Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  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.

  The local fire department was just two blocks away and arrived within a minute or so. Deliesh was rushed to the hospital, where she died after eight days on life support.

  The hunt for her assailant began immediately. A cop at the crime scene heard someone say, “It was Snoopy.” The officer called over to the Locke police station and asked if anyone knew a kid by that name. Snoopy was the moniker for a gangbanger named Dejuan Hines. An index card with all of Hines’s information was crammed into the overstuffed, well-thumbed file box kept at the campus police station. He was arrested later that night. “I actually got along with the guy; he was respectful,” recalls Salazar. “He wasn’t one of the real knuckleheads. I’d deal with this kid, two, three times a week. He was one of those guys, if you tell him something, he’d say all right, and call you
sir. What I think happened was he was shooting at a passing car or something.”

  On March 8, 2006, a few weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of the Deliesh Allen shooting, Dejuan Hines was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted murder. He was sentenced to eighty-two years to life in prison. He was eighteen years old when he killed Deliesh. He was a high school dropout.

  Deliesh’s death only underscored what Chad already knew. It was after Angel’s funeral that he understood that he wasn’t going to be in and out of Locke in two years. He hadn’t finished what he had come to do. He was a get-it-done-and-be-done-with-it type of guy. Too late, he realized that that was a terrible personality to have in a low-performing high school. Because you never felt like the job was done. You always felt like a failure. And because you couldn’t stand that feeling, you ended up trying even harder, working even more. Chad knew why he was at Locke, and he knew that Angel’s death was something he would have to remember if he was going to continue to be effective there. Remember how you feel, remember the kids, remember Angel.

  He probably couldn’t have left Locke even if he wanted to. It felt like home. He couldn’t leave the kids, and he couldn’t leave the band of teachers he had come to love. They were all young, mostly white, mainly single, many of them TFAers. They called one another by their last names, but they were closer than family. They worked together and drank beers together at Sharkeez, a dumpy surfer bar on the edge of Manhattan Beach. Some even lived together.

  So, he re-upped. But more and more, the satisfaction he felt at his students’ achievements was replaced by a nagging sense of frustration with school bureaucracy and the slow pace of change. In two and a half years of teaching he had already been through two principals; the third was waiting in the wings. Student attendance and test scores remained appallingly low, school crime unacceptably high. The school was too big, the district too political. Chad Soleo worked as hard as was humanly possible, but at Locke, nothing stuck. Not the teaching, not the teachers, not the administrators, not even the kids.

  He began to think about expanding his reach. As a teacher he knew the problems; as an administrator maybe he could fix them. He visited successful charter schools, and he pored over the literature on education reform. At around that time, the school was ordered by the district to reorganize into small learning communities—a consequence of failing to make academic progress under No Child Left Behind. Dr. Rousseau addressed the Locke faculty. “Dream!” she said. “Think about what a good school should be.” Staff proposals for six small academies were due in weeks. Chad drew up an outline for a plan and asked his friends and colleagues to help him flesh it out. In September, the School of Social Empowerment (SE) was up and running. The next year, recognizing Chad’s success in leading his small school, Wells asked him if he had thought about becoming a school administrator. Chad had reservations about Wells. Safety and security had improved under his leadership, but he thought Wells lacked the kind of instructional vision required at a school like Locke. He put aside his misgivings, though. Wells was making him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I have thought about administration, and yes, I would like to join your staff.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Locked In

  It’s like a prison. Even the teachers are locked in. No wonder the kids act this way. Phillip was in a bad mood as the police officer slid the gate open just wide enough for him to exit the football field, then promptly locked it shut again. He was sick of all the gates and the locks. What good did they do, anyway? Weapons still made their way onto campus, property still managed to go missing, kids still ditched classes. He was tired of being locked in, locked down, locked out.

  He should have felt great. It was homecoming weekend, the sun was shining on this first Saturday in November, and the Locke Saints were winning the game against rival Fremont High. Behind him, the cheerleaders were chanting: LET’S GO, LOCKE SAINTS, LET’S GO! LET’S GO LOCKE SAINTS, LET’S GO! The stands weren’t full, but the three hundred or so people who had paid the seven-dollar admission fee and submitted to a scan by a wand-waving cop were having fun. Whole families were there. Little girls waved pom-poms in time with the cheerleaders; blue and yellow balloons fastened to the fence bobbed in the breeze. Frank Wells, a former football player himself, stood on the sidelines, shoulder-to-shoulder with the players, his arms akimbo in his Locke bomber jacket. The fans were mostly African American. Sports at Locke tended to divide strictly along racial lines. Blacks played football; Hispanics played soccer.

