Opening Teen Eyes to Possibilities

The 305 wallet-size photos are neatly arranged on the wall, one of each student at Verbum Dei High School in Watts. The young men are all wearing neckties, and each one looks like he’s going to rule the world one day.

I saw the display in the Catholic school’s Corporate Work Study Office while doing a column about Verbum being in lockdown mode, thanks to a rash of gang-related murders and mayhem in the surrounding neighborhood.

What’s this about? I asked.

Cristina Cuellar-Villanueva, a program director, explained that each Verbum student is required to work one day a week at a corporation, small company or nonprofit. Not only do the students develop real-world skills and make great connections for future employment, but the sponsoring company helps cover the student’s tuition.

Sometimes the most ingenious ideas are the simplest.

I asked school officials to pick one student and let me spend the day with him. They picked senior Michael Zambrano.

I pulled up to Michael’s little red house in Compton at 7 a.m. sharp. A sign outside said “Jeans $13.”

Michael has lived here the last three years with his sister Angela, her husband, and their four kids. Angela sells jeans to help pay the bills.

Michael is 6 feet 1, weighs 220 pounds, and was a two-way starter on the Verbum football team while pulling a 3.4 GPA. He’s got a broad, handsome face, with a fuzzy mustache and goatee. He’s sporting black slacks, a crisp white dress shirt, a sharp brown tie, and looks like a million bucks.

Angela, 28, signs the permission slip allowing me to drive her 18-year-old brother to school.

“They’re not that involved,” she says without elaboration when I ask about their parents. Then she begins sobbing. She’s upset about family circumstances, but proud as can be about her little brother.

Michael, the baby in a family of seven kids, will be the first to graduate from high school on time. He will also be the first to go to college, with his heart set on Marist College in upstate New York or Whittier College.

“Just because you’re in a given neighborhood doesn’t mean you have to act that way,” says Angela, who tells me Michael gives her no trouble at all.

“It’s up to you,” Michael offers, “to go down the right path or the wrong path.”

The drive from Compton to Watts takes 10 minutes. In Verbum Dei’s multipurpose room, about 60 students are greeted at the door with a handshake and a quick inspection. Pull up your pants. Tuck in that shirt. Square the necktie knot. Next up is roll call, daily prayer, and a brief ceremony honoring Michael and four others for outstanding work at their job sites.

Then comes a string of vans, spaced out like the beads of the rosary. The kids pile into vehicles that say “Verbum Dei, the School for the 21st Century,” and schlep off to work. Michael’s group of 30 students is called last, and they board a blue bus that roars up the Harbor Freeway aimed straight at the downtown high-rises -- all that opportunity shooting up through the low morning haze.

Johnny Simmons sits in the front row, wondering if he’ll hear from Princeton this week. Michael is behind him, and one row back is Joshua Miles, who wants to go to Loyola Marymount.

The odds against getting on this bus are staggering -- this bus that is now gliding past neighborhoods filled with blind traps, dead-end streets and schools with shameful dropout rates.

For Michael, there was Angela telling him what he ought to do with his life, and a brother in prison who ably demonstrated what not to do. There was also a family friend named Mario Fernandez, who cleans FedEx jets at LAX and told Michael years ago that he should settle for nothing less than Verbum Dei.

The first stop is 8th and Figueroa, and six young men head off to jobs at Ernst & Young, Trust Company of the West, Monteleone & McCrory and other downtown firms. Michael’s stop is next, near 5th and Fig, and he cuts across the lobby of the Union Bank Building with the confident gait of an up-and-coming junior executive. He shoots a nod to one of the security guards, leads me to the elevator, and hits the button for the 34th floor.

This is home to the California Community Foundation, which studies the needs of the neediest Angelenos, manages private donations and doles out millions of dollars to dozens of nonprofits.

Michael is the filer, the mail clerk, the fill-in receptionist, the media director’s calendar manager and more. His work station is a small gray cubicle, but he says he hopes to come back one day, after grabbing a college degree in business, to take up residence in one of the nice, big offices with the stunning views.

“Once you give him something to do, you don’t have to keep going back,” says Shirley Young, the office manager, mother hen and unabashed leader of the Michael-admiration society. She said she thinks of Michael almost as if he’s a fourth son.

About 40 people work at CCF, and they can’t stop talking about him. Some have gone to his football games and other school functions.

“He’s influencing, educating and changing us just as much as we’re doing something for him,” says Executive Vice President Joe Lumarda, who took his family to a Verbum football game at which Michael went out of his way to welcome Lumarda’s 9-year-old son. “Considering what goes on in some parts of town, he represents the hope.”

Antonia Hernandez, president and CEO, said she keeps telling Michael to dream big.

“The problem with a lot of poor kids is that you can’t dream what you don’t know, but programs like this open their eyes to the possibilities,” she says. “There’s another point here: People feel hopeless, as if they can’t make a difference. But there’s immense wealth in this city, and if everybody took on one kid, it could make a very big difference.”

When we leave for lunch, the lobby security man holds the door for Michael, who may be a budding business executive but still eats like a high school student. He gives me my choice of McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr., and at Carl’s, he tells me a young man can get into trouble thinking about today and tomorrow. He’s looking five years down the road, he says, and laying plans to get there.

The two biggest threats to a young man’s success in Compton and South-Central, he says, are girls and gangsters. He’s willing to put in some quality time with the former, but he has no use for the latter. Three of his friends have been killed, and a cousin was just shot for the second time.

“Living where I live is bad enough,” he says, “without getting involved in that. I want to go to college to be an example for all my little nephews and nieces.”

Still, he often has to deal with a challenge that comes in the form of a question:

“Where you from?”

“I get that all the time,” says Michael, who also says he’s routinely stopped by police, probably because he shaves his head pretty close to the bone. “I just say, ‘I’m from nowhere. I don’t bang.’ ”

Tight jeans and casual dress offer protection, he says. No baggy pants or big shirts. That Verbum uniform is a lifesaver too. And as for lifelong friends who took a wrong turn, here’s Michael’s policy:

“I say, ‘You’re my friend, but you ain’t my homey.’ ”

Best thing you can do, Michael says, is eliminate risk. He does homework at Verbum after school, lifts weights and shoots straight home. Saturday mornings, he’s a math tutor in a program at King/Drew Medical Center. And one reason he wants to go to school in New York is to get away from all the negative influences.

“Michael has the greatest need and the greatest desire to be successful,” says John Martin, a local boy and volunteer recruiter for Marist College. Martin went to Mount Carmel High in Los Angeles with a kid by the name of Dennis Murray, who went on to become the president of Marist.

“I sent Dennis a Verbum kid last year, and I called and told him I’ve got another one this year,” says Martin, a gas station owner who is helping Michael put his application together. “He has a mature sense of what his goals are and he has realistic questions about the challenge. I know he can do this. I’m just so impressed with him.”

After lunch, Michael heads over to the hip and swinging Standard Hotel. There’s a pool table in the lobby, and the Verb kids take turns at eight ball or head up to the rooftop patio and pool to unwind from the rigors of the high-powered business world.

And then it’s back to the grind.

“Good afternoon, California Community Foundation, Michael speaking,” he says while running the reception desk. “Excuse me? Yes, just a moment please.”

One of Michael’s jobs is to clip, copy and file all the news articles that mention the California Community Foundation. I think this will be the first such one he’s ever clipped that ends like this:

Nice going, Michael. And good luck.