In Room 9, Rays of Hope Amid the Chaos

Every morning at an obscure little school in Inglewood, they call the roll of damaged children.

Up front in Room 9, Soldier Boy chatters and erupts from his seat, a study in hyperactivity. Across the way, New Girl slumps or sleeps for hours, welcome reprieve from the days she was haunted by voices. Wild Child just can’t settle on what to do--taunt the boys, sway compulsively in her seat or prattle on about favorite moments from “The Jerry Springer Show.” Sometimes she does all three.

In their midst you will find a 14-year-old boy who hardly ever talks, who dresses only in black. He might have summed up their emotional and intellectual devastation with a single line he scrawled on ruled paper.

“I ma a alonebe because I ma me,” it said. I am alone because I am me.

These four students and eight classmates have been assigned to a room they call “Mighty Fine Number Nine,” at a school named Slauson Learning Center, just one outpost at the end of the line in publicly funded education.

Slauson is a “nonpublic” school, paid for by taxpayers but run by a private company to educate disabled children that the public schools can’t, or won’t, accommodate.

Without planning or grand design, California has sponsored a massive shift of its most fragile children into these little-known and costly facilities, which grew out of a 1975 federal law requiring a “free and appropriate” education for all disabled children.

Today, nonpublic schools constitute the fastest-growing segment of the state education budget.

In just over a decade, enrollment in these publicly funded schools has more than doubled to 11,273, driven largely by an increase in emotionally disturbed children. Educating the average student now costs nearly $23,000, more than a year’s tuition at Stanford. In a dozen years, spending on the schools has leaped more than fourfold to $259 million annually.

But despite the weighty public investment, no one has measured how these 336 schools perform. No one knows how many students return to public school, or graduate. No one can say how many go on to college or jobs.

The state Department of Education and local school districts share responsibility for regulating the schools. The result: Sometimes neither gets the job done. Oversight is lax and state standards are low, allowing under-qualified and even unfit people to run some schools and teach children.

Where have all these emotionally disturbed students come from?

Some experts suspect that an epidemic of substance-addicted babies and the dissolution of families have driven up the numbers. Others say that school districts are too quick to label difficult children--particularly black children--as emotionally disturbed. Nonpublic schools--once dominated by the deaf, blind, autistic and retarded--have expanded to meet the new demand.

The growth in enrollment might have more to do with the lack of other alternatives. With state mental hospitals closing and private psychiatric facilities beyond the means of most families, nonpublic schools have become treatment centers of last resort.

“The kids are far more difficult and more troubling now than anything I have seen in my career,” says Sandra Sternig-Babcock, an administrator at a nonpublic school in North Hollywood and member of a committee that sets standards for the industry. Whereas students once arrived with just one disability, now they often enroll with layers of problems.

Children at Slauson Learning Center bombed out of mainstream schools. They threw fits, hit teachers, heaved chairs and threatened suicide. Their behaviors became so unmanageable that the Los Angeles Unified School District labeled them Seriously Emotionally Disturbed (SED) and transferred them to nonpublic schools.

District officials say Slauson manages more than 60 difficult students at its Inglewood school quite well. They rate the facility as better than the average nonpublic school.

To assess that “average,” a Times reporter spent five months visiting Slauson’s campus of six rented classrooms on the backside of a faded Episcopal Church in downtown Inglewood. Most of that time was spent in Room 9, regarded as one of the school’s most civil and accomplished classrooms. Students asked that they not be identified by name, and are described here only with pseudonyms.

Society makes what amounts to a last stand at Slauson Learning Center and schools like it. Teachers, therapists and aides struggle to curb the worst tendencies of children who could be bound for substance abuse, prison and the streets.

It is a school that is at once caring and fiercely hopeful, ineffectual and painfully overmatched. It is a school where children get more than they have gotten before, but not nearly as much as they need.

Trying to Take Setbacks in Stride

Late afternoon in Room 9. Time for math.

The spectacled boy they call “Urkel,” after the TV sitcom character, thumps his textbook like a drum. A 15-year-old chatters about “sexing up” the first available female. Next, a boy exiled for fighting in a neighboring class tells giddy peers in No. 9 how he stabbed his teacher with a pencil. The 15-year-old recommends that, next time, he use a knife, and he flashes one. Quickly, a teacher’s aide backs the boy into the blackboard and relieves him of the pocketknife.

