On the first day of class, gunshots alarmingly rang out in the hallway of the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute (PCITI) in Los Angeles, where former gang members sit alongside grad students working toward their doctorates in psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Executive director Aquil Basheer soon arrived to tell the students that he had fired harmless blanks as an experiential learning technique to get the students to pay attention to their own reactions and those of others in the face of violence.
Why the seemingly extreme teaching method? It’s a way to make violence prevention lessons more authentic and more helpful in case the soon-to-be-doctors some day find themselves in truly dangerous situations.
Basheer knows what he’s talking about. After all, he was once a gang member himself. After leaving the criminal lifestyle behind, he began PCITI in 2002 to give firefighters, psychologists, and other professionals standard techniques to apply toward violence intervention. In the past, the people who live in violent neighborhoods usually wouldn’t talk to the psychologists who tried to launch violence prevention programs — but they’ll talk to Basheer.
Former gang members come to his classes to talk about what situations spark violence and the best ways to diffuse tensions. They teach the doctorate students how to control rumors, restrain people safely, hold candlelight vigils for victims of violence without prompting more shootings, help bystanders, and perform CPR.
The former gang member instructors even teach the students what body language is acceptable in poor communities. Nikko Deloney, one of the streetwise teachers, told Melissa Pandika of Ozy Magazine, “You need to know if you have a holier-than-thou look in a place where people are hopeless.”
Once the program participants have a basic understanding about how to intervene in or prevent violent situations, the teachers take them out on the streets of Los Angeles for tours of “hotspots.”
Deloney says one of the most important lessons is to observe and listen more than they preach. “We call it grandstanding for no one. ‘I have all the answers in my book.’ If you show up without your book and a little communication and integrity … you can actually help somebody.”
MORE: Can Peer Pressure Stop Violence Against Women?
Tag: los angeles
Thousands More Angelenos Can Now Enjoy Farmer’s Market Produce
While this sounds downright strange, the sale of cigarettes is giving some California residents access to healthy fruits and vegetables.
Thanks to a new $2.5 million grant from First 5 L.A. (a nonprofit funded through California taxes on tobacco products), thousands of low-income families in Los Angeles are going to be crunching into healthy farmer’s market goods.
The sizable grant was given to Market Match, a program that provides a dollar-for-dollar match at farmer’s markets to shoppers receiving economic assistance through EBT (Electronics Benefits Transfer, which is more widely know as food stamps) or WIC (the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children).
According to the Los Angeles Times, the new funds could triple the impact of Market Match over the next several years. James Haydu, the executive director of Sustainable Economic Enterprises-Los Angeles, told David Karp of the Times, “It will not only expand the countywide program, but through the next five years it will make it far easier to be able to quickly explain how the system works to ensure that as many people as possible can take advantage of it.”
In 2010, Market Match started with only $3,000 of funding, serving just two farmer’s markets. With such a tiny amount of money available, the dollar-for-dollar matches quickly ran out. But with a projected $80,000 available to fund next year’s program, many more families will be able to enjoy the benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables. Market Match is now available at 14 L.A. farmer’s markets, and organizers hope to expand it to 37 markets during the grant-funded period.
Martin Bourque, the director of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, that manages the Market Match program, said that the funds will not only benefit low-income people in Los Angeles, but also enhance the health of California’s rural lands and its economy. Their survey of farmers at the markets indicated that 80 percent of them sold more produce as a result of the program.
“It’s important to remember that in addition to serving low-income shoppers, every dollar they spend is going to one of California’s small family farmers,” Bourque said. “So every dollar is doing double-duty — not only helping poor people in Los Angeles, but reaching out and helping some of California’s most economically devastated rural communities as well.”
Who knew the simple purchase of some locally-grown strawberries had the power to accomplish all that?
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked A Farm-Friendly Innovation
Meet the Couple Who Dedicated Their Entire Life Fighting for the Homeless
For decades, the 54-block stretch of downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row has been home to the largest concentration of homeless people in the country. While much of the city’s population marches towards revitalizing the area, a seasoned couple has dedicated their lives to standing up for those left behind.
