Relentless Pursuit (13 page)

Now he was in his fourth year at Locke, and he was a newly named assistant principal, in charge of the counseling office. Not only did he have to create a master schedule to accommodate some 3,100 students and 131 teachers, he also had to manage a dozen counseling office staffers. He was younger than just about every one of them. Some, if not all, resented his success, which even at Locke, where a second-year teacher could practically run a department, was meteoric.

Chad had come to Locke in the fall of 2001 as a Teach For America recruit. He thought of his two-year commitment then as a useful detour on the way to law school. Teach For America could get him to Los Angeles, delay graduate school long enough for him to afford the tuition, and really challenge him—which he liked. But more important, it would put something really valuable on his résumé. It would open doors.

The gibe that TFA really stood for Teach For Awhile wasn't that far off the mark. In fact, there was an unspoken expectation that after completing their commitment, most corps members would move on to something else. TFA actually encouraged it. As valuable as two years in the classroom was to the mission, Kopp knew it would never be enough to close the achievement gap. Teach For America had to groom an army of leaders to take the fight beyond the classroom and into the corridors of power. So it forged partnerships with top graduate schools and prestigious private-sector firms that agreed to grant two-year deferrals for corps members. And the opportunities provided post-classroom became a key component in the marketing of TFA. A two-year stint in the classroom would give recruits a chance to do something valuable, with immediate impact, right out of school. And far from derailing the ambitious, it would actually help set them up, paving the way for their future careers.

But by the end of his second year at Locke, Chad had forgotten about law school. He had become a teacher. He couldn't have been more surprised. Teaching wasn't a serious career move for a person with ambition. It didn't pay enough money, and it didn't command enough respect; Chad wanted both.

The thing was, Chad had taken to teaching right from the start. He had actually enjoyed Teach For America's intensive five-week training institute in Houston. A classic type A personality, Chad found himself up until 2 a.m. every night perfecting lesson plans. Others chafed under the workload. He thrived on it. He was psyched when he heard founder Wendy Kopp speak at the opening ceremony, and he was still psyched when he got a job at Locke. Chad realized that Locke was a low-performing school—those were TFA's only clients. But he didn't know it was arguably
the
lowest-performing high school in all of LAUSD. And if he had been told that Locke was a de facto gangland battleground, it hadn't sunk in.

Chad had arrived at a school in free-fall. Attendance was low, truancy high. His tenth-grade students lacked the most fundamental skills; a good percentage of them were reading at a third-grade level. Fights were an almost daily occurrence. Though he never felt personally threatened, he could feel the danger in the air. Everyone could. If you worked at Locke, you were always holding your breath, just waiting for the inevitable spark that would ignite a fire.

The siege mentality drew many of the younger teachers together. Chad found a lifelong friend in Josh Hartford, the only other first-year TFA recruit assigned to Locke that year. The two of them reached out to the five other TFAers then on staff, and to some others, such as Vanessa Morris, the young UCLA alum who had become a nationally board-certified teacher—a feat unparalleled at the school. The veteran teachers may have resented the tight clique of young turks, but no one disputed their dedication, teaching skills, enthusiasm, and love for their students.

Within two months of Chad's arrival at Locke, the principal who had hired him was gone. Shortly after school began in September, Locke was the site of what the media called a bloody “mêlée.” Chad and Josh Hartford watched in amazement as LAPD officers descended upon the campus to restore order after black and brown students engaged in a particularly ferocious battle during lunch. Weeks later, the principal was transferred, and local superintendent Sylvia Rousseau moved in.

June 2003 marked the end of Chad's two-year TFA commitment. He had seen the achievement gap narrow in his English classes. He had experienced the thrill of taking on a reading intervention class and turning it into a book circle where the ten kids who actually showed up had advanced several grade levels by the semester's end. Chad was a gifted teacher who had moved his students—academically and personally—and he reveled in their success.

He also experienced failure—and a loss so profound that it threatened to plunge him into despair. The boy was a gangbanger, only fifteen years old. His name was Angel de Jesus Cervantes, and by October, when he was shot dead in an alley, he had started coming regularly to Chad's class. The day after his death, students came to Chad's room crying, wanting to know what had happened to Angel. Chad had no idea. He was having trouble wrapping his head around the fact that his fifteen-year-old student was really dead. So he went down to the counseling office and asked how to verify whether a student had actually been killed.