Today’s lesson, simple subtraction, is already teetering when Wild Child sends it into full collapse. Failing to attract attention by scowling, foot-stomping and swaying violently in her chair, the 12-year-old girl lets go. Urine runs down her ankle and pools at the foot of her chair.

It will take another half hour to clean up and settle everyone down.

“Damn,” whispers the girl’s neighbor, Green Eyes. “I’ve got to get out of this crazy school.”

Math lasted maybe 15 minutes. Now it’s time to line up for the bus home.

As the students bump and fidget at the door, teacher Steven Wiesenthal shakes his head and smiles wanly. In three years at Slauson, the 30-year-old UCLA graduate has learned to take setbacks in stride.

“It was a wild day today,” he says. “Some days there is not much you can do. You just have to let it happen. Then start over.”

Many of the denizens of Room 9 have the impulse control of 3-year-olds. They hardly follow directions, seldom stick to a task. They beg their teachers for help, then curse the one who gives it to them.

The children are grouped by age. These 12- to 15-year-olds span the academic spectrum. Some read like first-graders, others test at the high school level. A few struggle to subtract whole numbers, while a couple tackle pre-algebra. No one can name the largest state in the United States. Only one can recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Of the 10 boys and two girls in Room 9, all have been labeled Seriously Emotionally Disturbed. At least a couple of them, school district officials suspect, have organic brain disorders. Piled on top of those problems can be many others, including specific learning disabilities and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Spontaneously, on any day in class, the root of their problems can become obvious.

Urkel reads a letter from his imprisoned father.

The boy who wrote about his loneliness had good reason; his mother died recently of cancer and his father is away from home most of the time, working two jobs to support his family.

One girl fights off boys who tease her about her dead brother--killed in a gang drive-by.

Another child worries about a mother’s drug use.

Others don’t live with their parents, having been removed by the county’s foster care system.

Sometimes they find friendship and solace in each other--phoning late into the night to confide their secrets. There is love in the communion of lonely souls.

But there is anger too--at being labeled SED and being segregated with others regarded as somehow defective. Fiercely, they taunt each other. “Trick!” “Bitch!” “Crackhead!” “Dumb-ass!”

No insult goes unanswered. The air in Room 9 fairly buzzes with angry energy, making it difficult for hope and inspiration to survive.

Hardly a task is undertaken the students can’t derail.

They leave their desks repeatedly to sharpen pencils, scrounge paper, staple assignments--three, four, five, six times.

Wiesenthal tries to start a conversation about President Clinton’s State of the Union speech. Instead, the distracted dozen argue about whether Wild Child’s family could afford a television to watch the speech.

The class reviews a vocabulary list. It takes an hour to define 10 words. In a roomful of African American students, not one can cite the historic significance of “abolish.”

Finally Big Man comes the closest when he offers: “They abolished the dinosaurs.”

Expectations are so low that one 13-year-old boy’s school district-approved education plan calls for him to “respond to commands without profanity--75% of the time” and “reduce the impulse to fight by 50%.”

Slauson Director Evelyn Wright urges teachers at a staff meeting to “stay positive” on report cards. She is only half joking when she adds: “If the child used to fight 900 times a day say, ‘Wow! Now he is only fighting 850 times a day.’ ”

Weak Standards, Poor Training

Students like these push the limits and often frustrate the efforts of even the best educators. But in California’s tax-supported nonpublic schools, teachers, therapists and aides often are undertrained and ill-equipped to help these neediest of students.

The vast majority of students in these schools do not have fully credentialed teachers.

The state Department of Education last year attempted to tighten regulations--requiring nonpublic schools to employ at least one credentialed special ed teacher per campus. But with dozens of schools struggling to meet even that minimal requirement, the State Board of Education last month backed down. Teachers in training are still allowed to fill the positions.

Even instructors who have been thoroughly schooled find it is often not in the right techniques. Although the number of children with emotional disorders is expanding faster than any other disability category, special education teachers continue to be taught mainly about more “traditional” disabilities like autism, deafness and retardation.

