Skill Seekers

In this brightly painted apartment complex where the drug-dealing hands of former tenants once snatched money from customers across the fence, the new residents--nine adult teenagers in the process of freeing themselves from county custody--prepare for an honest day’s work.

Amber Rose, 18, an outgoing young woman who has bounced between group homes and juvenile hall all her life, puts on her red uniform shirt and the makeup she hopes won’t run during the hot bus ride to her job at a West Valley Target store.

Her roommate, Evelyn Sanchez, an 18-year-old who in a couple of years would like to finish raising her 12-year-old sister who is still in a foster home, will catch another bus to her work at a photo lab in the Northridge Fashion Center.

Sheldon Winters, 19, has tried a few jobs and quit. Now the cautious young man who chooses his words carefully as he explains his entrance into the foster care system as a toddler with “I guess my mother just couldn’t take care of me,” is studying for the U.S. Coast Guard entrance exam.

Others will go to jobs at a McDonald’s, a Home Depot and a hair salon or take classes at a vocational school.

Most of the teenagers are graduates of Penny Lane, the nonprofit foundation just down the block, whose residents come from the county’s Children and Family Services and Probation departments.

During the last few years, Penny Lane has slowly sprawled over four blocks, cutting into the territory roamed by drug dealers in this crime-infested, but improving area just east of Sepulveda Boulevard and Rayen Street.

The foundation--one of the largest private social service organizations contracted with Los Angeles County--already boasts a main residential facility, a school, a clinic, a foster care agency, administrative offices and nine satellite group homes.

Its latest expansion, financed largely by federal funds, includes three apartment complexes that will serve as transitional housing for adult teens entering the real world after a life in foster and group homes and juvenile halls. The complex where Rose, Sanchez and Winters live is on Columbus Avenue.

Penny Lane “has put new life” into the three buildings that were once gang-infested, senior LAPD Lead Officer Ernest Jimenez said.

Behind the walls of Penny Lane’s other facilities, 104 boys and girls younger than 18 attend school and counseling sessions as they struggle to put their lives back together after committing crimes or being abused or abandoned by their parents.

They are guided by more than 200 Penny Lane staffers who enforce discipline, check their homework and drive some to jobs and outings on weekends.

“They supply us everything we need--except my family,” says a playful 12-year-old, the youngest of six girls at a spacious satellite group home off Nordhoff Street, which the youngsters are responsible for keeping clean.

Penny Lane, officially known as the National Foundation for the Treatment of the Emotionally Handicapped, was founded in 1969. Its nickname was drawn from the 1967 Beatles song.

“It was a happy song,” says Ivelise Markovitz, 58, the organization’s founder and executive director. Like the song, her goal was to brighten up the lives of unwanted children.

Just out of Azusa Pacific University with a master’s degree in family counseling and driven by the social consciousness of the 1960s, Markovitz gathered a few friends and attempted to establish a group home for girls.

With a $45,000 loan from her father, she and her friends opened a home in Altadena for 25 troubled girls.

“We very much looked like the hippies of that time,” Markovitz said about the team she assembled. “It was that kind of feeling we were going to do something good for kids.”

But when the girls ran away soon after arriving at the home, Markovitz said the organizers realized that their idealism did not prepare them to take care of kids with problems.

“One of the first things I learned was that love wasn’t enough,” she said.

Structure and discipline were also needed.

The girls eventually returned on their own or were found by authorities. Soon after, Penny Lane moved to North Hills, where today it operates on an $11-million budget, 90% of it from public funds.

Its residents are 13- to 18-year-old girls and boys, most wards of Los Angeles County. The girls live in the main residential facility and in five satellite homes. Thirty boys live in four satellite homes.

The teens who end up at Penny Lane are hard-to-place youngsters who have been abandoned by or removed from their parents--most often because of drug use.

Some kids have committed crimes, but are put in homes rather than juvenile camps because they are first-time offenders.

Most are emotionally disturbed and receive regular counseling at Penny Lane’s clinic, said Markovitz.

The kids are supervised round-the-clock, including bed checks every half-hour while they sleep.

“I’m used to it,” said a 17-year-old girl whose room is decorated with basketball trophies, pictures of singers and stuffed Tweetie birds on her bed. “I’ve been here so long, it’s like a home.”

Another 17-year-old girl used to run away chronically from her Pacoima home and do drugs. At Penny Lane, she attends school and works afterward at a supermarket. “I think it makes me responsible,” she said.

The teens’ responsibilities include cleaning their houses. Privileges such as visiting relatives on weekends or gaining permission to get part-time jobs are granted based on their performance, including behavior and grades.

The staff tries to provide a home atmosphere.

“I raise them the way I raise my daughter,” Bill Perrish, 48, supervisor of a boys home on Haskell Avenue, said as some of the teens in baggy pants and sporting new haircuts set the table for dinner. “I give them a hug the same as I give my daughter.”

One night, as Perrish hugged each boy before bed, he did not know whether to do the same with a tall 14-year-old from South Los Angeles who had arrived at the house that day.

Perrish did not want to make the boy uncomfortable. But the teen--whose offenses included assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at rival gang members--reached out his arms to Perrish and asked: “Where’s my hug?”

For another boy, a 15-year-old who was taken from his drug-using mother in the Monterey area after social workers found him in a filthy apartment with feces in the bathtub, Penny Lane is the best home he’s ever had.

“You’re always safe here, nobody hurts you,” said the small intense boy, known around the house for his temper.

In three years, he has been in half a dozen group homes all over the state.

He ran away one night from his previous group home in Hollister, broke into a school and destroyed several computers. That night, he said, he was confused and angry--at his mom, at the group home staffer he fought with before running off.

“I couldn’t take it--I flipped,” he said.

After that episode, he was sent to Penny Lane, this time as a delinquent.

Unlike many neighborhoods where residents oppose establishments such as Penny Lane, in this low-income, high-crime area, the institution is a welcome addition.

A lot of people are intimidated by criminals and do not call the police, but Penny Lane staffers are not afraid to get involved, LAPD Officer Jimenez said.

By purchasing the three apartment complexes to use as transitional housing, Penny Lane has displaced at least some of the drug dealers in this square-mile area that two years ago accounted for 34% of narcotics arrests in the San Fernando Valley. Last year, all crime in the area, including narcotics arrests, declined by 20%, he said.

And, Jimenez said, the mere presence of Penny Lane is beneficial to police because anyone caught selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school can get a longer sentence.

Now, as part of its continuing effort to get kids ready for real life, Penny Lane is helping adult teens learn how to live honestly on their own.

In the six months the 18-year-olds are allowed to live there, Penny Lane requires that they work and pay rent. They are taught such skills as how to cook and balance a checkbook.

And how to get on with life.

Sanchez, who got As and Bs in high school, said she plans to study at Mission College in Sylmar to prepare for a career in medicine.

Winters, who has participated in drama productions, said he will try to enlist in the Coast Guard, but hopes one day to become an actor. “I’ll scrub toilets just to work in a studio,” he said.

Rose, who at 14 slit her wrist at a Lancaster group home because she thought her father didn’t want her anymore, said she hopes to learn to drive and plans to enroll at Cal State Los Angeles.

“I’m a little scared to go out on my own,” she said, sitting outside her apartment playing with her tongue piercing. “But I think I’m ready.”