“Well, what do you want to see? The dead body?” came the reply from a usually empathetic counselor.
No, I want to know what it is I'm supposed to do with these students crying in the hallway!

Chad took the kids to the library, where Angel's girlfriend fell to the floor in hysterics. Chad had never seen anything so emotionally god-awful in his life. And he couldn't think of a thing to say. In the end he mumbled something about how everything would be “all right.”

But nothing about it was all right. Angel's was the first funeral Chad had ever attended. All Angel's homeys were there—dressed in Bloods' red, arms crossed, gang signs flashing. Chad was incensed.
This is all so wrong. He had started coming to my class. And now he's dead.

The kids seemed to get over the slaying more easily than Chad did. He couldn't stop thinking about it. The school never made an announcement that Angel had been shot and killed. When another teacher heard of the death, his response shocked Chad: “Oh, he was a gangbanger anyway,” he said, as if that made his murder okay. Though Chad had been in South Los Angeles long enough to have a sense of the community and the gang violence that pervaded it, he hadn't been prepared to feel the way he did when he watched that fifteen-year-old—a boy he had known and presumably touched—being put into the ground.

Angel was the first student of many that Chad would lose in the next four years. Most, not surprisingly, were victims of gang violence; Los Angeles is the uncontested gang capital of the world. A 2006 gang study commissioned by the city council estimated that some 720 gangs call Los Angeles home. Despite 23 antigang programs that cost $82 million a year, gang violence in the city overall rose 14 percent in 2006. The increase in South Los Angeles—home to Locke High School—was 25 percent.

Throughout the 2005–2006 school year, school police had a small eight-by-ten-inch map tacked to the wall of the campus police station. Its title: “Southeast Division Gang Map, Black, 2003.” At first glance the map looked like a lightly colored jigsaw puzzle. Locke High School was just a three-eighths-inch square in the middle, toward the top of the page. Surrounding it was a patchwork of pastel-colored geometric shapes. But they were not jagged puzzle pieces; they represented square footage, carefully surveyed gang-owned turf. What was painfully obvious was that the tiny neutral patch, marked with a red flag, the symbol for a school, was hopelessly landlocked, hemmed in on every side by warring gangs.

Locke is a Crips school; the black gangs that surround it are all sets of that notorious Los Angeles street gang. Blue is the Crips' color; their rivals, the Bloods, wear red. Dick Fukuda, the dean of discipline at Locke, reckoned there were more than a dozen Crips gangs operating on campus and in the surrounding community in 2006. Unlike the Bloods, whose various splinter groups tend to get along, the Crips are often at war with one another. The most active gangs at Locke are the Back Street Crips, the Broadway Gangster Crips, the Front Street Crips, and the East Coast Crips. It's hard to say how many students are hard-core gangbangers; probably fewer than 500, maybe even fewer than 250. But there are plenty of wannabes, kids who tag along, dress the dress, talk the talk; and there are “associates,” too, the gangbangers-in-training, doing a kind of fraternity rush before being courted in as full-fledged members. For some kids, membership in a gang is a given, a birthright. Siblings, parents, even grandparents have gang connections. It's a family affair.

Not surprisingly, gangs break down strictly along racial lines. The primary Hispanic gang that operates in South Los Angeles is called South Los—Spanglish for Los Del Sud, a gang that originated in Mexico. South Los is a deadly force in the community, but it is not as active on campus as it once was. The Latino action at Locke comes from the tagging crews, or the “cliques,” loose groups of wannabes that “kick,” or hang around, together. The cliques can be violent, but they tend not to deal in drugs.

