Chartering a Course Past Gang Life

The gray vinyl-covered twin beds are similar to the ones that furnish jail cells. But the four young men who just moved into Suite 308 of this Cal State Northridge dormitory couldn’t be more aware that their new accommodations mark a milestone on a divergent path.

Not that Delbert McFarlane, Darnell Harrison, Keith McNeal and Jamal Howard were headed for lockup. They did, however, come from a neighborhood where that’s not an unlikely trajectory.

Street gangs have spread ruin through this city for decades and continue to corrode Southern California schools. Four years ago, when letters arrived in Inglewood-area mailboxes, inviting eighth-graders to enroll in the initial freshman class at Animo Inglewood -- the second public charter high school built by the then-new Green Dot organization -- many moms and stepdads and aunties found solace in the promise of small classes and uniforms as a way to insulate their children from the influences of the surrounding streets.

It’s never that easy, though, as the folks at the publicly funded, independently run school quickly learned.

Look at Delbert. He lived with his mom, Cheryl, in Inglewood, where she worked in school cafeterias and as a crossing guard. But he also has family in a part of town that’s Crip turf, and although he was no gangster, he spent a lot of time there with people who tend to wear Crip blue. He never really fit into Inglewood, a habitat better known for its red-wearing Bloods.

His first day at Animo, he encountered young men with similar vague connections. And they soon discovered that attending this experiment in urban college-prep schooling branded them as “weak, whack, square,” to students at nearby Inglewood High and Morningside High, Darnell says.

In an act of rebellion and solidarity, the young men and their friends began wearing their white school uniform shirts inside out, with the “Pro-Club” tag showing. They weren’t a gang, just a “clique,” Delbert says.

Christina de Jesus wasn’t so sure. “Miss DJ,” as everyone calls De Jesus, had, at 31, made the injudicious leap from Santa Monica middle school teacher to become the charter school’s first principal. Now she saw the boys’ roughhousing edge toward something darker.

When local gangsters from nearby Inglewood High started showing up at the school’s door shouting threats and “P-Club,” the self-described control freak went on the offensive.

To get into Animo, parents had already agreed to volunteer at the school and become an integral part of their kids’ education. Now De Jesus made them sign a contract saying they wouldn’t tolerate anything resembling gang behavior.

Meanwhile, she badgered the four friends and other “P-Club” members, trying to pound in the notion that at Animo, “I’ll catch your back” means making sure friends study and stay away from thugs.

Delbert and his friends cracked down on their studies and pushed their GPAs up to solid Cs or low Bs. The school’s brainwashing about the importance of college began to sink in. But they didn’t drop the street stuff entirely.

One afternoon in his sophomore year, Delbert stopped by a local park for a barbecue. Some young Inglewood men arrived and said it was their turf.

“The dudes I was with was older,” Delbert says. “They said, ‘We’re not going to leave.’ ”

The locals left and returned an hour later. A bullet sliced through Delbert’s small intestine, shattered his pelvis and opened an artery. Delbert lived. P-Club died in the park.

“I can’t think of many ways a school can stop gangs,” Delbert says. His friend, Keith, has a similar take. “They did the best they could,” he says of the adults at Animo. But “it was us that ended it.”

That, however, is just the arrogance of young men who still lack perspective. In neighborhoods like theirs, gangs’ subtle, steady pull can slowly drag down even the strong. Although the boys played a role in their own survival, I doubt they could have done it alone. That’s why some of these young men’s mothers believe the school was an answer to their prayers.

Katrina Rodriguez always wanted college for her son Darnell. But that future often seemed unlikely, she says -- especially after the father started using drugs and landed in prison, and she and her children wound up in a homeless shelter. Then came the letter from the charter school.

“I believe that God allowed Darnell to go there because it is more family-oriented,” Rodriguez says. “The teachers and parents and students are close.... We’ve all been there for one another.”

Eighty-two percent of the 112 students in that first graduating class were accepted at four-year colleges, including Brown, Berkeley and UCLA, De Jesus says. On the first day of this month, Darnell, Delbert, Keith and Jamal’s family members joined the caravan of cars and SUVs delivering new students and their bikes and bean bag chairs to the Northridge dorms.

Darnell’s mom concedes that there’s risk in the four sharing a suite. But she’s also convinced that Animo’s philosophy has finally begun to penetrate the young men’s post-adolescent skulls.

“I think they’re going to encourage one another to do good,” she says. “One may be hotheaded one day and want to do something wrong, but the others are going to say, ‘Come on, we didn’t come this far for you to do this.’ ”

They’d better. If not, I suspect that De Jesus will be at Northridge in a control-freak flash, badgering the bejabbers out them -- or, to put it nicely, catching their backs.

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bob.sipchen@latimes.com

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