Jeff Dietrich, 68, and nearly 80-year-old Catherine Morris have spent their lives sticking up for L.A.’s most underserved community: The homeless. The two are often found at the Hippie Kitchen, a soup kitchen located on 6th Street, where the couple joins a team handing out 5,000 hot plates of food each week, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Despite their efforts to serve the poor, Dietrich and Morris have not always been popular. They’ve been arrested more than 40 times and have even faced criticism from within their own religious organization. Notorious for their range of protests — from rallying against nuclear arms and Army recruitment to the first Gulf War to the groundbreaking of a $200 million cathedral — Dietrich and Morris have also been perceived as preventing growth in one of the poorest areas in the city.
Indeed, Los Angeles is home one of the largest homeless populations in the country. According to a 2013 report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), L.A. had the highest percentage — about 80 percent — of homeless people without shelter as well as the largest amount of chronically homeless, Politico reports. About 14,840 homeless people, many whom suffer from mental disorders to drug addiction, live in L.A. — 5,000 of which call Skid Row home.
“We’re known as the homeless enablers,” Dietrich told the Times. “Yes, we believe in enabling people living on the streets, people who’ve been discarded by society, so they can live with as much dignity as possible. I guess that’s right, homeless enablers is what we are.”
The two also championed an initiative to provide homeless people with shopping carts to serve as mobile storage. Despite public outcry from business owners downtown, a judge ruled that the carts could not be seized, which some considered detrimental to revitalization efforts.
MORE: Why This Pastor Continues to Feed the Homeless, Even After the Police Told Him to Stop
The pair first met while volunteering at the Hippie Kitchen as a part of the Catholic Worker, an organization that sprang from the Great Depression and created a movement of people living in poverty while helping society’s most vulnerable members.
Morris was on a year-long hiatus from her job as a principal at a posh Pasadena school while Dietrich was returning from a trip to Europe after he refused the Vietnam War draft. The two fell in love and Morris left the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus to marry him in 1974.
Catholic Worker volunteers operated out of an old Victorian home, which can house up to 30 people at a time. It is kept scant to convey the sense of being poor, and Morris and Dietrich still reside there with just 12 workers — half of which are older than 50.
But the two are resolute to carry on their work despite a lack of successor. They don’t preach or ask for any federal aid and instead focus on what’s important: Helping the poor.
That attitude is inspirational to some like Father Tom Rausch, a Jesuit priest and professor at Loyola Marymount, who points out that their work aligns with Pope Francis’s vision for the future of their church.
“I think finally we have a pope in line with the Catholic Workers,” Rausch said. “If he were a simple priest living in Los Angeles, he’d be with them. Times have changed. There’s a sense that the work they are doing is validated by Francis, that he is saying the kinds of things they have been saying for years, and that has to feel very good to them.”
These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D., and a Passion for Science?
Can Living in a City Give You a Leg Up in Life?
We’ve been hearing for years that people who live in cities tend to be thinner and more active than those who live in suburbs—all that walking and climbing stairs seems to contribute—but a new study finds that people who live in densely-packed cities also are more likely to be agile in a different way: climbing the economic and social ladder.
The study by Smart Growth America and the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Urban Center is significant because it quantifies urban sprawl. Sprawl is not just about how much land is occupied by a city. As the authors write, “sprawl is not just growth, but is a specific, and dysfunctional, style of growth.” The study shows that the health benefits that correlate with city living are specific to dense cities, where residents have lower rates of obesity and diabetes. Residents of sprawled-out cities such as Atlanta do not show the same benefits as do those living in packed-in places such as New York.
Reid Ewing of the University of Utah, lead researcher on the study, told Lane Anderson of Deseret News, “Urban places provide higher likelihood of moving up the social ladder. Compact places provide better access to jobs, better transit and more integration.” The study judged Los Angeles to be relatively dense compared to Atlanta and other sprawling places, and found that a child in L.A. has a 10 percent chance of moving from the bottom of the income scale to the top, while an Atlanta-based low-income child has only a 4 percent of chance of such a rise.
Ewing said that one factor in this difference might be transportation—denser cities tend to have better public transportation, which gives citizens of all income levels more access to better jobs and schools, but is especially important for low-income people who may not have a car. Better mixing between people of different ethnicities and economic levels might contribute to the social mobility, too. “In dense areas, there are more chances for networking, for meeting people, more chances of getting better salaries and jobs,” he said. And riding the train also seems to keep people thinner—train riders are 6.5 pounds lighter than car drivers, according to The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and they’re 81 percent less likely to ever become obese. One twist: the study found that kids get more exercise in the suburbs where they can run around in backyards and playgrounds, and adults get more exercise in cities, where they are forced to hoof it.
