Penitentiary Prep -- From the Schoolhouse to the Jailhouse

PENITENTIARY PREP – FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO THE JAILHOUSE

Written by

Michael Rose

Fremont High School, a typical school in South Central Los Angeles annually welcomes between 1500 and 1700 students into their freshman classes. 

Four years later only 350 to 500 graduate.  Many of the missing students have matriculated to prison.  Others are on the streets with no idea where to go.  A lot of these kids will also end up behind bars.  They are a lost generation seemingly without hope.

One young and charismatic community leader has begun to find a way to reach these kids before they drop out and are lost forever in an endless cycle of incarceration.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the director of South Central LA’s Community Coalition’s youth programs, started by finding out what issues concerned the students.  He took a poll.

He thought that the poll would show that violence, gangs and drugs would be the key issues in this urban center.

Instead, over 75 percent of the students said, “school conditions” were the most important concern.  The conditions were absolutely criminal.  There were literally classrooms with no light.  Schools where there was no bathroom to use – or one bathroom for 3000 students.

Harris-Dawson knew that the voters had just passed Prop BB, a $2.4 billion bond measure, to improve schools.  He thought help was on the way but was shocked to see how the money would be spent.

In the end, the monster share of the money was going to suburban schools for air conditioning and other goodies and the schools getting the least amount of money were the schools in South Central LA.

Those schools, the oldest and the most overcrowded in the city, were slated to get $1.1 million mainly for more security fences and bars on the windows. 

Harris-Dawson had a plan.  He armed 60 students with disposable Kodak cameras and sent them into the schools.

They were cheap enough so that if the students got caught or they were afraid, they could throw the camera away.  If they were able to avoid detection they could get fairly decent pictures to document the conditions of the schools.  Armed with the evidence, they staged a protest.  When the LA Times ran a story, they quickly won a meeting with the Prop. BB funding oversight committee.

In front of a crowd filled with over 200 of their fellow students, parents and concerned community members, the student photographers premiered a slide show of their work and asked the committee to reconsider their funding priorities.  It worked.

In total, the 127 schools in South Los Angeles ended up with an additional $153  million worth of repairs.

This gave the students hope and showed them that they could change their lives.  Now that they’ve begun to improve the physical conditions at their schools, they want to improve the educational opportunities.

They are demanding that college prep courses be taught and that all the classes that are offered have textbooks and teachers.  These appear to be reasonable demands but in South Central LA it promises to be a grueling struggle.  I wouldn’t count these kids out.  They’ve shown that they want to make sure their schools are more than just Penitentiary Prep.