How to End Crowding? It’s No Multiple-Choice Question
This has been the season for “rescuing” the Los Angeles Unified School District, a trick that has meant declaring its problems to be so vast and far-reaching and long term as to be almost insoluble.
Not to Betty Chavez. To Betty Chavez, those problems are here and now and pretty basic. We are in the concrete hallway at Belmont High School when--with a deafening BRRRRRING!--the bell rings. “Check it out,” nods Chavez, an LAUSD sophomore with a tastefully pierced nose.
Thwack! Metal doors fly open like lids on strongboxes. Bam! A stampede of Celtic soccer-riot proportions ensues. In an instant, the hall is a roiling, seething, sweating, wall-to-wall thicket. Teenagers upon teenagers. Teenagers with brown skin, black skin, pink skin, long hair, no hair. Teenagers who call “Whassup!” and “Yo, Betty Spaghetti!” and “Ayyyyy!” and “ ‘Scuse me!” Thousands of teenagers crammed into a space intended for hundreds. “This is nothin’! You should check out [the] nutrition [break crowd],” Chavez calls.
She ducks into the girls’ bathroom: “Check this out.” Lipsticked girls peer at a mirror so gouged and scraped with graffiti that it is impossible to see anything. There are so many curse words and Raul+Connies that the glass looks like the dull side of tinfoil. “Gangs,” the sophomore says, sotto voce. “Also girls that hate each other.” The trash overflows.
In the hall, the mob has cleared to reveal wall decorations--
posters that say “No smoking” in many languages and “I pledge to become a U.S. citizen.” In a few classrooms, kids without desks plunk down on the floor. Where the mob swirled there is now the flotsam of litter. A crumpled Cheetos bag floats down the stairwell. “It’s not so bad here,” says Betty Chavez. “It’s just crowded--crowded is all.”
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This tour occurs as the school board announces the LAUSD’s third head in six months. This apparently being the season of on-the-job training for out-of-town L.A. saviors, the new boss is not only green in the ways of huge urban school districts but also from some other state. There is the usual talk of the LAUSD’s vast and far-reaching and long-term misfortune, the understandable whispering about how the board could settle for a career pol like Roy Romer. Not at Belmont, though. At Belmont, the here and now trump everything.
At Belmont, there is Gloria Lewyn, a tousled woman with that look that says “English teacher,” pushing a big cart full of files and notebooks. “Welcome to my classroom,” she quips. “I have five periods in here. Room 322 in the morning, then Room 307, then back over to Room 326. Recently, my workbook of grammar and writing exercises, which I spent $50 of my own money copying at Staples, was stolen. Also my tape dispenser.” This year, to classes of gangbangers and children of immigrant dishwashers, Lewyn taught “The Odyssey” and “Romeo and Juliet.” “I’m doing fate versus free will now. These kids are wonderful.”
At Belmont, there is Tony Velie, a joyous, gray-bearded bald man who has spent the better part of his career teaching at this high school. He seems to know every child, from the academic decathletes to the kid who is being transferred after having been attacked by hammer-wielding classmates.
“Let me show you my attendance for Period 5,” Velie says. “These are seniors who think they’re going to blissfully graduate in July. Look!” The page is riddled with absentee marks; kids say they ditch sometimes just because the halls are so jammed, they’ll be tardy anyway, so why bother? Velie sighs. “In a few days, it’ll be, ‘Mister, no sea malo!’ ‘Don’t be evil!’ ‘You can’t fail me!’ ” On this day, two of last year’s graduates visited from college, just to show Mr. Velie how far they had come.
At Belmont, there are preparations for a new school year just as this one ends--year-round scheduling, which has spread to the LAUSD’s suburban outposts as crowding has had a domino effect. At Belmont, there is the scuffed office where a too-small table holds a model of the doomed Belmont Learning Complex, which might have eased this situation if the LAUSD’s past “rescuers” hadn’t made such a mess.
At Belmont, in short, there is this riddle: Why is so much of the LAUSD debate fixated on the vast and far-reaching and long-term when the here-and-now need is so obviously addressed with more schools? Does it really take this much politicking and grandstanding to unite behind an infusion of clean, well-lighted classrooms?
“All this discussion--this versus that one, breakup or no breakup, mini-districts versus clusters--it’s utterly esoteric to our problem,” says John Lackner, a bespectacled dean of discipline. “The problem is: We are warehousing students.” And, this being the season, he talks about the future of schoolchildren, which, now as ever, starts in the present tense.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.