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.