The authors of the study hope their findings will encourage more cities to implement healthy changes, such as bike-share programs, more mixed-use developments, and improved transportation. Or, as Ewing asks, “It’s time to ask the question again, how can we make cities better?”
MORE: More College Graduates Moving Into Cities
Want to Avoid L.A.’s Most Dangerous Streets? There’s a Map for That
The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder in 1964 is practically American folklore — stabbed to death in a dark alley in Queens, N.Y., just outside the front door of her apartment building, with at least 30 neighbors within earshot. Intense media coverage focused on this last part, examining the bystander effect and why she died, despite dozens of nearby witnesses.
Stories like these are painful reminders that the most gruesome crimes can happen in broad daylight or with countless others present. So what can happen on far less populated blocks?
As Atlantic Cities writer Conor Friedersdorf writes, Los Angeles is void of what the late Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist, would call “eyes on the street.” L.A.’s design — spread out and dominated by highways — drastically reduces sidewalk populations that could deter, if not at least bear witness to, crimes.
But the Los Angeles Police Department is actively exploring ways to combat this inherent city problem. A new law enforcement tactic called “predictive policing” involves a computer program that analyzes all crime that occurs in an area and produces a map with boxes drawn around blocks where future illegal acts are most likely to occur. Each day, cops release a new map via social media with updated boxes so people know which cross-streets in their neighborhood need the most attention. A community-driven initiative like this allows cops to better plan their focus their attention.
“Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual, but when they are free, they return to the spots which the computer suggests,” The Economist noted when the plan first came to light last summer. “Officers may talk to locals or report problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could encourage crime.” And it works: The tactic coincided with a 12 percent reduction in property crime in one Los Angeles neighborhood.
Friedersdorf wrote about the expansion of his program; he and his neighbors received a message from the LAPD, which stated:
“In an effort to do this we are deploying as many resources as possible to the box areas. To further increase the effectiveness of Predictive Policing we are asking the public to spend any free time that you may have in these areas too. You can simply walk with a neighbor, exercise, or walk your dog in these areas and your presence alone can assist in deterring would be criminals from committing crime in your neighborhood.”
Unsurprisingly, Friedersdorf is eager to do whatever it takes to make his neighborhood within L.A.’s Pacific Division safer. “I’d change the route I take on dog walks to help out,” he writes. “And if lots of my neighbors do the same, it’ll be a sign of civic health. We’re all responsible for safeguarding our neighborhoods.”
Though city governments can often cause frustration, this attempt to galvanize citizens to pursue safety can also increase cooperation between Los Angelenos and their governing bodies. “This latest example is a good illustration of how transparency can help law enforcement to improve public safety,” Friedersdorf writes. “And if the experiment works, needed eyeballs will be dispersed to at-risk areas without the use of Orwellian surveillance cameras being installed all over the neighborhood.”
Tricked Out Zero-Energy Homes Aren’t Just for the Rich and Famous
When you think of modern homes with solar panels and award-winning green designers, you probably imagine they’d be constructed somewhere in Beverly Hills or Malibu. But three net-zero energy homes have been built in a Los Angeles zip code you probably wouldn’t imagine — South Central, a notoriously disadvantaged area in the city.
As Jetson Green reports, notable green design studio Minarc, Habitat for Humanity, and the non-profit Restore Neighborhoods LA (RNLA) have built three modern and environmentally friendly homes in one of the poorest neighborhoods of LA. These prefabricated homes take up much less time, money and manpower to assemble thanks to Minarc’s interlocking panel system, called mnmMOD. In fact, these 3-bedroom homes — with sizes around 1,200 to 1,375 square feet — were erected in three short days, when traditional construction for homes this size would take around two weeks.
According to a property listing, these homes are completely net-zero, as the energy that they consume are offset by solar panels and a thermal wall system. The homes also feature a drought tolerant landscape, vegetable gardens, sustainable bamboo floors and other green features.
MORE: Will This Be the Largest Energy-Free Building in the World?
The three homes are expected to sell between $300,000 to $325,000 (which is relatively cheap for a new home in Los Angeles). But not just anyone can swoop up these properties. According to Jetson Green, a potential buyer’s income has to be below 120 percent of the area median income for the Los Angeles metropolitan area. They also have to go through a home buyer education program in advance.
