Armando Sosa's elementary school is just a quick scramble up a steep dirt path and over a crosswalk from his home in Ramona Gardens, an Eastside housing project known for its crime and violence. If he's late, he can hear the school bell from his bedroom.
His mother, Liliana Martinez, loves Murchison Elementary but worries that Armando's zeal for learning will wither in middle school. She has seen too many children from the projects nose dive in sixth grade and begin gravitating toward the gang life that has devoured the youth of Ramona Gardens for generations.
So, along with other mothers, most of them Mexican immigrants struggling for a foothold in U.S. society, Martinez helped start a movement to keep children at Murchison at least through sixth grade. That is typically the first year of middle school.
Goal achieved.
When the new school year starts Wednesday, about 100 sixth-graders will be staying at Murchison, instead of being bused across the tracks to El Sereno Middle School, where parents and teachers say they face teasing and bullying because they are poor and come from a housing project.
"As parents, we want to have the kids close," said Martinez, who sells tacos in the neighborhood and does volunteer work at Murchison. "We know that if parents are involved in their kids' education, the kids will be successful in life. They'll go on to college, have a better future and eventually leave the projects."
The parents' longer-term goal is for Murchison to add seventh and eighth grades so that children like Armando, who is heading into fifth grade, will be able to stay until they are ready for high school.
"This is a tremendous story about a community organizing and demanding more quality service," said Monica Garcia, the Los Angeles Unified School District board member who represents the Murchison area. Garcia, who supported the addition of sixth grade at the school, said she wasn't sure it was a good idea to include seventh and eighth grades. But, she said, "I'm interested in that conversation."
The Murchison parents are part of a small but influential movement. School districts nationwide are taking a hard look at middle schools, acknowledging that they have become the weakest link in the educational system. Some districts are scrapping them.
