Small-Town Bonding at Big-City Schools

The procession of parents and children appears outside the gates of Garden Grove Avenue Elementary School just before 8 a.m. There are no yellow school buses belching fumes, just fathers holding their daughters’ hands and mothers kissing their sons goodbye.

The morning is cool, intimate: A grandmother who lives across the street arrives wearing her blue bathrobe, a granddaughter on each arm. Even after the bell rings, a dozen parents linger on benches in the courtyard, chatting about their children, their school.

Garden Grove Avenue belongs to this quiet Reseda neighborhood of modest homes and rose-bush gardens. In elemental ways, it defines the neighborhood.

In the faceless metropolis of Los Angeles, where next-door neighbors go lifetimes without uttering a word to one another, the tidy little school with Chinese elm trees is galvanizing the spirit of a community.

This fall, Garden Grove Avenue became the first of more than a dozen long-shuttered schools to be reopened by the Los Angeles Unified School District because of growing enrollments. The district last week scheduled three more campuses--two in the San Fernando Valley, one on the Westside--to reopen over the next two years.

As repair crews prepare to spruce up those neglected campuses, Garden Grove serves as a portrait of how a simple school, the smallest of public institutions, can become a vital piece of the civic puzzle, as cherished as the corner church.

Visit Garden Grove and you return to small-town America, where neighbor watches out for neighbor, where investment means nurturing a small corner of the land and the children who play there. You return to childhood itself, when life is simple and fresh and anything seems possible.

“This school has expanded the fellowship of the neighborhood,” said John Sanders, 74, a retired high school principal who led a corps of volunteers from nearby First United Methodist Church of Reseda to greet parents and students last month during the first week of classes.

The Methodist church is only one of many groups rallying behind Garden Grove. The Reseda Woman’s Club is donating a used set of encyclopedias. A photography studio provided $250 for school supplies. A building supply store gave metal stakes for the student garden that will yield vegetables and flowers in the spring.

“I always liked little Garden Grove,” said Pearl Hoover, 73, third vice president of the women’s club and a retired Los Angeles Unified School District nurse who once made rounds at the campus. “It made us all feel good to see it revitalized.”

That good feeling, that sense of belonging, also has blossomed on the school grounds, where parents have found an outlet for their devotion.

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“We were hungering to have this school open,” said Rosario Chavez, 35, a mother of two students who spends about 20 hours each week volunteering in the main office. “I feel a great deal of pleasure being around this school.”

At its core, Garden Grove’s magic boils down to a simple matter of geography. Before the school opened, its 343 students traveled to other campuses. The schools were only a mile or two away, but they might as well have been across town for parents without cars and those with busy schedules.

Reopening a school in the heart of a neighborhood like Garden Grove’s--one teeming with both the children of established, white-collar workers and recent immigrants struggling to gain a foothold in a new country--played into an atmosphere ripe for activism, rousing even the busiest parents.

And in action lies the potential for progress.

“If you can get people to work together for some common good in their community, then they feel more a part of the community,” said Tammy Anderson, associate director of USC’s Joint Educational Project, which dispatches college students to work in schools. “It’s something they can feel they are helping to build.”

A far more personal motivation also stirs longtime residents whose children grew up at Garden Grove. For them, the school’s reopening after 13 years evokes a rush of memories. Every classroom, every corner of the blacktop resonates with emotion.

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Sanders and his wife, Barbara, have lived just a few feet from Garden Grove’s playground for 42 years. Their two sons--now 47 and 44--attended Garden Grove shortly after it opened in 1953.

The couple once were part of the daily procession of parents that strolls past their house. John Sanders remembers the YMCA’s track meets and touch football games at the school. Nearly four decades after the fact, he ticks off the names of his sons’ very best teachers--Mrs. Sarnecki, Mr. Mix, Mrs. Henry, Mr. Wechter.

Now Sanders, who served 11 1/2 years as principal of nearby Cleveland High School until his retirement in 1983, is thrilled to once again hear the high-pitched voices of children over his backyard fence. “To me,” he said, “the noise is fantastic.”

Emotions run just as strong in other neighborhoods where schools are reopening.

For Steve Nance, the thought of children once again prancing around Osage Avenue Elementary in his Westside neighborhood speaks to a profound hope for stability in a world gone awry, where 12-year-olds carry loaded pistols to school, where childish disputes end in knife fights.

Nance, 51, has lived across the street from the Westchester school for 19 years. His daughter and son--now 29 and 24--both attended the school, which currently is used as a Los Angeles Unified training center but will begin serving students from a West Los Angeles magnet program in 1999.

“The way the world is getting now, it’s a little out of control, getting nutty,” said Nance, a cross-country trucker, as he hosed down his driveway. “Let’s face it, this is a grammar school. It has to begin here.”

Richard Moore has his own hopes for Haynes Street Elementary. The 41-year-old construction supervisor attended the West Hills school in his youth, then returned years later to buy his childhood home, located across the street from the campus.

Over the years, the school has served as a bellwether of a neighborhood in transition--first serving the children of the area’s optimistic new homeowners, then becoming a virtual ghost town of weeds and rusting jungle gyms as families fled mandatory busing.

“You take a walk around the school and cockroaches come out from every corner,” said Moore, who has three daughters, ages 3, 7 and 11.

Haynes, like Newcastle Avenue Elementary in Reseda, will serve neighborhood students as well as those from overcrowded schools in the central and eastern San Fernando Valley.

First it will have to overcome years of disrepair--chewed-up asphalt, yellowed lawns, peeling paint, adult-size weeds. But Garden Grove did that.

Garden Grove replaced its graffiti with coats of cheerful peach paint, its homeless squatters with purposeful volunteers, its potholes with a playground smooth and inviting. And now Garden Grove stands as a testament to the power of an elementary school, to all the small things that can create hope and change.

The early-morning procession of parents and children. The smiles of recognition, the friendly banter, the greetings of “Buenos dias” and “Good morning.”

And in the midst of it all, the moments to savor: a little girl in a white dress and pink stockings starting up the walkway, turning back toward her kneeling father. “Bye, Papi,” she says, before scampering through the gates and into the school.