Room 9’s teacher, for example, has been working toward a special education teaching credential for more than two years. But Wiesenthal says his graduate courses have taught him nothing about how to deal with severely emotionally disturbed children. “I just learned a bunch of acronyms like ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] and LD [Learning Disabled],” he says.

Making the teaching task even more difficult is the fact that schools usually receive students whose behavioral and academic deficiencies are deeply embedded; typically they enter special education five years after their problems were first recognized, research has shown.

Even the best schools find it difficult to help this generation of students.

“In years past, I never would have said this, but now, sometimes, so much damage and dysfunction has set in that we just can’t break through, even with superhuman efforts,” says Sternig-Babcock, the special education veteran who helps run the Dubnoff Center, a respected nonpublic school in North Hollywood.

Finding qualified support staff to work under such trying conditions--often for less than $10 an hour--can be even more difficult than finding good teachers. High turnover is endemic.

At Slauson, one teacher’s aide lost his job in January when he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old Slauson student. The aide met the girl while driving her to school, deputies said. After three months in jail, he is on probation for lewd conduct with a minor.

Less than a month after the employee left, another Slauson aide had to resign because of a new state law that prohibits adults with violent felony records from working with children. The aide was convicted of voluntary manslaughter seven years ago. But Slauson’s staff and students knew him only as a loyal and steadfast friend. Many of them cried when he left.

Such immense challenges have not prevented some nonpublic schools from elevating students that the public schools could not.

Schools like the Dubnoff Center, the Almansor Center in South Pasadena and the Switzer Center in Torrance have received acclaim for creating rigorous and consistent programs that connect with difficult children.

Authorities say the best schools have highly trained and creative leaders who bring a strong philosophy to their campuses. A tightly structured schedule is a must. Often, they employ a point system or token economy to reward students’ good behavior.

Some of the best schools sponsor vocational training. They stretch to involve parents in counseling and planning sessions, recognizing that many problems begin at home.

In some cases, they assign a “one-to-one” aide to children to help them function inside and outside the classroom. Employees meet once a week or more to make sure that teachers, therapists, aides and coaches apply the same strategy to a particular student.

Even with generous public funding, the schools raise substantial amounts to enrich their programs.

“We have to keep reinventing ourselves and coming up with new solutions,” says Gil Freitag, executive director of the Dubnoff Center. “With each new case, we might have to try new things.”

Making Their Own Rules

In Room 9, someone has painstakingly posted the class schedule on a bulletin board. Inside Wiesenthal’s notebook is a lesson plan, with page and even lesson citations for every day of the month. Inspectors from the state Department of Education appreciate such formalities.

But no one in Room 9 pays much attention to either schedule.

Instead, the teacher and two aides make their own rules as they go. There will be no high educational stratagem, no advanced therapeutic techniques, just a daily scramble to keep control, maybe move forward. The three adults cajole, plead, praise--sometimes taunt and yell--to try to get kids to care, to follow the rules, at least in this one small universe.

“These kids are too unpredictable,” says Wiesenthal. “You have to be flexible.”

Teacher’s aides Haamid Abdul Wadood Jr. and Sheryl Coleman share much the same sensibility. Wadood, 29, came to Slauson when his college football career at San Jose State ended with an injury. Coleman, 37, started a decade ago as a bus driver before taking on duties in the classroom. Neither has a college degree.

The cue for their freewheeling, impromptu style can be traced to owner-administrators Wright, Ray Lewkow and Deltha Williams.

The three met while teaching at a private school in Los Angeles. After 17 years, they have built Slauson Learning Center into a thriving business, with 90 students at two locations. It received $19,200 per student last year, a total of $1.7 million, enough to pay each of the three owners about $100,000, reports to the school district suggest.

Although Williams and Wright have special education credentials, the owners say they mostly learn the business through day-to-day experience. There isn’t so much a philosophy at Slauson as a feeling--that everyone on the staff should act like family and treat the children as such.

In Room 9, Wiesenthal likes to seize on his students’ small moments of inspiration. When they say they haven’t ever used an encyclopedia, for instance, he runs out of class to find an old set. Feverishly, he flips through the pages, calling out topics they might appreciate. “Vampire bats!” “Football!”

