Young people forced to move from one room to another for instruction.
Forced to eat a limited diet; forced to deal with distant adults barking orders.
Sounds like any public school, yet I am describing an alternative setting: a juvenile court school, in Los Padrinos, located in Downey, CA.
For the last year, I have served off and on as a substitute teacher, assisting minors who have broken the law to complete credits and graduate.
One instance was striking. After leading one class through a lesson on the slope-intercept formula, one student exclaimed:
"I have been in school for years, and I never learned this stuff. This is the first time I have ever learned anything."
I share this anecdote not to promote my skills as an educator, but rather to point out the questionable quality of the education these young people have received in the traditional public schools.
Why is the education so poor? Imagine forty plus youngsters, talking of turn, harassing their peers, interrupting the teacher. Then imagine a teacher, resigned to calling on-campus security to ensure some semblance of law and order in the classroom.
After about ten or fifteen minutes, when straggling students have finally entered the room, the teacher begins a lesson which engages perhaps a fraction of the students, while the rest are preoccupied with domestic or friendship issues, starving for having missed breakfast, or worried about the local gang that has been intimidating them for the past month.
At least in juvenile hall, the inmates-students enjoy some security. They can receive three meals per day. They have housing, they have protection. In some cases, they can rely on kindly probation officers who notice when a young man has "seen the light" and no longer has any desire to commit a crime.
Still, isn't it terrible that in order to receive proper attention, care, and respect, a child has to commit a crime and be incarcerated in juvenile hall?
It is scandalous that the only schools with small class sizes are in juvenile court schools. Should every student who desires a real education now break the law in order to learn anything?
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