A School Blossoms Along With Its Petunias
The rosebushes, tied with red ribbons, bloom white. The pansies, yellow and white, appear to catch fire in the sunlight. The petunias and the snapdragons sway in the breeze as three water fountains provide gurgling background noise.
The plum tree should be bearing fruit by graduation time. Only the impatiens don’t show their blossoms; they are a difficult flower anyway, planted here only to please the principal.
This giant garden--as idyllic as anything in an arboretum--sits not on some country estate or in a glossy magazine but at the entrance of the Vanguard Learning Center, a public school for grades four through eight in South-Central Los Angeles, right by Compton.
The idea of social uplift through landscaping is ancient, but few schools have applied it so thoroughly as Vanguard.
“As soon as you walk through the garden, you know you’re here to learn,” said Rene Peraza, 13, an eighth-grader.
“And how can you not feel safe?” he added, his head turning to take in all the roses. “Who is going to come in here and cause trouble?”
A few blocks away, students at Centennial High are greeted by a black iron gate and school police at the entrance to their school. At neighboring Davis Middle and Enterprise Middle, students walk across parking lots through doors barren of decoration to schools that can seem like islands in seas of concrete.
To enter Vanguard, everyone must pass through an exquisitely tended, 15-by-15-yard garden where students and staff let nary a weed grow.
“It’s our version of a metal detector,” Deloris Holmes, the principal, said.
That is only half a joke. Crime has declined at Vanguard during Holmes’ tenure over the last five years, as the garden has expanded farther and farther into the school courtyard. There’s no hard data showing a connection, but all the flowers are a living demonstration of the fact that in Vanguard’s soil, things grow.
A school that burned in the 1992 riots, and nearly closed in 1995 because of dwindling enrollment, Vanguard now is considered one of the safest campuses in the Compton Unified School District. So far this spring, it is the only middle school campus in the area not to report a break-in. That sense of security has allowed the school’s teachers and 880 students to devote their energies to the classroom. Over the last two years, Vanguard had the largest gains on state tests of any school in the county.
Tyree Hall, the longtime facilities manager at Vanguard, first planted a flower bed outside the front driveway in 1995. When Holmes became principal two years later, she immediately recognized the psychic and metaphorical benefits of a robust garden and ordered an expansion.
Hall, 52, is the type who never speaks out of turn or dresses in anything but his district-approved janitor’s uniform. But at the mention of his garden, he turns animated and pulls out a photo album he has kept to chart the growth of Vanguard’s flowers.
Cultivation started at the front of the property line, with a heavy accent on rosebushes. The first roses were stolen, a theft that has not been repeated. Each year, Hall has expanded back toward the school, encompassing the entire front courtyard. Nearly all of the flowers are donated by Coast Nursery, a local spot on Broadway where Hall knows the manager.
Though he denies it, school staffers said they have known Hall to dip into his own bank account to pay for seedlings and sprinklers.
“The reason we do it is because when kids have a peaceful setting to come to, kids behave peacefully,” Hall said. “And since we started this, we don’t seem to have break-ins.”
The plant manager sometimes grumbles at Holmes’ requests--she has a weakness for high-maintenance flowers like impatiens--and ambitions, at a time when the district has cut back on the number of workers who maintain school grounds.
Nevertheless, he is in the garden most weekends, accompanied by Patricia Gordon, a groundskeeper for the city of Santa Monica who has volunteered at the school since a friend taught there.
She adds decorations in seasonal themes, and has introduced imported ladybugs and recommended specific flowers to keep the garden healthy. Students show up--even on Saturdays--to clip roses, weed and spruce up the campus at Hall’s direction.
“It’s the first thing people know about this school,” said Jerry Brooks, vice president of the eighth-grade class. “So we have to take care of it.”
Right now, Hall is in the midst of another expansion; new flower beds have begun appearing in the courtyard in the center of the school. There is even talk of adding a gazebo. Holmes points down a 40-yard corridor of grass and brick that she says she would like to fill with flowers.
Holmes has turned down entreaties by the Compton district’s state-appointed administrator to come to headquarters for a promotion and a big raise. She said she would miss her school, the garden, and the reaction they get from unsuspecting visitors. On a recent morning, a passerby stopped to seek directions and asked, as he stared at the garden, “What kind of private school is this?”
A few months back, the American Civil Liberties Union and a team of state crisis managers visited four district schools to conduct surprise inspections--part of a monitoring effort that resulted from a lawsuit over conditions in the district’s schools.
At the first three campuses, the inspectors found disrepair--lead paint, broken water fountains--and school district officials were concerned that they might flunk.
The fourth and last stop was Vanguard. At the entrance, the inspectors’ faces immediately brightened. “Wow!” said Robert M. Myers, an attorney who has represented the ACLU in litigation against school districts and is not prone to gushing.
The garden had won him over. Vanguard received an A from the team. And on that day, the district’s schools narrowly passed inspection.
