Living Examples of Hope Regained

They are the misfits, the losers, the throwaways . . . and on Thursday, 800 of them will gather to collect their diplomas--shining beacons of hope in a school district where fewer than half the students who enter ninth grade make it to graduation.

Some opted out of regular schools; others were kicked out or turned away. They wound up in Los Angeles Unified’s Options program--a network of 50 high school campuses aimed at getting wayward kids back on track.

“These are kids who were not expected to make much of themselves,” says Cecil McLinn, principal of Duke Ellington High, an Options school on the campus of George Washington Prep in South-Central Los Angeles.

Pregnant girls, drug users, gang-bangers, truants, kids from abusive families and troubled homes. . . . Up to 12,000 of them pass through the Options program each year, “and every one,” McLinn says, “has a story.”

I went looking for those stories and found tragedy and redemption, sorrow and salvation. And evidence that the system can work, one child at a time, if somebody believes.

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Two years ago, Hasani Gray landed on McLinn’s campus after school officials in Palmdale found traces of marijuana in his pants pocket.

He was an angry, unmotivated kid, a disappointment to himself and his mother and grandmother.

“I stopped caring,” Hasani said. “I’d come to school maybe two, three days a week. The rest of the time, I’d be hanging, smoking weed, drinking with the homies. School couldn’t hold my interest.”

“He was extremely bright, but he was running with the area’s most violent gang,” McLinn said. It’s a notion hard to square with the articulate, soft-spoken young man who answers my questions with “yes, ma’am” and “no ma’am.”

It wasn’t until he was wounded last spring in a drive-by shooting that he began to question the direction of his life.

Bullets in the chest and hip meant six days in the hospital and three months at home with nothing but bed rest, television--and lots of homework.

McLinn’s staff stayed in touch with Hasani and made sure he didn’t fall behind. He returned to school the next year with a renewed respect for himself and his school--and for the first time in his life, a vision of himself in college, a life beyond the streets.

“That was when I knew I had to move on to bigger, better things, that this wasn’t the life for me. . . . I knew I’d messed up. But here, everybody’s messed up, or made a mistake--that’s how they got here. So you realize that from here on, it’s up to you to change.”

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Some folks hold their nose when they say the words “continuation school.”

“I know people think we’re slow, we’re losers,” says Jaime Mungia. But for students like him, the small classes and individualized instruction offer the first success of their academic careers, or their lives.

He tells his story softly, hesitantly, with much prodding. He only recently learned to read and write in English, despite a lifetime spent in California.

He is the oldest of seven children, never knew his father, rarely sees his mother, who is hobbled by her own problems.

On Thursday, he will become the first in his family to graduate. It means more to him than he can find words to explain.

“I want to influence my brothers, let them know they can make it if they stay in school.” His 13-year-old brother already has dropped out of school.

Jaime talks about his life without a trace of rancor or self-pity . . . a life spent in foster care and group homes, or on the street with gang members as his only family.

There was no great epiphany that pointed him toward success, just a slow, steady dawning of maturity--and the good fortune to find a school like Miguel Leonis in Woodland Hills, where teachers recognized his artistic talent and met his academic needs.

“I had to find the motivation within myself. I’ve had difficulties . . . but I’m an adult now, and I have a better mentality. They gave me a chance, and I’m taking real seriously my life.”

He has cut ties with his gangster buddies and is having his gang tattoos removed. He volunteers at a local health agency and has been offered a job there when he graduates this week. He just moved from a group home into his first apartment, under a special program for abandoned youth.

And he paid his first visit to a college campus when he enrolled for fall classes at Pierce last week.

“I want to study art,” he said. “Someday, I’d like to teach.

“I hope I can help other people . . . and raise my children in a good way, not let them grow up on the streets.”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.