  Because of security issues, it wasn’t often that the blue-and-gold Saints team played at home. Homecoming was special. The daylong festivities began in the morning when the once famous Locke Saints Marching Band led the annual parade through the neighborhood and onto the campus. Kickoff was at 1 p.m. Then later, at seven, the homecoming dance would begin. Throughout the day, security was tight. Three uniformed school police officers manned the field’s sliding entrance gate, unlocking and locking it after each arrival and departure.

  Phillip was wearing jeans. More than a few heads turned in surprise at the sight of him out of professional attire, but he had already put in several hours of work in his third-floor classroom. He would probably log in several more before the dance that evening. He was exhausted. His allergies were acting up (was it the L.A. air?), and he hadn’t had time to sort out his medical benefits and get a prescription refilled since he’d moved to the city. It felt like all he did was work. The only time he was able to relax was when he returned to the apartment he shared with three women—all first-year TFAers like himself. Their place was in Baldwin Hills, a black middle-class neighborhood only a short drive from Locke. It wasn’t until they moved in that they realized that thirteen years before, the neighborhood had been ravaged in the Rodney King riots. Now their apartment building was filled with professionals—many of them teachers in L.A. Unified. The four roommates took turns cooking; over nightly meals they shared their war stories. They got along perfectly. Phillip’s only complaint was that on occasion someone forgot and put his coffee mug in the dishwasher.

  He felt burned out. But he wasn’t the only one. Just walking down the halls each day, he could see people dragging. It was only November, and already a lot of the teachers were saying this would be their last year at Locke. Not Phillip. He had a plan from which he would not deviate. He would stay at Locke for four years, and during that time he would get his master’s in administration from Loyola Marymount University. He didn’t want to be a principal, but it made sense to get certified for administration. From there he would most probably move to another school, where he would work while earning his doctorate. Finally, he would get a Ph.D. He knew that eventually he would leave the classroom, and just the thought of that day’s arrival made him sad. He loved teaching. Still, working at Locke was so taxing. People said the atmosphere on campus had changed for the better since Wells took over. But judging by the chaos he saw all around him, school and district policies had not. The system is failing, and it’s making me fail.

  Classes were too big and the school too dysfunctional for one teacher to effect real change in student achievement. Ten-week grades were due, and Phillip still didn’t know exactly how many students he had. In his seventh-period class, only half of the thirty-six students enrolled ever showed up. In his fourth-period class, there were forty-five names on his roster in a room that had only forty-one desks. Most of the time it wasn’t a problem—there were always at least five students absent; some of them he had never even seen. But it was annoying. Each day, one particularly good-natured student would come in, sit at the front table, and wait to see which desk would be empty. Then, satisfied that the real owner was a no-show, the student would take a seat and get to work. Phillip could have requested more desks, but that would have sent the wrong message to the administration. That would be saying that he was okay with an oversized class, and he was not okay with that at all. The way to raise student achievement
was to lower class size, not to pack the kids in like sardines and assume there’d always be enough room because attendance was so poor.

  Other things bugged him, too. Like the fact that there was a deaf boy in Rachelle Snyder’s class who had no aide to sign for him, and the fact that some kids assigned to honors English couldn’t really read, and the fact that faculty meetings were like grade-school food fights, and the phones didn’t work, and access to copy paper was based on politics—if you were one of the anointed, you got paper; if you were not, you had to beg, borrow, or steal. That’s literally what he had had to do to get a computer for his classroom. He begged. The school didn’t have enough working machines, so rather than wait or do without, Phillip logged on to www.donorschoose.org and published his sob story. The website was designed to match donors with needy causes in low-income school districts. Some rich philanthropist trolling the site saw Phillip’s proposal and funded the purchase of a Sony VAIO laptop for him.

  The heady days when he first arrived in Los Angeles seemed like a mirage. Teaching at a place like Locke was a grind, an uphill climb with no summit in sight. And the kids! They came to school with so much baggage, baggage that no first-year teacher could possibly help carry.

  His most recent heartbreak was Darius. Darius had been absent from school for three or four weeks, and when he finally returned, Phillip asked him where he had been.

  “You don’t wanna know,” Darius replied.

  “Yes, I do,” insisted Phillip. “Tell us the story.”

  “I was at home,” he explained. “I got into this fight with this kid and he lost, so he came to my house several times with guns.”

  “What else?” prompted Phillip.

  “He’s been threatening to kill me and my family, so my mom wouldn’t let me go out. We got a TRO [temporary restraining order]. Then she thought I should go back to school.”