When 6.5 million low-income families spend more than 50 percent of their incomes on housing and utility costs, sustainable solutions are necessary to help keep roofs over heads. As John Perfitt, executive director of RNLA explained to Dwell.com, “We think that good design and new construction methods can, over time, have a very positive influence on restoring neighborhoods.” When it comes to sustainable homes, you don’t need a lot of green be green.
Meet the Incredible Boy Who Proves You’re Never Too Young to Volunteer
After a visit to Los Angeles’ historically disadvantaged Skid Row at the age of 4, little Jonas Corona knew he had to help. As the TODAY show reports, the preschooler couldn’t get the image of homeless children out of his mind. Wanting to do more to help, his mom quickly signed her young son up to volunteer at shelters and charity programs so he could help out every day. However, because Jonas was so young, he was only allowed to volunteer once a month.
MORE: Why One Minnesota Teen Is Sleeping Outside for a Year
Undeterred, when Jonas was 6, he started his own non-profit called, Love in the Mirror that works to help homeless and disadvantaged youth in need. Jonas, now 10, and his other young volunteers collect food, clothing, books and other supplies to donate it to programs like Casa Youth Shelter that provides a temporary roof and counseling services to youth in crisis.
“It’s not right for kids and adults to be on the streets having nothing. Everybody should have a home, everybody should have a place to eat or live,” Jonas told TODAY. “Everyone should have something.”
The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
For years, parents at the troubled 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles protested the plight of its students, 98 percent of whom are Hispanic or black. Test scores were abysmal. Only a third were reading at grade level. And the stench of dead animals rotting in the air ducts was making kids sick.
Parents organized two protests and petitioned to have the principal removed, but according to Amibilia Villeda, parent of a fourth-grader, “nobody ever listened or paid attention.”
Then an organization called Parent Revolution showed up. The Los Angeles nonprofit group helped the parents form a union and transform their failing school through new leadership, new teachers and a unique partnership between a district and a charter school. The parents even negotiated for free universal preschool.
The revamped school opened its doors last August, and parents who fought for change already see the difference on their kids’ faces. “Smiles!” says Esmerelda Chacon, another parent of a fourth-grader. “They want to come to school.”
MORE: The Surprising Secret to Improving Math Skills
How did these parents do it? Emboldened by California’s pioneering Parent Empowerment Act, which passed in 2010, parents at a persistently failing school who gather signatures from 51 percent of the parents now have the right to take over the school, hire a new principal, new staff or convert it into a charter.
The law, informally dubbed the parent trigger, was the brainchild of Ben Austin, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and an ex-member of the California State Board of Education, who founded Parent Revolution in 2009. Since his unlikely success in getting the bill passed, parents have transformed five California schools, while six other states have enacted similar laws and nearly 20 more have considered them. The United States Conference of Mayors passed a unanimous resolution endorsing the concept in 2012.
Parent trigger “gives parents a historic amount of power to sit at the table and bargain with the traditional interests that have power in the education system,” says Austin, who began his career working in the Clinton White House. They can “bargain on behalf of their kids and not be told to go do a bake sale when it’s time for the grown-ups to make the decisions.”
The idea behind the parent trigger law is simple: The rights of kids must come first, and no one has a greater interest in seeing kids receive a quality education than parents. “Everybody cares about kids, but there’s no doubt that parents have a different sense of urgency than everybody else,” Austin says. “Parents can’t sit around and wait for pilot programs or half measures. Their kids need a great education now.”
ALSO: Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
Austin, a father of two, ages 4 and 7, has seen firsthand how the quality of public education varies dramatically based on “who you are, what color skin you have and what ZIP code you live in.” He sends his older daughter to one of the best public schools in Los Angeles, where parents have the clout to get kids what they need.
“I have the very unique experience of dropping [my daughter] off and then driving to places like 24th Street Elementary, which is in the same school district, the same city, the same type of neighborhood school, same age kids, but it feels like you’re in a different universe,” Austin says. “If there was a dead animal on [my daughter’s] campus, there would be a SWAT team of paramedics surrounding it to resuscitate it before any parent ever noticed. But these parents had been complaining for years, and it took the leverage of the parent trigger to force the district to act.”
There is a systemic reason the quality of education is so much worse in poor neighborhoods.
A 2009 investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that 98 percent of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)were receiving lifetime tenure with little or no performance review — a situation the current superintendent has worked hard to change, amid fierce opposition from the United Teachers Los Angeles union.
