Ex-Judge to Keep His Real Job: Tutoring

Jack Mandel retired from the Superior Court bench this month after 19 years to join a private mediation panel, where the hours should be a little less demanding.

He’ll be late for dinner anyway. Same as he has been the last 11 years.

That’s because Mandel, 64, plans to keep his after-classes, volunteer library job at Santa Ana High School.

Mandel’s commitment to students has won him numerous honors, including recognition as “Volunteer of the Year” from this newspaper. Four days a week he has left the bench no later than 4:30 p.m. to head over to the high school library, where he listens, tutors, mentors and passes out fruit to students.

“What Jack mostly does is keep their dreams alive,” said Court of Appeals Justice Eileen Moore, who has helped him on occasion.

Mandel shared with me the extraordinary story that led to his library job:

Some 20 years ago, Mandel created a “Stay in School” program, in which he and other judges tutored eighth-grade students in the Santa Ana district to help fight a startling dropout rate. One day Mandel and his wife, Judy, had lunch with a Cambodian American high school girl he had tutored two years before. Her parents dead, she had a difficult home life and was one of at least seven living with her grandfather in a one-bedroom house.

Mandel learned from the girl, who got good grades, that she had no place to study at home. So she studied daily until dark, sitting on the curb in front of the school. In fact, Mandel learned, there was a whole mini-culture of students who studied curbside, with nowhere else to go.

Mandel couldn’t understand why they weren’t studying at the school library. There was no money to keep it open after school, he learned.

I’ll let Lew Bratcher pick up the story. Now an area administrator for the district, he was principal at Santa Ana High School at the time. Bratcher recalls:

“The judge said, ‘I’ve got to have that library open.’ I told him because of budget cuts, we couldn’t afford it. But the judge just wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we let him keep it open himself.”

A few years ago, Mandel decided maybe it was time to give it up. So he stopped going for a few days.

“But a student called me at the courthouse. She seemed so disappointed. She said, ‘But Judge, where will we study?’ So I said, ‘I guess I’d better get back there.’ ”

His wife, Judy, is a willing partner. Each week she buys the four bags of fruit that he passes out during the week, for many the only fruit they get. A friend of Mandel’s told me the judge tells the students he gets it from his backyard, so they won’t know he paid for it from his own pocket.

Mandel is quick to credit others from the legal profession who’ve come to his aid. He tells how attorney Donna Bader helped two of his students learn to write essays and how both students wound up winning contests in their divisions. He tells how Justice Moore pitched in to help.

“She’d sit down with a couple of girls and just talk with them. Pretty soon, there would be four or five gathered around her, then a dozen. Pretty soon, the students would be three rows deep. It was incredible to see. I think, for them, Eileen was what life could be, but wasn’t.”

Justice Moore insists it’s Mandel who inspires them. She told me about a student who’d gone to visit relatives in Mexico and was about to miss out on a chance for a college scholarship because he had not filled out his application. Mandel drove to Mexico to take the application to him.

In fact, Mandel is responsible for sending dozens of students to his alma mater, Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, on full scholarship. What the scholarship doesn’t pay is the trip out there. So Mandel pays that himself. Friends told me he even buys them winter clothes.

It’s heart-wrenching just to listen to the stories of his students. There’s the girl whose only place to study at home was to sit on the pile of laundry. She recently finished in the top 30 in her class at Allegheny and is en route to Washington, D.C., for a special intern program.

Mandel and his wife throw Shakespeare parties at their Fullerton home because so many of these students who flock to him have never been exposed to the great theater master. The judge got a friend to take some on a boat cruise in Newport Harbor. Longtime Orange County jurist Ed Wallin, who was best man at Mandel’s wedding, doesn’t see retirement from the bench slowing down Mandel’s student commitment.

“He must have the biggest heart of any judge I’ve ever met,” Wallin said.

That’s quite a tribute. But Bratcher of the school district echoes that.

“When you stop to think about it, four days a week, year after year,” Bratcher said. “I mean, how many people of his stature would really do that?”

There are more funds now for keeping the library open a little later. But Mandel’s students still count on him being there, his friends say. And Mandel says changing his day job won’t end his volunteer time. He told his new bosses:

“If I have to work late on a case, one of you will have to take my place at the library. The kids will be expecting me.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 966-7789 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com.