Some Lessons From a Tour of Education Hell

Exit doors boarded and locked, unusable in case of fire. Floors covered by rainwater. Bathrooms without toilet paper or paper towels. Graffiti on the walls. And, worst of all, classes without books.

This is Compton High School three years after the poor, largely African American and Latino school district was taken over by the state in a desperate, and so far ineffectual, effort to reverse years of local mismanagement, corruption and neglect.

A phone call from a mother, Diane Washington, brought me to the school in south Los Angeles County. Things were bad, she said. Some of the computers were still in the warehouse instead of the classrooms. The place was filthy.

If the state Department of Education can’t operate one small school district, I wondered, then how can it advise the whole state on how to run the schools?

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Late one afternoon, I met with Washington and three other mothers, Karen Mackey, Felicitas Parades and Regina Nettles. Over coffee in Mackey’s home, they shared their outrage and agreed to show me the high school. A few days later, Mackey, Nettles and I toured education hell.

We headed down a dark flight of stairs into the basement. Desks and chairs were left helter-skelter in the halls. In one room, cafeteria records and canceled checks from 1949 were scattered on the floor. Once a space for classrooms and student activities, the basement is now the weekend headquarters for a gang, whose graffiti cover the walls. The graffiti obscure a mural painted by long-forgotten student activists--”La Raza” and “Chicanos Unidas.”

Up from the basement, we passed a muddy, waterlogged courtyard and walked into the theater. The dressing room looked like a neglected jail. Gang graffiti were the mirrors. The toilet was filthy. The sink didn’t work. Two new baby grand pianos were backstage, but with gangbangers and vandals having the run of the place during the weekends, my guides figured that thieves would soon truck the pianos away. Half the seats in the once fine theater were broken.

We picked our way around the puddles of a muddy sidewalk and turned into a classroom building. Water remained on the hall floor where it had leaked from a storm the day before. The water had poured through light fixtures, drenching what appeared to be live wires.

The exit door in the middle of the building was boarded. Escape in case of a fire was possible only through exits at each end of a long hallway. I also noticed an exit door in another building secured by two locks and a chain.

We visited the music classes. Water was on the floor of the office, a practice room and the main classroom. “Lucky we don’t have electric instruments,” the teacher told us.

In another classroom building, leaks had been covered with cheap plasterboard, which offered no protection from the recent storm. The hallway was uncomfortably cold. We looked into a bathroom. The paper towel container was empty. There was no toilet paper or soap. The sink was dirty and the walls were darkened by the usual graffiti.

In a chemistry classroom, the teacher told us the students had no textbooks. She taught three classes, but there were books for only two of them. Some materials are Xeroxed for home study, but for the most part, students have to do all their studying in class.

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Afterward, I called up the man who administers the district for the state, Randy Ward, a former Long Beach school official who has been in Compton just two months. He admitted things were bad, but he said he’s working hard to improve the place.

Before Ward took over, at least three others had failed at the job. Clearly, this task is beyond the powers of one person.

Ward needs help. Let State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin make Compton her top priority, and turn it into a model of how an impoverished urban school district can be restored. Let Gov. Pete Wilson join her. Let them walk the despairing halls of Compton High.

For, as it stands now, said Karen Mackey at the end our tour, “Our kids say, ‘You give us what you think we’re worth.’ ”

* COMPTON CRISIS

Three years after state takeover, Compton schools are still in dire condition. A1