Homework Center Nurtures Urban Youths

For 15 years, the African American Unity Center has helped South Los Angeles youths steer clear of gangs and drugs. Through field trips, sports leagues, counseling, mentoring and support for lowincome families, the group aims to keep urban children busy, productive and away from the dangers of inner-city streets.

The center broadens horizons by exposing youngsters to new experiences such as camping, the opera, a trip to the beach.

But years of charting her charges’ struggles convinced executive director Charisse Bremond that her program had a missing link. Too many of the children suffer from crippling educational deficiencies.

“Field trips are great,” Bremond said. “But if they’re not educated enough to be prepared to move forward, then making them aware of choices won’t count for much.”

Most of the children the group serves attend urban campuses that are crowded, are poorly equipped and post low test scores.

“We realized that we had to focus more on education,” Bremond said, “because these kids were not getting what they need.”

The group’s effort received a boost this year from the Los Angeles Times Family Fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which spent more than $1.4 million -- raised through readers’ donations -- to help dozens of charities across Southern California provide services for needy families and disadvantaged children.

The foundation’s $20,000 grant to the African American Unity Center paid for 10 computers, software and books for the group’s homework center at Horace Mann Middle School, in a neighborhood where few children have home computers and getting to a library may mean traveling alone through streets riven by gang rivalries.

Raising academic achievement is not an easy task at a school like Horace Mann, where almost one-third of the students live with foster families or in group homes, one-third speak little or no English and many families can barely afford the school’s basic uniform of blue pants and white shirts.

For more than six years, the homework center has provided tutoring, counseling, recreational activities and a haven for hundreds of children whose after-school alternative would be empty homes or dangerous streets.

Parents -- most of whom never graduated from high school -- have been grateful, Bremond said: “We’ve heard them tell the kids, ‘Now you have no excuse for not doing your homework.’ ”

For teenagers such as Rakin Amos, the after-school program made the difference between failure and success. As an eighth-grader, he was skipping school, failing classes and flirting with the idea of joining a street gang when his mother sent him to the campus center for tutoring.

Center director Bette Braxton not only helped him improve his grades enough to graduate from the middle school, but helped raise money to buy an outfit for him to wear at graduation, something his family could not afford.

“Back then, I never thought I’d be walking across the stage at graduation,” said Rakin, 15, now a student at Crenshaw High and still a frequent visitor to the homework center. “Without them, I’d probably be in a gang right now.”

The computers have proven to be a popular draw, and not only for their research potential.

“Before we had them, those boys would be running around the room, wearing us out,” Braxton said, gesturing toward a crowd of boys lined up at the bank of computers, waiting for a turn at the race-car game reserved as a reward for completed homework assignments.

“Now the whole energy in this place has changed. They settle down, they do what they’re supposed to do. Because we’ve got something good waiting for them.”

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Dec. 5