Often, he rolls his sagging swivel chair to the center of the room to talk. About anything: the five senses, how money is printed, the foolishness of gangbanging, the prospects of a new downtown sports arena.

He remains open and encouraging, even when the hyperkinetic Soldier Boy asks his umpteenth question about World War II: “What was the difference between the Jews and the Nazis?”

Wiesenthal, a distant relative of the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, answers: “They were all people, all human. But the Nazis hated the Jews.”

Often the job doesn’t give much back.

The kids call Wiesenthal “wheezer,” “Pillsbury Dough Boy,” “fat man” or “white boy.” Students curse him almost daily. They punch his shoulder, poke his protruding belly and pull his droopy curls.

For this, Wiesenthal earns $28,600 a year. It’s much the same for Wadood and Coleman, who make $17,600 and $15,400 a year, respectively.

Parents usually can’t be counted on to cushion the burdens.

When the teacher calls one mother to report that her son is coming out of his cocoon, she registers no joy. She announces she has been sleeping and quickly ends the phone call, causing Wiesenthal to throw up his hands and declare: “What are you going to do?”

What Room 9’s educators have done is step into the parenting void.

Wiesenthal cuts short many a lunch to counsel his students. Coleman unloads a pocketful of change on one student’s desk and patiently helps him learn to count. The total: $4.26.

Students Crave Wadood’s Approval

In particular, the students crave the attention and approval of Wadood.

The teacher’s aide lives just blocks from some of them, behind the scrap metal yards of Watts. He too grew up alienated from his father. He too nearly turned to the streets, pondering life as a drug trafficker when his football career ended.

Now the short, puckish aide gives the boys the clothes off his back, literally. On any day, a handful sport his hand-me-down shirts and shoes. He teases the boys and occasionally attends their sports events after school. When one announces that he is moving away, Wadood sends him off with a hug, saying: “I love you, man.”

But the unstructured style of Room 9 can backfire, and the staff misses opportunities for meaningful connections with their students.

Despite the high staffing ratio, for instance, it seems that Wiesenthal often must leave his students to take care of paperwork or scrounge for books. Coleman might be on a break or driving for a field trip. And Wadood often disappears, usually to help in other classes.

In one typical month, the class never assembles in small groups. Aides make themselves available to help students only sporadically. Too often, students are left to their own devices.

When Big Man writes “kaids doent wotat to loan” in an essay, no one makes time to correct his spelling and punctuation. If they had, the sentence would have read: “Kids don’t want to learn.”

Playing the ‘Hard Cop’

Sometimes, the powerful undertow of the students’ habits takes over. The adults in Room 9--seemingly overwhelmed by their charges--occasionally stagger over the line from tolerant to indulgent, or from strict to oppressive.

Coleman, in particular, says she must “play the hard cop” to keep students in line. When the students woof, she woofs louder.

“Bring it on! Bring it on!” she hollers, fists poised at her sides, to boys who won’t obey. Usually, it’s pure bluster. But the feisty, onetime high school shot-putter throws an occasional punch. The mild blows find the back or shoulders of boys, who usually laugh and squirm back into their seats.

When the class can’t find an assignment one morning, she jabs them again: “The chapter on the brain . . . something some of y’all don’t have.”

“I’m going to be on your nerves,” Coleman tells one student, “because you are on mine.”

At other moments, it’s Wadood who applies the pressure. He reprimands Wild Child, only to set her pouting and rocking compulsively. Then he threatens to have her write, over and over: “Just because I look retarded, doesn’t mean I have to act retarded.” For 18 pages.

“Is that what you want?” he shouts.

One boy writes a foulmouthed screed about how he will go to a cemetery and fornicate with a classmate’s dead mother. Wiesenthal allows the essay to be read aloud to a tittering class. All the teacher says is: “That’s cold, really cold.”

Although the adults spend much of their time threatening to take away privileges such as videos or longer class breaks, often they don’t follow through.

Slauson staffers insist that they only go far enough to command respect, that discipline never gets out of hand. In March, however, the guardian of a 10-year-old student claimed in a lawsuit that a Slauson teacher hit and kicked the boy and dragged him through the school. Slauson’s owners denied those allegations, and the suit is pending.

