Public Support for Public Schools: It’s Out There

THE TRAFFIC ON FIRESTONE BOULEVARD STINKS OF BURNED GASOLINE and dust as John Maloney makes his way on foot from his butcher shop to South Gate High School. Maloney, a 78-year-old man in a white meat-cutter’s smock and hard hat, stops abruptly and raises a forefinger.

“Smell that?”

Suddenly on the oily breeze comes the unexpected, confusing, beautiful scent of roses.

Nine years ago, Maloney and some of the employees of Maloney Meats planted more than 1,000 English and American hybrid roses on the front grounds of the high school. It was his way of honoring students who’d done well academically at the predominantly Latino school. “Goodness needs to be rewarded,” he says. He’d chosen those particular flowers, he explains, “because, how did Our Lady of Guadalupe come to Mexico? Carrying roses.”

Since opening shop at the corner of Firestone and State Street in 1983, Maloney has waged war against ugliness in the vicinity of the school. Even now he can be found on Firestone before dawn, picking up loose trash and monitoring buildings and sidewalks for defacement.

More than 4,700 students pack South Gate High and the temporary buildings eating up the school’s athletic field (named “John Maloney Field” in 1994). “The kids shouldn’t have to walk through litter and graffiti on their way to school,” he says.

Maloney personifies a neglected truth about Los Angeles’ schools: Despite the sumless tale of sorrow (low reading scores, overcrowding, Belmont), not all of the public has given up on them.

LAUSD’s Partnerships Program oversees a massive Adopt-a-School effort, in which thousands of people volunteer money, skills and time to the schools. The 22-year-old program is one of the largest and most emulated in the country. An estimated 85% of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 800 schools have been embraced by more than 750 adopters. These range from individuals like John Maloney to large corporations to nonprofit groups to Hollywood.

Washington Mutual alone has adopted 107 schools; McDonald’s, 52; Office Depot, 44; Playa Vista Development, 12; the L.A. Department of Water and Power, 11.

The program is entirely decentralized. Adopters deal directly with individual schools. District headquarters, says Partnerships director Eiko Moriyama, promotes the concept, helps adopters pick schools and tries to stay out of the way. A survey that Moriyama’s office did last year estimated adopters are contributing $40 million a year to schools in cash, goods and services, none of it funneled through district bureaucrats. The value and vigor of the program is such that LAUSD is expanding Moriyama’s staff from three to eight.

Adopters provide students with what the district cannot and probably never could--expensive equipment; one-on-one tutoring and mentoring; practical and up-to-date workplace skills; living, breathing, adult-world proof of the value of becoming educated.

The entertainment world’s participation in the program puts the lie to the notion that the make-believe industry gives little thought to the teeming, real-life city around it.

For example, Wonder of Reading, a nonprofit organization founded by Pacific Theaters, has renovated and restocked the long-neglected libraries of 55 elementary schools. Its goal is to do the same at all 427.

Creative Artists Agency, meanwhile, has adopted Venice High School and two of its feeder schools, Coeur d’Alene Elementary (home to the largest population of homeless children in the city) and Mark Twain Middle School. The talent agency has established computer labs at each school, and an estimated one-fourth of its 400 employees mentor individual students and conduct book clubs. CAA President Richard Lovett meets with Venice High students every Thursday morning from 8 to 9 to talk about goal-setting and personal achievement.

It’s still common for people to think they do plenty enough for public schools simply by paying taxes, especially given that the generation-long decline of public education in virtually every large urban center has tainted the very concept. In some quarters, public schools have come to be thought of in the same way as public housing and public toilets.

Their decline may have had one benefit. It has sparked among some citizens the sense of urgency and personal involvement that private schools have always depended on to survive.

This phenomenon won’t solve the fundamental problems of public education, which is so dramatically affected by complicated social factors and so much in need of fundamental rethinking. It demonstrates one thing clearly, however. Without the public, public schools, meaning the children who attend them, have little hope.