Convention Doesn’t Captivate L.A. Youths

Carlos Carranza tried to care about the Democratic National Convention and even tuned in to watch Hillary Clinton on television. But the 17-year-old senior at Franklin High School said one glimpse was enough to confirm his suspicion that the presidential campaign “doesn’t really concern me.”

“She was talking about how America has changed in the last eight years and all the problems that have been fixed,” Carranza said Wednesday of the first lady. “That’s somewhat true, but they have to do more for the ghettos. They just don’t pay attention.”

While it may be a stretch to call their school’s Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of aged Craftsman and Victorian houses a ghetto, Carranza and other Franklin students say that much more needs to be done to improve the lot of teens like them than is being discussed at the party convention just 10 miles away.

The relevance of the activities at Staples is lost on them, said these teens during interviews inside the 3,200-student school and on the sidewalks of Avenue 54, which bisects the campus.

Although most are not old enough to vote, they remember a Republican “education president” followed by a Democrat who claimed to feel their pain; and neither administration has changed the fact that their school, like 17 others in the Los Angeles Unified School District, has to run year-round because of overcrowding, including these air-conditioned August dog days.

Carranza doubts Al Gore or George W. Bush will really do much for his neighbors without health insurance. And even in the midst of an economic boom, he sees few career prospects in hilly Highland Park, which was hurt badly by the construction of suburban shopping malls and the flight of high-wage manufacturing jobs.

“There’s McDonald’s, Jack-in-the-Box, minimum-wage stuff,” he said of the job choices.

Rather than hoping for the political system to improve society, Carranza and many of his classmates have turned inward, focusing on improving their own lots first. Carranza plans to pull the stainless steel stud soon from below his lower lip, shave his mustache and join the Marines. It is a path he hopes will lead him to a career as a police officer and, perhaps, an entrepreneur of some sort.

Even Franklin’s student government president, Jennifer Duenas, has not followed the convention. When the party luminaries make their evening speeches, she is at her job, stocking groceries at a market. Most nights, she gets home about 11, then studies until 2 a.m. She wonders if the politicians who talk about the need to instill values and discipline in students have any idea what her life is like.

The Democratic Party platform calls for a “revolution in American education,” and is filled with buzz words of school reform, such as “accountability, character, discipline and incentives.” Duenas, 16, thinks there are more obvious ways to fix schools. “We need to pay teachers more,” she said.

Duenas said her own teachers often work late into the night to do things such as taking her to observe a Board of Education meeting, or phoning parents at home to discuss a student’s work. Yet they are known less for their dedication than for their small paychecks. “Students and other people do not respect teaching. They see it as a waste to go into that field,” she said.

Still, Duenas wants to return to Franklin someday as a teacher. Six friends also had wanted to be teachers but changed their minds. “Their parents want them to do other things that pay more, like becoming lawyers and doctors,” she said.

Nearly 90% of Franklin students are Latino, and about 80% qualify for free or reduced-price lunches because of their families’ low income. About half of its graduates go on to two- or four-year colleges or universities. Over Franklin’s 84-year-history, alumni have included former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and Olympic gold medalist diver Sammy Lee.

In his speech at Staples on Monday, President Clinton proclaimed that SAT scores had gone up nationwide on his watch. At least some of those Franklin students who’ve taken the test are loath to credit Clinton.

Jackie Moreno, 15, said greater competition for admission to colleges, such as the University of California campuses, has pushed students to prepare more for the tests. “Almost everyone I know is taking the classes now,” Moreno said of the SAT prep courses.

Moreno also doubts whether Gore or Bush is aware of concerns like hers. “They don’t know anything about what’s going on here,” she said. Politicians, she said, are interested in “whoever has more money to give to their campaign.”

Rudy Olea, 18, said he has noticed physical improvements at Franklin with recent increases in education spending. “When I was in middle school we hardly had any computers, or even books. Now we have new books, the Internet. . . . The poorer schools are getting better,” he said. Yet funding for schools ought to rise much more, added Olea, who was clad in a T-shirt bearing the name of rapper Eminem.

Standing outside the school with a filled backpack, Bao Mang, 17, said he hasn’t watched much of the convention, but is “actually concerned about the country.” He was discouraged recently, however, when he called a city official to share his concerns about violence and bigotry. He reached an answering machine and never received a response.

Bao said he’ll give the system another chance, but now--as the Democrats across town boast about “prosperity and progress”--he is focused on finding a part-time job that pays more than minimum wage. “They say a lot of people are giving jobs out there,” he said, “but I can’t really find one.”