Schools Offer More Than Education to Lennox Residents

The people of Lennox can easily list what they don’t have: a full-time medical clinic, a city hall, a high school for the majority of their teenagers and streets free of gang violence.

Living next to the Los Angeles International Airport landing strips, they don’t have much peace and quiet either. Airplanes fly so low over Lennox that one elementary school was built partly underground a decade ago to reduce the noise.

But when pressed to talk about what defines their mainly low-income, unincorporated community of modest bungalows and mini-malls, residents quickly will tell you about what they do have--the Lennox School District.

Despite low standardized test scores and a high transiency rate among immigrant pupils, this K-8 district has become the touchstone for community life in Lennox. Beyond classroom learning, it tries to meet the wider needs of its 7,000 students, their families and other Lennox residents with programs in gang and pregnancy prevention, mental and physical health counseling, and computer and citizenship classes, among others.

Experts said the district’s level of social involvement is unusual, especially in a community with so few resources.

“I’ve been extraordinarily impressed with the commitment of educators to the children and community of Lennox,” said Jeanie Oakes, assistant dean of UCLA’s Graduate School, which has sent a number of students to train at Lennox.

“I don’t find a lot of dysfunctional pity, but rather a real sense of determination to ensure that Lennox’s kids get a real solid education and also get the social support they need,” she said.

The Lennox School District covers a 1.5-square-mile area, in the elbow of the San Diego and Century freeways next to Inglewood, with an estimated population of 55,000.

Reflecting the poverty in the area, 95% of students receive reduced-cost or free lunches, about double the statewide average per district.

More than 90% of parents are Spanish speakers with limited English skills. Many are recent immigrants and more than 60% never graduated from high school. The high transiency rate of the students and their families often hinders educational progress, teachers said.

Still, the five elementary schools and one junior high are the community’s heart and soul.

For years Lennox parents have turned to the district for a variety of assistance. They ask teachers for help filling out immigration, census and other official documents. When they have doctor or official appointments, many drop off their children early for the teachers to watch. They hold adult education classes in the schools.

And with the district’s encouragement, parent organizations have addressed other issues, such as Neighborhood Watch efforts, graffiti cleanups, park repairs and communitywide celebrations.

“Because we’re not attached to a city government, the schools have been the focal point for the community,” said Supt. Bruce McDaniel, who notes with pride that school attendance rates are about 97%.

“Lennox, they really care about the parents,” said Maria Smietan, a former volunteer who recently was hired as a parent organizer. Smietan said that many recently arrived immigrants are terrified to enter the school. But the district’s open-door policy quickly allays their fears. On a recent cold Tuesday night, 20 parents crammed into a small trailer that serves as the Jefferson Elementary School teachers’ lounge.

It was a monthly meeting of representatives from the district’s adult English Learner Program and Assistant Supt. Tim Allen. As usual, the issues immediately moved beyond the adult curriculum.

One parent asked for school menu changes: Children want pizza with pepperoni, not beans. Then someone asked Allen for information on new INS laws that may affect Lennox’s undocumented immigrant families. Unfazed, Allen promised to get back to them on those issues. The parents nodded, confident he would.

The Lennox district began looking for creative ways to address students’ needs 20 years ago under then-Supt. Kenneth Moffet. Before retiring in 1994, he won the American Assn. of School Administrators’ National Superintendent of the Year award. McDaniel, his successor, has expanded the programs.

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department office in Lennox, the community has 14 gangs and 27 tag crews. In response, the district has beefed up after-school activities, such as making room for the Boys & Girls Club at Lennox Middle School.

Through a state grant, schools offer workshops for parents on signs of gang involvement and drug use and work with the local sheriff’s station and other law enforcement and mental health organizations on gang prevention.

Educators and counselors praise Lennox’s mental health support network, implemented in 1997 through outside grants. In addition to having on-site counselors at each school, the district has a full-time therapist, with a shelf full of books, puppets and toys in her trailer for ongoing therapy with students and families in crisis.

“It’s not typical for elementary school districts to have so many counselors,” said Paul Meyers, a consultant for counseling services at the California Department of Education.

Students haven’t been the only ones to benefit. “There are not a lot of services offered in this area, and many people don’t have transportation or insurance,” said Claudia Villegas, the district’s full-time therapist.

Cheryl Geourgouris, of Richstone Family Center in Hawthorne, which provides counselors for Lennox schools, recalls a suicidal woman who decided to seek help at a Lennox school last year instead of at a hospital. According to Geourgouris, the woman didn’t have any children with her but said she hadn’t known where else to go.

After launching a plan to put computers in each classroom, the district now offers free computer classes for adults. They also can take courses on parenting, English literacy, domestic violence and CPR. At Buford Elementary, parents have a weekly charla, or conversation time, with cookies and tea. At Moffet, parents organize adult cooking and sewing classes. At Felton Elementary, they attend adult Spanish literacy classes.

The district supported the efforts of outside activists to create a new, independent charter high school on the campus of the University of West Los Angeles, just northwest of Lennox. The school opened this year amid high hopes, but so far it serves only 140 students, a tiny fraction of Lennox’s post-eighth-grade students. Most still leave the district to attend the large, more impersonal Centinela Valley and Hawthorne high schools.

Transient Students Pose a Problem

Despite all the efforts, the district continues to battle students’ low academic statistics. The 2000 Academic Performance Index, based on Stanford 9 test scores, gave all Lennox schools except Lennox Middle School the lowest possible ranking, a score of 1 out of 10 possible points compared with other schools in California. Even among schools with similar demographics, four schools received a 1 or 3 out of 10, with 5 as the statewide average.

However, Supt. McDaniel pointed out that last year most Lennox schools met or exceeded their growth targets for Stanford 9 scores.

He added that other schools with similar student populations may place more emphasis on higher test scores, but he doesn’t believe that such statistics gauge educational quality.

“There are things going on in this school that are very positive that aren’t measured in the Stanford 9 test results,” he said.

Administrators said that until 1997, 65% of their students were in bilingual education and were rarely tested on written English skills.

Alberto Paredes, 26, a first-year teacher who attended Lennox schools, said the transiency of students is one of the toughest aspects of teaching at Lennox. “We’ll have kids who come from Mexico. We’ll work really hard with them, and then they’ll move back.”

But a recent California Healthy Kids Survey yields a few promising statistics. In 1997, nearly 30% of seventh-graders said they did not feel safe at school. Only 10% felt unsafe in 2000. During that same time, the number of students who said they had been involved in school fights dropped from 30% to 20%. The district’s emphasis on community-building has trickled down to students. Nancy Orozco, 14, a student at Lennox Middle School, said her mother, Guadeloupe Orozco, has been a frequent volunteer with the Lennox School District and the local sheriff’s station.

While Orozco labels her mother’s activism “really embarrassing,” she is following in her footsteps. This year she is organizing a group of friends to help the sheriff’s deputies.

Orozco said one of the few places she feels safe is at school. “There’s not a lot of fighting in school, but there’s still a lot of girls getting pregnant. There’s still a lot of gangs in the neighborhood,” she said. “Parents don’t always know what’s going on, but maybe we can do something.”