At-Risk Girls, Mentor Get Together and Get Real

In groups of two and three, they leave their desks and take their place behind a makeshift puppet stage, hoisting handmade paper dolls before their audience of teenage girls.

Their assignment: Act out scenes of domestic violence they’ve written, with characters they have created--construction-paper teenage girls, dressed to resemble themselves in tight skirts and tank tops, with yarn hair twisted into braids.

The paper dolls act out their stories of girls getting beaten up by boyfriends, seeing their mothers and aunts abused, watching the suffering of friends who refuse to leave lovers who hit them.

They offer up all the right suggestions in these mini-morality plays: Get help, move in with a friend, call a hotline, go to a shelter for battered women. Then the discussion turns, in this high school classroom: What happens when real life unfolds like this?

“Nothing you can do,” one girl says curtly. “If a girl keeps going back to a man and she knows she’s going to get beat up, that’s on her. She must like it.”

Her classmates pop their gum and nod their heads. They all know girls like that . . . sisters, mothers, friends. Maybe even themselves.

“If she don’t like it, she should leave,” another says, shrugging off any complicated sociological explanation of abuse. “You can’t help somebody that don’t want help.”

Their teacher swallows hard and wades in. “I won’t accept that anyone likes getting beat up,” she says firmly. “Maybe they’re afraid, or they don’t know where to go for help. . . .”

“Yeah. Maybe they oughta get counseling,” one girl pipes up. “Right, Miss Brunot?” Her home girls laugh and clap their hands, amused by the gentle mockery.

Miss Brunot smiles and nods. “Yes, counseling might help.”

She waves another group of girls on stage, and they present this tale: They hear shouts coming from Keisha’s apartment and the thump of her head as it hits the wall. “You think we oughta knock on the door?” one paper doll asks. “Nah,” says the other. “Let’s go get her brother.”

Miss Brunot frowns. “What about the police?” the teacher asks. “It sounds like Keisha needs help right away, like she might be in danger.”

The girl behind the stage shakes her head. “You’ll have folks shooting up the whole building because somebody called the police. The police come and everybody winds up in jail. . . .”

“Let me tell you what happens in real life, Miss Brunot,” the girl’s partner says, putting aside her paper doll with the exasperated sigh of a teacher lecturing a slightly dense child.

“If your boyfriend is beating you up, you get somebody in your family to kick his ass . . . let him know: ‘That is not your place to hit her!’ Then he backs down, because most men that beat women up are scared to fight men.”

Miss Brunot looks momentarily confused. “But then you have another assault.”

“And . . .?” The girl stares at her teacher for a moment, waiting for the downside of that scenario. “It’s just . . . that’s the way it happens, in real life.”

Welcome to Real Life 101--formally called the Young Women-at-Risk Violence Intervention Program--on this South-Central Los Angeles high school campus.

*

Ellen Brunot is not your typical teacher and this is not a typical class, this collection of two dozen girls, whom some might say have been marked for failure.

They have all been in trouble--at home, at school or with the law. Most of them were expelled from their regular schools for fighting or truancy. Some can barely read or write, hobbled by learning problems or other disabilities. Many are on probation or just out of California Youth Authority camps. Others are pregnant or already mothers. Several live in foster homes.

“Most of these girls have been abused--sexually, emotionally or physically,” says Paula Petrotta, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women, which created this classroom series to address the special needs of young women like these.

“They come with a lot of baggage,” Petrotta says, but they are not beyond redemption. “They need options, information . . . a sense that they can control their lives, can create something beyond what’s happened to them or what they see around them in their neighborhoods.”

The commission launched the program at the urging of probation and juvenile court officials alarmed “by the huge increase in the number of young women coming into the court system after having committed serious crimes,” she said.

“We looked around and couldn’t find anything the city sponsored that was gender-specific, that would give young women a place to deal with the kind of painful issues that can steer girls toward delinquency. A lot of the girls tell us this is the first time they’ve felt ‘safe’ to talk about issues like these.”

The class began meeting in September on the campus of Duke Ellington High, one of Los Angeles Unified’s continuation schools, aimed at students who have not succeeded in conventional programs. This fall, a similar class will begin at Metropolitan High, a continuation school near downtown L.A.

The girls meet each Thursday in Brunot’s classroom, where they tackle an ambitious--and often emotionally treacherous--curriculum intended to help them create “healthy dating relationships,” safeguard their emotional and physical health, plan for life on their own with college or career training.

Attendance tends to vary weekly. Girls come and go as they move in and out of probation camps or are shuffled among foster homes. Some skip classes for reasons as varied as having to stay home to care for younger siblings, or being too stoned to get out of bed.

Still, there is a relationship that has developed among these tough, young black and Latino women and the idealistic and equally tough white woman who teaches them.

“Miss Brunot,” one girl tells me, “keeps it real.”

*

“Miss Brunot, you musta never lived in the ghetto,” one girl calls out, as Brunot goes over, again, the list of community resources the girls could tap to deal with domestic violence. The teacher smiles. It is a running joke between them, the way her middle-class sensibilities sometimes clash with their urban reality.

Brunot was born in the Midwest and raised in the ‘60s in San Francisco. She is educated, artistic, liberal, a feminist grounded in women’s studies, who “never dreamed” she’d be a teacher.

She graduated from UC Davis with a double major in political science and art, spent a year in law school in San Francisco, then dropped out and headed for Los Angeles to pursue a career in theater. Along the way, she got her teaching credential at UCLA and has spent 10 years teaching “at-risk” teenagers.

Miss Brunot was no saint growing up, these kids know. “I’ve had what you might call a full life,” she says demurely. She’s not shy about sharing it with her students, though she’s not about to bare all in a newspaper column.

But she has never faced the kinds of challenges these young women have had to endure, and she’s learned to respect the strength and courage they display day to day.

Her job, she says, is not to change them, not to strip them of their survival tactics, but to teach them “appropriate” approaches to daily life that steer them away from poverty, abuse and delinquency.

“I’m just trying to show them options,” she explains. “With all people, if we get stuck looking at things only one way, we’re missing alternatives that might help us.”

And her students seem to take to heart both her lessons and her earnestness.

“Miss Brunot, she’s straight up,” says 17-year-old Mikquanua. “The stuff she talks to us about in class, I take back to my family, try to talk to them about the way we treat each other, about respect and listening and not always yelling at each other.

“I’ve learned that some situations I’ve been in, I could have handled them better. The class changes how you look at things.”

Brunot is not expecting miracles, even though she knows city officials will be looking for success stories when they decide in September whether to fund the program again.

“Is the purpose of this to produce a quantifiable result? Not in my mind. This is not something where you can measure success on a fill-in-the-blanks test. But I’ll be here for these girls whether they fund the program or not.”

As their teacher, she is “casting bread on the water,” she says, extending to these girls a lifeline of information that she hopes they will grab if they begin to sink. “It’s opening their eyes to new ideas, giving them resources to help them when they’re in trouble. I remember the first time I mentioned counseling in class, they said, ‘Miss Brunot, only white people go to counseling.’

“Well, they may not think about it right now or a week from now or a year from now. But maybe later in life--they’re in a bad marriage or having problems with their kids--maybe they’ll be open to counseling, remember this class and consider it an option.

“It’s like all of education,” she says. “Education goes in your head and maybe 10, 20 years down the line, if you’re lucky, it’ll save your life.”

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. She’s at sandy.banks@latimes.com.