A Lifeline for Talented but Troubled Kids

They are car thieves and robbers, truants and runaways. But in this room, they are also budding screenwriters and costume designers, cartoonists and carpenters . . .

Kids with checkered pasts but bright futures, thanks to an innovative partnership between a Hollywood museum and a government program for troubled kids.

It is an unlikely place for a school, it seems, this glitzy museum in the heart of Tinseltown. But here at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, two dozen kids file in each day--down carpeted halls lined with movie posters, past the set of “Cheers” and the “Star Trek” exhibit--to study Shakespeare and cell division, along with stage makeup and animation.

The school opened in June, the brainchild of Dwight Bonds, who has spent 27 years working with troubled kids, and Phyllis Caskey, director of the 3-year-old museum.

“I visited the museum when it first opened, and all I could think of was what a wonderful opportunity a place like this could provide for kids,” Bonds said. “A lot of these kids have never even been inside a museum; they’re discovering a whole new world.”

The county pays for teachers, textbooks and teaching supplies; the museum provides classrooms and computers. The students, 11th- and 12th-graders, are referred by probation officers and court officials. And if they stick with the program and stay out of trouble, they are promised not just a high-school diploma, but a job in the entertainment industry.

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A generation ago, kids like these would have been locked up and abandoned, left to fend for themselves after their jail terms were done.

“Even 10 years ago, there were no resources devoted to this kind of student . . . kids in trouble, who’d committed serious crimes,” says Bonds. “Nobody even wanted to talk about helping them. They were society’s throwaways.”

Today, so-called “high-risk” kids have become big business. Federal and state spending on juvenile delinquency prevention and intervention is up 500% in the past five years, with more than $550 million in federal funds funneled to state governments in the past year alone.

The strategy seems to be paying off. Last year, juvenile crime was down nationwide nearly 11%--double the rate of decline in adult crimes. It is the steepest drop on record, and it comes despite continued growth in the juvenile population.

Juvenile-crime specialists credit a booming economy that provides more jobs for youths, and increased attention to juvenile delinquency.

In Los Angeles County, 65,000 youths each year pass through the network of county-run programs charged with educating students who are either in jail or on probation. And their options are expanding each year--from independent-study programs to vocational training--as money earmarked for their education flows through local school systems and community groups.

“Now we’ve realized that society benefits from their transformation,” says museum director Caskey. “Each one of us gains when we turn a kid around. . . . That’s one kid who’s not going to rob you or steal your car.”

True enough, but wouldn’t it be nice to find a way to reach those kids earlier, to offer opportunities like this before they steal their first car or blow away a store clerk in a robbery?

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Bonds has seen how despair can keep kids locked in a life of crime.

“They get out and say, ‘I’m going to fly right, change my life.’ But nothing’s different for them on the outside. They start hanging with the same people, doing the same things . . . the next thing you know, they’re right back in the [juvenile justice] system again.”

The museum school aims to change that by providing a job for every student who completes the program.

“We’ve got commitments from businesses in the [entertainment] industry to employ every student who walks out these doors, and we think that will make a tremendous difference,” Caskey says.

“A lot of these kids have extraordinary talents, they just need the opportunity to learn the skills. And if we can connect them to jobs, help them see alternatives [to crime], that can provide a way out, a way up.”

Great idea.

Now if only we could find a way to extend that vision to all 700,000 kids in our city’s public schools. Children who have committed no crimes, but have been sentenced anyway . . . to overcrowded schools with outdated books and overworked teachers, in a system that only seems to pay attention to our children’s cries when there’s a knife at our throats, a gun at our heads.

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