The highly selective tagging crews are not usually violent, but their handiwork is considered a crime. The names of the crews change constantly; their modus operandi does not. A tagger needs only a marker, a moniker, and a paintable surface. Locke High School offers a broad and inviting canvas. Every bit of it—floors, walls, ceilings, desks, doors, the runner on the stairs, and the cement benches on the quad—is covered in graffiti. In an effort to deglamorize the artistic vandalism, Dr. Wells invited Locke taggers to display their signs on the outer walls of the school's handball courts during the 2005 school year. Soon, the hand-painted murals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders were obscured by wall-to-wall graffiti. The experiment was short-lived. There was no notable decrease in tagging elsewhere on campus, and the district ordered that the walls be cleaned up. During the 2005–2006 school year, Locke employed three men, full-time, five days a week, to handle graffiti outbreaks. It was a task for a sorcerer's apprentice. The more the graffiti was painted over, the more it popped up elsewhere. wet paint signs posted all over campus marked the spots.

Every student on campus has a working knowledge of gangs. It's a necessity. At Locke, many kids must pass through several gang enclaves to get to school. Knowing how to navigate the terrain can be a matter of life or death. That means students have to watch where they go, how they dress (red is out of the question), and what they say. Bulging backpacks are often filled with clothes—not books—so that students can change colors as they traverse enemy territory. Even so, Locke students get jumped frequently on the treacherous journey to and from school. Wary of the danger, some kids join a gang simply for protection. It's called getting “jumped” in. The kids who don't “bang” often spend their days behind closed doors, rarely venturing outside—much as Phillip Gedeon did during his childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Few escape their urban childhoods unscathed. A 2006 report by Marlene Wong, director of crisis counseling and intervention at LAUSD, revealed that between 85 and 91 percent of children in eighteen district schools had been touched by violence. Teenagers are wounded—and die—at shockingly high rates. Carla German, hired in 2005 to be Locke's first-ever psychiatric social worker, guessed that by the middle of the 2005–2006 school year, nearly a dozen Locke students—or Locke dropouts—had died violent deaths since the first day of school. She couldn't be sure of the exact numbers. That's because no one knows how many students enrolled at Locke actually attend—much less how many drop off the rolls due to transience or death. “Shootings are a common occurrence here,” says German. “There are always kids dying, kids losing friends. The thing about kids in this community, they have such a tough skin, they normalize it all very quickly.”

That's what happened in early December 2005, when seventeen-year-old Carmen Duncan was killed by her own sister in a fight over a photograph. While the two Locke students were getting ready for school, they argued, and the older sister took a pair of scissors and stabbed the younger one to death. Word spread quickly that day as kids arrived at school. But there was no announcement of the tragedy on the intercom, nor was there a school assembly for mourning or public discussion. Wells sent a memo to the staff advising that counselors were on hand to help grieving students. Few came.

The case of Deliesh Allen, who had been a Locke sophomore earlier that spring, was different. Her death, perhaps because it was so random, perhaps because it was a slow news day, rocked the school and the community. Press conferences were called and tougher antiviolence measures promised. Dr. Wells, just seven months into his new position, spoke at the funeral. The program from the service was sealed beneath the glass that topped his office desk.

It was 3 p.m. on Friday, Saint Patrick's Day 2005, and school was just letting out. Fifteen-year-old Deliesh was standing on the sidewalk fifty steps or so from the school's back gate, waiting for her aunt to pick her up. She chose the wrong spot. Directly across the street was an apartment believed to be a stronghold of the infamous Back Street Crips. Suddenly, gunshots rang out. The young girl collapsed, a single bullet lodged in her brain.

School police officer Harold Salazar was in his car patrolling the perimeter of the school at release time that day when he got a call from a campus aide. “I think we have shots fired and I believe somebody is down” came the message. Salazar called for LAPD backup and made a loop around the campus. Traffic was bad as he turned onto Avalon Boulevard, heading for the school's back entrance. Looking to the right, he saw a crowd. Everyone was staring at the ground. The aide was right. Somebody
was
down. It was the east side of the campus. Salazar figured it was the Back Street Crips. What he hadn't reckoned on was that the victim was a young African American female. When he leapt from the car and saw the teenager lying on the ground unconscious, barely breathing, he pulled up short.
A child. Crap.
He had seen shootings before. But never a schoolgirl, never one that he knew attended Locke. As he cleared the area and set up the crime scene, he couldn't help thinking about his own kids.
You send them to school and you think they're safe. And then they die.