Misfits Need Schooling That Fits
This ugly two-story Lawndale strip mall seems better suited to selling kalua pork at the Hawaiian BBQ downstairs than to educating high school students. In fact, when I first walk into the standard-looking classroom on the second floor, not much education seems to be going on. Not that teacher Jeanett Hector isn't trying. She's picked a Stephen King teleplay for the class to read aloud, and she's brimming with enthusiasm for it, certain that the 17 students slumping in their seats will get into it. At the moment, though, most of them are mumbling excuses and acting bored. Well aware that a reporter's watching, Hector grows increasingly annoyed.
For my part, I'm well aware that this Los Angeles County-run "community day school" takes only students that other schools have booted, often for felonious activity. So I'm not surprised that most of these students are behaving like unmotivated losers.
Hector won't give up. "This is a good story," she says. "It's very, very creepy and will make you think."
I first stumbled upon these students while they were field-tripping through a small gallery in downtown Los Angeles. I'd never heard of the County Office of Education, a 150-year-old niche bureaucracy whose $783-million budget comes from the state, whose superintendent is appointed by the county Board of Supervisors, whose hodgepodge responsibilities include running 47 community day schools with a total enrollment of 1,789.
Judging by the numbers, which include a few students in other county programs, these schools look pretty lousy. Fewer than a third of the students taking the high school exit exam passed in 2004-05. But then this program isn't meant for natural-born scholars, and the way these misfits gawked and yakked about the oddball paintings and sculptures intrigued me. I ambushed teacher Hector and invited myself to her class.
So here I am at Alternative Academy of the South Bay.
Ricardo, a 17-year-old in-line skating videographer with a neo-Beatle haircut knows we're not supposed to talk about what landed him here, but he does -- and just so you know, "bombing" involves spray paint, not explosives.
Seventeen-year-old Vanessa says her school kicked her out because she had a penchant for fist-fighting with other girls and one boy -- "He was talking mess to me."
And Wilmer Ramirez -- a big guy with curly hair, a fake diamond stud in his ear and an unruly smile -- says he started at nearby Leuzinger High, in the Centinela Valley Union High School District, as an A student.
