How School Problems Become Everyone’s Problem

Somewhere in the mess that now awaits L.A. Unified’s new, improved school board majority, amid the reformers and lawyers and demoralized teachers and stunned-looking reinforcements getting pulled in off the streets, somewhere in all of the current talk of at-risk kids and social promotion--there is the world of kids like Sarah Hernandez. Let her speak:

“I was slipping through the cracks. That’s the phrase my mother used to use, both for me and my brother.” Sarah is 20 now, with long black hair and pale eyes. Six years have passed since her mother, a bus driver, finally took action. “I’d been in special classes since fourth grade, and not a summer passed that I wasn’t in summer school, but I wasn’t under the impression I’d fallen that far behind until my mother told me. I was 14.

“I think maybe I just wasn’t learnable, or whatever,” she says, struggling. “I was coherent and good around adults, so people didn’t pick up on it right away. I was fine until the third grade, and then I don’t know what happened. I just forgot everything. I’d sleep in class, or pretend I was doing the work, and nobody seemed to notice. I got Cs and Ds. Finally, in middle school, I started hanging out with the wrong kids, and we’d ditch. The school knew I was gone, but they didn’t mark me absent because, you know, they get money for that kind of enrollment. By the time my mom found out, I’d been out for months.”

What was the problem? By eighth grade, she didn’t know and didn’t care. She lived with her mom and brother in Venice; her dad lived in Pomona. A guy she knew stole a car and took her out for a joy ride; she ended up on probation for three years. She went to Montgomery Ward and shoplifted some junk jewelry. Her mom sent her to live with her dad.

One day, she hopped a bus back to the Westside and didn’t go home. She and her friends stayed in cars and hotel rooms for more than a week. Her mom finally found her outside a boy’s house at 6 a.m., rolled down the car window and said, Let’s go. “I was, like, ‘Fine’,” Sarah remembers. “The guy I was talking to didn’t like me on the streets.”

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This is the core of it--the way school problems become life problems, and vice versa. Even Sarah is unsure which came first, the “can’t read” or the “don’t care.” Of all the hard truths that factor into the urgency over education, this is the hardest: L.A.’s public schools are aswarm with quiet legions of children who are culturally and psychologically unprepared to get, or maybe even to wholly want, education. Test scores aside, what “reform” can beat back the betrayal of rising above family and friends?

Some sidestep this with therapists and private tutors. Bus drivers don’t have such perks. Sarah’s mother didn’t care whether the problem was with the kid or the teachers; she petitioned the LAUSD to put Sarah at taxpayers’ expense into what is known as a “nonpublic placement”--a special school for children whom even special education has failed.

The school, the highly regarded ERAS Center in Culver City, tested Sarah. Her reading level was second-grade. She got one-on-one instruction and mass quantities of counseling and wondered, later, if her mom had anticipated the future: Three short years after she started at ERAS, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died.

Gently, firmly--while her mother wasted and her brother dropped out and Sarah helplessly, desperately got pregnant--the experts at ERAS forced her to learn the basics her childhood classrooms had failed to impart. Her diploma cost taxpayers about $75,000. Which is both serious money and a bargain compared to, say, jail.

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So where are the lessons for education? Some start with the Prop. 13-induced demise of California’s once-great public schools. Some blame unyielding teachers unions and educational fads.

And a few wonder about the shameful miserliness of the federal government, which requires school districts to provide a “free appropriate education,” even if it means private schooling, to children like Sarah, but which has almost entirely reneged on its promise to help pay the tab. Because the category she fell under--children with disabilities--covers everything from Down’s syndrome to behavioral problems, the mandate has forced states to ante up $36 billion a year now for special ed.

Such spending has helped multitudes, but it has also pitted the needs of special ed kids against other kids’ needs. Meanwhile, what we need are leaders who’ll just admit that there is no cheap fix, that it’s pay big now, or pay bigger later. For Sarah’s child’s sake, let them speak.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.