Clearly, however, Slauson has its own idiosyncratic approach to children’s aggression. It might be called streetwise. When fists fly--as they do nearly every day in the tiny courtyard or classrooms--adults often stand back and let students do battle.

Big Man jumps to the defense of Wild Child one day, for instance. He drags another boy away from the hapless girl. When the two boys square off in the brick courtyard and begin punching, Wadood folds his arms. “I’m not getting into it,” he announces, rolling his eyes. The boys break apart, argue and begin brawling a second time before the aide finally intervenes.

Staff members say they are quick to jump in if they see a child getting hurt. They insist they don’t condone fighting. But “sometimes if kids are nagging each other for a couple of weeks, it settles it if they just fight it out,” Wiesenthal says. “They get it out of their systems and then they can calm down again.”

Some Students Remain Hopeful

In spite of the losses, the turmoil, the lack of a grand plan, some students at Slauson, and other schools like it, remain defiantly hopeful. Over time, you can see them inch ahead.

Urkel sleeps and mopes less, joins in class and basketball more. Big Man writes an entire page and reads aloud in class, when once he scrawled a few lines and covered his paper. And Wild Child spends more time in her seat.

When the 12-year-old reads the last lines of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech--”Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”--even the boys who love to call her “ugly” and “stupid” stop teasing. For a moment, they applaud.

Soldier Boy Is ‘Good Special’

Potential burns nowhere more brightly than in Soldier Boy. Rare among students in Room 9, the 12-year-old exudes curiosity and enthusiasm. Most of the artwork on the wall is his--fanciful butterflies and an evocative portrait of a man saying, “Bye.”

He regales Wiesenthal with questions about war and soldiering; tells Wadood that, if he had $20 million, he would raise the Titanic. During any free moment, he positions plastic armies on a game board atop his desk.

Not long ago, at home, his mother hugged him close and told him he was “special.” He drew back. “Don’t say special unless you say ‘good special,’ ” he replied.

Slauson students feel painfully aware of being set apart. So the boy’s mother says it that way now: “Good special. You’re good special.”

If only he had gotten help sooner, to contain his flighty habits and hot-wired temper.

But his mother pulled him out of public school for three years, unwilling to accept the district’s diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder. For those critical years he attended private schools, with no special help.

“I don’t know if I was in denial or what,” Soldier Boy’s mother says. “I thought if they put him in with these other [special education] kids, it might be worse for him.”

By the time he returned to public junior high school, Soldier Boy could not be managed. A series of brawls finally landed him in a nonpublic school in Culver City, where he constantly ran away. His mother rejected offers of medication. Then came his transfer to Slauson Learning Center.

Now, his mother concedes that the flight from special education probably hurt her boy. She takes solace that Slauson keeps Soldier Boy in check.

“I’m not getting those [complaints] from school every day anymore. And he’s not running [away],” says the woman, a state government employee. “Now I have some happiness in my heart.”

Some of the parents are so comfortable with Slauson, in fact, that they fight against returning their children to public school. They take pride that their children are getting a “private school” education.

But most of the students feel the opposite--returning to mainstream schools is the Holy Grail. Even if they will remain in special education classes, they crave dances and football games and a prom. They talk about it every day. Wiesenthal and Wadood encourage them, telling them that they can make it.

Five of Slauson’s 66 students this spring qualified for “dual enrollment,” a program that allows them to spend half their days in public school.

But a return to the mainstream is far from a guarantee of success. Some special education students inevitably get lost on larger campuses. Therapy and medication can fall by the wayside.

Soldier Boy told all his friends at public school that he would be back in six months. When that deadline passed, he told them he would return by year’s end. Now his goal is to finish next year, eighth grade, back in public school.

Wiesenthal told him he needs to stay in his seat more, squelch his urge to respond to every slight; generally to act more mature.

He concedes that the teacher is probably right. But it’s his nature to be impatient.

He longs to walk home from public school with his friends, hang out, migrate between classrooms and teachers in a “regular” school.

“I don’t think I’ll miss anything here,” he says quietly and tentatively, away from the rest of the Slauson kids. “I’ll be more happy when I’m gone.

“I already wasted enough time. I don’t want to waste any more.”