Probation System Presses Literacy Effort

This may be Gilbert’s last chance.

“A, E, I, O, U, and Y,” the 18-year-old says hesitantly, rewarded by an approving smile from a volunteer tutor.

Gilbert leaves his county probation camp next week, and reformers believe that sending the gang member back to Los Angeles without a basic education is tantamount to handing him a ticket to County Jail.

That’s why the county is expanding the education it provides the 4,000 juvenile offenders in its probation system, 80% of whom are functionally illiterate and 50% of whom end up in the adult prison system after turning 18.

After protests that the county’s probation camps violated state laws requiring 300 minutes of classroom instruction per week, offenders this summer will spend less time on work crews and on fire lines and more time in the classroom. On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors also discussed a new reading program that will send an army of volunteers into the county’s probation camps and foster homes.

Operation Read, a year-old county effort to provide after-school tutoring for its least literate charges in probation camps and foster homes, hopes to pair each teenager with one of 350 tutors during their time in county custody, as well as when they return to public schools.

“The kids themselves have said to us they need somebody to hold their hand on the outside,” said Debra Greenstein, executive director of a Canoga Park nonprofit group that tutors teenagers in the probation camps.

Operation Read representatives said Tuesday they hope that intensive after-school tutoring of abused, neglected or delinquent children will raise reading abilities by two months for every month in the program.

“These kids need all the help we can put together,” said Gerry Lopez of the county’s office of education. “If you can’t even attack a word by age 15 you need a lot of assistance.”

Probation Chief Richard Shumsky said his agency’s camps have long had reading programs, but on an ad hoc basis. Operation Read, he said, could provide a structure to help turn lives around.

“It would be really tragic if we wasted this time,” he said.

Supervisor Don Knabe, whose office has coordinated many of the new efforts, agreed: “If you can’t read above the eighth-grade level your future is bleak,” he said. “You can’t fill out a job application, you can’t fill out a form for help. . . . With two out of four of our kids in the camps ending up in the state prison system we need to at least try something.”

The current activities in probation camps do not prepare offenders for the job market, Probation Commission President Betty Rosenstein said. “How many people graduate from our camps and go on to be firefighters?” she asked. “How many jobs are out there for raking leaves?”

Probation officials and the teachers and probation officers who work at the county’s 19 camps say they long have focused on improving education as well as requiring tough, boot camp-style labor. Still, they are enthusiastic about expanding class time because the youths in probation camps, in the words of Sarah Lawrence, an assistant principal at one probation school, “are a captive audience.”

A resident of the Scudder probation camp in Saugus, Mario is happy to be a captive. In the “outs”--the term camp residents use for the outside world--the 16-year-old gang member could never concentrate.

“There’s your homies, there’s your girlfriend, and then there’s school,” the 16-year-old said. “You don’t know what to do. I chose my homies and my girlfriend.

During his three tours in probation camps, Mario has been able to focus and learn to read. He now curls up in his bunk with Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Stephen King’s “It,” asking roommates to help him with tough words.

“In camp I can’t go nowhere,” Mario said. “When I don’t have no openings in fences, when I have staff that are watching me. . . . I can’t run away from my problems.”

Classes at probation camps range from sex education to lessons in which students learn to read by reciting lyrics in the liner notes of Tupac Shakur’s albums. Some have virtually no reading or math skills. Others are like Sara, 17, of West Los Angeles, who is just a few credits shy of high school graduation and says, as she hunches over an economics text, that she hopes to earn a master’s degree in criminology from UCLA.

But the time in captivity is limited, and the obstacles to boosting offenders’ prospects through reading classes are amply illustrated in Gilbert’s case.

Gilbert’s family emigrated from Mexico when he was 9, and he said that teachers in Los Angeles schools did not help him learn English. He fell in with gangs, ditching school regularly, and, he recounts with a shy smile, “living in the streets, with my homies.”

His ambitions raised by four months of careful educational ministrations, Gilbert now says he hopes to attend night school and earn his graduate equivalency degree while working construction with his father.

But in a reflection of the long odds against him, Gilbert says he also has another use for what he’s learned--now he can write letters to his girlfriends when he’s inevitably incarcerated in County Jail.

Sentiments like that may have led Supervisor Gloria Molina to look at Operation Read’s video and computer graphics presentation Tuesday and express a certain skepticism. She noted that even probation officers assigned to monitor juvenile offenders lose track of them once they leave the camps.

“It sounds wonderful,” Molina said of Operation Read. “But it will all be lost if it does not track” outside of probation camps.

Operation Read officials said they will be able to track enrollees through a computer database, and supervisors ordered county staff to research ways to help fund the $1-million program.