A Bitter Victory in Compton

I should have been pleased, but my main emotion was anger at the announcement that the Compton school district is being forced to provide students with such basics as toilet paper, textbooks, drinking water and safe schoolyards.

Anger that it took a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, plus tough news coverage in The Times, to assure Compton students the necessities that should be taken for granted.

Anger that minority children should have to go to school in conditions where it is all but impossible to learn, where to traverse the path between Compton and college is more difficult than climbing Mt. Everest.

Anger at people who believe intelligence is race-based. Such individuals should send their kids to Compton and see if they ever make it to UCLA or Cal State L.A.

Anger at successive school boards and administrators who let the system collapse.

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The announcement that Compton schools may at long last receive long-denied educational staples was made Tuesday at a press conference called by the ACLU and school officials.

They announced an agreement in which the district promised to remedy its shortcomings by Dec. 1, 1998. If not, the ACLU, along with its private counsel allies, Robert Myers and Karl Manheim, will haul the district into court.

The terrible conditions go back through generations of students. This is a district where rip-offs--contracts to pals, use of the cheapest building materials and much, much more--have earned the district a reputation for being not a bureaucracy, but a kleptocracy.

In 1993, after the district had spent itself into bankruptcy while somehow forgetting to repair deteriorating campuses, the state education department took over.

But the state turned out to be another neglectful trustee. When Edward Gilliam Jr. took over as principal of Compton High School in August 1995, he found the place a mess. He said he wrote many memos and made countless phone calls demanding repairs of the auditorium, the long dysfunctional swimming pool, leaky roofs and fire-damaged buildings. He asked for more textbooks and desks. He also requested a properly functioning public address system for use in case of fire or other disasters. Gilliam was fired last year because, he said, he complained so much. Compton officials said they could not comment on his firing, a personnel matter.

Only when the ACLU, prompted by Times stories and parental complaints, filed its lawsuit did the district begin repairs.

Even so, improvements have been slow. Recently, I met with several Compton High School teachers who complained that despite district promises, there were still classrooms without books and other instructional materials.

After attending the press conference at the ACLU office Tuesday, I drove to Compton High School. I found myself wondering, as I have in the past, how we could allow such educational desolation in a place as rich as the Southland.

I went to the office of the current principal, Billie Coleman, who had taken me on a tour of the campus last month. At that time, he showed me some of the improvements the district had made before Tuesday’s agreement.

This time, he offered another tour. We headed toward two buildings that had been among the worst. On the way, a student greeted him: “Mr. Coleman. Best principal in Compton.”

A bathroom had been cleaned and painted. New dispensers were filled with toilet paper. Leaking ceilings and roofs had been repaired.

The halls smelled of fresh paint, put on the day before in anticipation of visits from television crews seeking pictures to accompany stories of the ACLU-district agreement. Coleman said the paint was no gimmick. Painters are on campus three times a week covering graffiti.

But a locked building nearby was evidence that the Compton school district’s miseries are too profound to be covered by paint. Inside the building was the swimming pool, closed and out of commission for 15 years. Neither the old independent school board nor a succession of state trustees have managed to get it repaired.

The pool is symptomatic of Compton’s neglect. The city is starved for recreational facilities and the pool could have served the community as well as the students every day for the past 15 years.

“It was not a priority of the people leading the community before,” Coleman said.

Why couldn’t a corporation or rich individual donate the money, estimated at between $250,000 to $300,000? “We get such negative press that it’s hard to get people to come in here and partner,” Coleman said.

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Think of the students who have passed through the school during those 15 years, their education as neglected as the crumbling buildings.

They’re being sent into a world where education provides the only way up. Long gone are the old industrial plants that provided low-skill work for an earlier generation. Without education, Compton’s grads will be shunted into low paid, low-future jobs.

It’s gratifying that the ACLU has forced the district to act. But a generation of young people has been robbed of its fair chance to succeed in life by bureaucrats and elected officials who have sworn to provide a decent education for these kids.