Once teachers in California receive tenure, state laws make it difficult to fire them for any reason. The process is so lengthy, costly and arduous that attempts are rarely made except in egregious cases of misconduct and abuse. Even then, it’s not easy. LAUSD even had a hard time firing former elementary school teacher Mark Berndt, who is currently serving a 25-year sentence after pleading no contest to felony lewd conduct charges that included blindfolding his students, spoon-feeding them his semen, putting cockroaches on their faces and photographing these crimes. The district paid Berndt $40,000 to leave, and he’s still receiving his nearly $4,000-per-month pension. (The school district now removes teachers accused of misconduct from the classroom, sending them to so-called “teacher jail,” where hundreds are paid full salaries totaling $1.4 million a month to sit and do nothing, as the district investigates the claims.)
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
LAUSD and other school districts have pushed for changes to state law. However, the California Teachers Association (CTA), arguably the most powerful lobbying group in the state, so tightly guards teacher tenure protections that in 2012 it managed to kill a bill in the state Legislature that would have made it easier to dismiss teachers who abuse students. Lawmakers who sided with the CTA faced backlash, and one was booted out of office.
A CTA spokesman said he agrees that the teacher dismissal process needs to be “streamlined,” and last year CTA backed its own bill. However, district superintendents, education reform groups and the president of the California School Boards Association all complained that the CTA-backed bill made the problem even worse. Gov. Jerry Brown, a strong CTA ally, vetoed it.
On Jan. 27, a historic trial began in California challenging the constitutionality of the state’s teacher tenure and seniority rules. Plaintiffs in Vergara v. California claim that they deprive low-income students of equal access to quality education. There are also several ballot measures in the works to address the issue.
However, the lack of change to date frustrates Austin.
“If after three years, tens of millions of dollars of litigation and two different legislative attempts, we can’t figure out how to fire teachers who feed their own semen to children,” Austin says, “how in the world are we going to figure out how to run an effective system for kids?”
DON’T MISS: This Clever Idea Could Solve One of Public Schools’ Biggest Technology Problem
When ineffective teachers can’t be fired, schools in poor neighborhoods become the dumping grounds for the lemons. (After Berndt’s arrest, a second teacher at the same elementary school — located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city — was also arrested for lewd conduct.)
The parent trigger law upends that dynamic, allowing parents to hire a new staff or convert to a charter that isn’t bound by the same tenure rules. Parent Revolution helps parents unionize, learn their rights and organize petition drives so they can collectively bargain on behalf of their kids or force change.
“The parents are not asking for Olympic-sized pools in their schools,” says Alfonso Flores, Parent Revolution’s district director, who was previously an Army Special Forces soldier, a teacher and principal. “They’re asking for clean restrooms, interactive lessons, science and social studies — basic things that should already be happening.”
Nevertheless, school districts and teachers’ unions have not taken kindly to such a radical power shift. “It would be silly to think that the general public could be educated enough to decide what doctors should and shouldn’t do, but they feel like they can do that in education,” says Marty Hittelman, former president of the California Federation of Teachers, in the documentary film “We the Parents”, released last fall.
The first two parent trigger campaigns met with fierce opposition, legal challenges and allegations of harassment, vandalism and dirty tricks, including threats to deport parents who were undocumented immigrants. Parent Revolution’s first attempt to transform a school in Compton, Calif., ended in failure after a court ruled that the parents’ petitions were invalid because the signatures were undated.
ALSO: This Innovative Philadelphia School Has a Really Good Reason for Downgrading Its Computers
Austin also has been the target of vicious personal attacks. Education historian Diane Ravitch called him “loathsome” and an “idiot” and said there was a “special place in hell” reserved for his funders after parents at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts — one of the worst schools Los Angeles — successfully petitioned to replace the principal, during whose tenure the school’s performance had grown radically worse. (Ravitch later apologized.)
“All the parents wanted was new leadership because their principal had a track record of abject failure for their children,” Austin says. “If that is so offensive that people are condemned to hell, I think it exposes opponents of this movement as being not against charters but against parents having power of any kind. If parents can’t exercise power in this situation, I would ask our opponents: When is it that they think it’s okay for parents to have power?”
Critics have charged that Parent Revolution, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the Walton Family Foundation, is attempting to turn public schools into private, for-profit ventures.
However, only one of the five transformed schools has converted to a nonprofit charter after the district refused to negotiate. (Parent Revolution opposes for-profit charters.) The other four schools implemented various forms of in-district reform. In some cases, just the threat of a parent trigger has given parents enough leverage to negotiate for changes before they even finish collecting signatures.
