Program Offers Tutoring and Fun Close to Home

After school, while most of the kids in their Baldwin Village neighborhood are home watching television or out on the streets, the kids who reside at two apartments on Santa Rosalia Drive are off to study. It’s easy to find: In one of the apartment buildings, it’s on the second floor.

In a one-bedroom apartment, the living room and bedroom serve as computer labs, the linen closet holds reams of paper, the kitchen cabinets store stacks of construction paper, and the kitchen counter tops serve as bookshelves. The kids’ drawings cover the walls, along with work sheets of connect-the-dots, crossword puzzles and math games.

The building is owned by Learning Links Centers, a real estate investment company that aims to be socially responsible by purchasing apartment buildings in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods and offering free tutoring to residents and discounted rent to teachers who live in the buildings and tutor children four days a week.

When a building is purchased, tenants sign a lease stating that they will not use, buy or sell drugs. If caught, they are evicted.

The number of such neighborhood tutoring centers is undetermined because they are grass-roots efforts. Learning Links Centers, which owns five buildings in Baldwin Village with a total of 104 units, operates one center.

In a working-class neighborhood where many parents have two jobs, the need for after-school programs is pressing, said Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow, who represents the South L.A. area. It is especially valuable in Baldwin Village, an area that has a lot of apartments, a lot of alleys and a lot of crime, he added.

“The idea is a progressive, humane way of removing a bad element,” Ludlow said. “They are taking buildings that are bad on the outside and are turning them into information oases.”

The center at Santa Rosalia Drive comes alive in the afternoon, Monday through Thursday. The kids -- ranging from kindergartners to 12th-graders -- swarm up the stairs at 3:30 p.m. They go to the “Quiet Zone” -- a nook in the kitchen -- sit at a dining table and do their homework for an hour. For the next 45 minutes, they play educational games on the computer, and spend the remaining 45 minutes however they want. Some go online; others play games, like Monopoly and dominoes. Some read books.

The interest in reading is particularly satisfying to Joe Killinger, founder of Learning Links Centers, who recalls the poor academic skills of some of the children before the center opened. “These kids at 8, 9 and 10 years old couldn’t even read,” Killinger said.

Karen Batiste, a 27-year-old unemployed single mother, says the center is a blessing for her daughter, who struggles with reading.

“It’s a beautiful opportunity for people who are in my situation,” she said. “It’s right up my alley -- it’s right upstairs, and it’s free.”

Her daughter, Dayshanora Francisco, 9, has always struggled in school. Because they moved a lot, Batiste says, Dayshanora never attended a school long enough to grasp the curriculum.

Now Dayshanora has consistency: Mother and daughter have lived in the same apartment for three years, and she goes to the center every day that it’s open. Occasionally, Dayshanora meets with the tutor early and gets extra help before the other kids arrive.

“It’s fun. I like it here,” she said. “When you read and don’t understand, they help you.”

The center serves a dual purpose for 13-year-old Sylvester Walton: He gets help with his math homework and something fun to do.

“When I used to come home from school, I would be bored because there’s nothing to do,” said Sylvester, an eighth-grader at Audubon Middle School. “Now, I come here after school.”

The concept of combining study centers with apartments came to Killinger in the middle of the night a few years ago. Killinger, 40, remembers growing up in Wolbach, Neb., a town of 281 people, and being able to call his teachers at home when he needed help.

His math teacher, Mr. Kolar, would stay on the phone with him and explain math problems over and over until he understood them.

Killinger wanted to bring that same interaction to a large city like Los Angeles. He got out of bed and started writing pages of notes.

“Everyone thought I was nuts -- even my [business] partner,” Killinger said. “He didn’t understand what I was trying to do and how the numbers would work.”

For the venture to be profitable, the buildings have to have more than 30 units to absorb the cost of the two apartments used for tutoring and the resource center, he said.

Imani Afi-Danli, a substitute teacher for the Inglewood Unified School District and the Los Angeles County Office of Education, is one of the tutors. She doesn’t live in the building because she is bound by a lease in Inglewood, but she gets paid $50 a day.

She says the kids need centers like this because they don’t get enough one-on-one attention at school.

“I help them understand that learning can be fun, and I try to make them feel successful at it,” Afi-Danli said.

Part of making it fun is having access to educational computer games, which many of the kids don’t have at home, she added.

Killinger also founded the Education Advantage Foundation, which raises money for field trips and scholarships for children who attend such tutoring centers. The children from the two buildings on Santa Rosalia Drive recently attended a Laker game and toured the KKBT-FM (100.3) radio station.

In March, the City Council plans to honor the founders by presenting them with plaques to place on the doors of the buildings. The text, Ludlow said, will have a “series of whereases” and provide some historical and social context as to why the service is necessary in the community.

As for Killinger, he said he hopes the concept of tutoring centers will spread and transform communities.

He wants to change the face of Baldwin Village, one apartment building at a time.