Locke High Update 2: Joanna, Damon and Bryan

Last night on KCET’s new magazine show, SoCal Connected, ran a half hour special on the Green Dot charter converstion at Locke High. It was excellent. You can watch it here.

Although the SoCal Connected people interviewed plenty of adults, they chose to focus on three different kids, each of whom were very much on the edge when the new, revamped school opened.

There names are Joanna, Damon and Bryan.

Each kid has been through serious trauma—as is true with a lot of kids in these kinds of chronically low-scoring schools. A month before the filming, Joanna’s brother was shot to death in a gang-related murder. She found him on the pavement. He died in her arms.

Bryan is a music talent who lives in a one bedroom place with his father and sister. Bryan sleeps on the couch. His sister sleeps on the floor. He’s dad is a single father. Sometimes they don’t have money for food, Bryan says.

One of Bryan’s source of pain is the fact that his mother ran out on the family. The Locke music teacher talks about how sometimes Bryan is so distraught that sometimes he doesn’t come to school.

When asked what he wants for his future, he says, ““My dream would be to have a decent life. Just a decent life.”

Damon, a tall good lucking, basket ball player, also lost a parent, but in his case, his mother died when he was fourteen. He moved in with his grandmother and stopped caring about school. But now all that is starting to change at Locke.

The show intends to check back in with all three kids as the year progresses, to see how they are doing, and through their eyes, how Locke is doing.

In the meantime, each kid talks about his or her life, and how the school feels so much different now that the new Green Dot Sheriff is in town— like how even the bathrooms are finally clean.

“There used to be tagging all up and down the hallway,” says Joanna, “In the restroom, even the place that you would sit down, the toilet seat would have tagging. But now you look and it’s all clean. You actually see the walls are… white.”

“And there used to be two or three fights a week, ” says Damon. Not any more. Damon admits he used to ditch two or three days a week, he said. “But now you can’t ditch,” he says. And he likes it, he says.

“When he graduates,” says Damon’s grandmother of her newly hopeful grandson, “I’m going to find me some bells and put ‘em on my shoes, so I can stomp and jump for joy and just rattle the bells. Because I will be one happy grandmother to see her grandson graduate.

There’s much, much more.

The thing that is both horrifying and remarkable is how many years we have somehow been content to watch kids like these fall through the cracks and fail. Just drown. And, while success is far from guaranteed for any of the three, all three seem to feel at the new Locke they have a real chance.

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“We have to undo ten years of neglect,” said Steve Barr on Larry Mantle’s show on KPCC yesterday. “We have kids at Locke who came in and were rreading at fourth grade level. Now we do an individual lesson plan for every kids. We have seniors at Locke who don’t even have one credit. They’ve just been floating around there.”

Not anymore.

“Parents are pulling their kids out of charter schools and bringing them back to Locke,” he said.

So, why is it again these same principles haven’t been put into place at others schools?

Really. Why?