain.

The gangs themselves remain, as does the drug business which provides them with an economic base. There are still a lot of guns out there.

No amount of intense efforts by the Police Department and other city officials has cleaned up the motels or the prostitution that thrives in them.

All these things--gangs, drugs, guns, prostitution--are elements of what we lump together as crime on the streets. All of them contribute to a climate of fear. With witnesses running scared, is it any wonder two juries could not convict the suspected gang members accused in the shooting?

On Tuesday, when Mayor Riordan announced his candidacy for a second term, his aides announced that he would address the crime problem. All of us--reporters and Riordan supporters alike--waited in a meeting room of the San Fernando Valley’s Sportsmen’s Lodge for the mayor to shed light on the subject, and perhaps to clue us in to what he has learned in almost four years in office.

His answer was the same as it was when he was first elected--more cops. No mention of the drug and prostitution motels, which plague the San Fernando Valley as well as South Los Angeles. No mention of guns.

When Riordan finished his presentation, he darted out a rear door, without answering any questions. I wasn’t surprised, having seen the mayor use the maneuver during most of his 1993 campaign appearances.

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But executing a mayoral duckout maneuver, even with Riordan’s skill, isn’t leadership. The press, and I assume the public, wanted more.

We wanted answers. Giving answers is part of leadership, a skill that Mayor Riordan has yet to master.

I know where he can get some lessons--Figueroa Street Elementary School, 510 W. 111th Street.

There, Principal Lucente, her staff and the parents have shown how you can make a better place of your space in the world.

Figueroa Street Elementary School, unlike the city of Los Angeles, is clean and beautifully maintained, thanks to plant manager Darlene Milton, the maintenance chief, and her crew of three. “We see graffiti, whatever, we get rid of it,” she said. “We do it all.”

A clean and well-maintained building, Milton said, shows the students and the parents that the school respects them.

Respect breeds respect. That’s clear from the way the kids interact with the teachers in the schoolyard, in the hall and in the cafeteria.

Drawn by this spirit of cooperation, parents have become a vital part of school operations, including the safety apparatus, especially since the shooting. Parent patrols watch the schoolyard and nearby streets. Parents open their homes as “safe houses” where children can find sanctuary in case of trouble on the way home. There may be more cops around, but the increased patrols wouldn’t do much good without such parental and community cooperation.

I’m sure Figueroa Street School isn’t perfect. But the school feels safe and comfortable a year after Alfredo Perez’s shooting.

There’s a lesson for you there, Mr. Mayor.