“We’re making public schools more public and responsive to the public that they supposedly exist to serve,” says Austin, who takes the criticism in stride. “I don’t like having people dislike me, but if you’re not running up against entrenched interests, you’re probably not fighting for big social change.”
DON’T MISS: Chicago Schools Just Made This Tech-Savvy Move. The Rest of the Country Is Next
Austin is not a guy who crumbles under pressure. When he was 16, his father, an alcoholic author who published five novels before falling on hard times, committed suicide. Then in 2006, Austin fought for and lost a state ballot initiative to tax millionaires to pay for free universal preschool. Two years later, he lost his bid to join the school board.
“I’ve had more epic public failures than most people in life,” Austin says. “But you have to be able to get back up when you fall flat on your face. It is one of the most important skills in life, and it’s a skill my father didn’t have.”
So when Austin’s first attempt to transform a school through parent trigger failed, he didn’t give up. He examined his mistakes and completely revamped Parent Revolution’s organizing model. In Compton, Parent Revolution chose the school’s transformation path and a charter operator to replace the failing school.
“It was too top down for it to be an organic movement,” Austin says. “Instead of doing the work for the parents, we [now] give parents the tools to do it themselves.”
And that means the parents’ interests don’t always align with his. For instance, the parent trigger law is criticized for being “divisive,” but at 24th Street, LAUSD’s reform-minded Superintendent John Deasy welcomed petitioning parents into his office and apologized for what their kids had endured. Instead of fighting the parents in court, LAUSD competed against various charter operators to win back the right to run its own school.
Austin viewed this as a rare opportunity to work collaboratively with a district on reform, and he hoped the parents would choose LAUSD’s proposal.
MORE: The High-Tech Ride That’s Getting Kids Excited About Coding
Austin’s community organizers thanked him for his opinion but said parents would decide for themselves.
“We at Parent Revolution had lost all control of this process, and the parents were driving it — every step of the way,” Austin says. “This was parent empowerment on steroids.”
LAUSD agreed to meet all the petitioners’ demands, but parents were still distrustful after years of neglect. What they did next was something Austin never envisioned — something that had never been done before. They asked the top two finalists, LAUSD and Crown Preparatory Academy charter, to work together jointly to run the school.
Parents interviewed and approved the new principal and teachers, retaining a few who had reapplied for their jobs. And when 24th Street reopened last August, it had four new grades, with LAUSD running preschool through grade four, and Crown Prep running grades five through eight.
“It took empowered parents telling all of the interests to play well in the sandbox together to force a deal like that,” Austin says. “There isn’t anything in the law that says you can force a district and a charter to work together for the first time in history. They just figured it out.”
Austin expects these newly empowered parents to continue fighting for change on a state and national level. “One of the things no one has gotten their heads around is the unintended ripple effects when whole communities that have been left for dead rise up,” he says. “I think they appreciate the help we’ve given them, but they don’t see me as their hero. They don’t see me as having done this for them. They feel the power in themselves.”
MORE: Mindfulness Isn’t Just a Hot Trend. It’s Improving Low-Income Schools
For This Iraq Veteran and Actor, Hollywood’s Hard Knocks Don’t Seem So Tough
When Chris DeVinny served as a Forward Observer in the Army in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, one of his most unpleasant experiences was digging through burning garbage, trying to locate some missing guns. He told Erin Prater of the Fort Collins Gazette, “I remember thinking, ‘No matter what happens, where I’m at in the civilian world, I’ll always be able to look back on this day and remember that nothing sucked as bad as this.”
This perspective has proved useful as DeVinny pursues an acting career in Los Angeles, and endures the disappointments typical of aspiring actors. After his discharge from the army, DeVinny used GI Bill funding to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. Since then DeVinny, now 27, has landed several parts in theater productions, and works as a handyman on the side. What DeVinny thought might be his big break came in September of 2013, when he was cast in a small roll as a Navy master-at-arms in NBC’s drama “Ironside.” Unfortunately the show, starring Blair Underwood as a wheelchair-bound police detective, was canceled before the episode DeVinny appeared in aired, sending him back to auditions. But he’s also writing a play about Iraq War veterans and plans to cast fellow veterans in all the starring roles. There shouldn’t be any complaints, no matter how grueling the rehearsals are.