California kids, do you follow the news about the culture wars over the boards that oversee your schools?

If you do, you’ll see these wars portrayed as political contests between groups that want to take education in different directions. You’ll see reports about loud conflicts between progressives and right-wingers, and fights between parents’ groups and teachers’ unions.

But you won’t hear much about the role of students in these debates. Because there isn’t one. School boards are meetings of adult politicians; kids are rarely even present (much less heard) in those loud and angry rooms.

You might think not having to listen to grownups yelling is a good thing. It’s not. There’s an old adage in politics: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

That’s cynical, but so are your parents and teachers. For all their performative battles over your schools, the adults in your lives share a unity of purpose in the education wars.

They all want to trample on your already very limited rights as children. And they want to prevent you from having control over your own education.

They just attack from different flanks.

On the right, conservative parents and their political allies seek to take away your right to read what you want. Groups with Orwellian names—like Moms for Liberty—are pursuing bans on books and curricula. (Note to you kids: “Orwellian” refers to George Orwell, the sort of satirical author that grown-ups, right and left, are trying to keep out of your hands.)

Now, you may not care about books, but their censorship influences more than just what you read. Banning books limits what your teachers can teach, and which of your questions they can answer. The right is particularly interested in limiting what teachers can tell you about the most hot-button topics, like race and sex. Maybe you think parents are just trying to protect you, but this sort of paternalism always leads to the erosion of more rights.

The right is also demanding that teachers violate your privacy and make official reports, including to your parents, if you dare deviate from old-fashioned gender norms. I know, it’s crazy. Figuring out your identity is hard enough, in this world of gossipy classmates and social media, without your teachers being required to inform on you. Why can’t these uptight adults live their own lives, and stop inserting themselves into yours?

Now, the political left, to its credit, is fighting back against these intrusions on your privacy. But they have their own ways of trying to limit your freedoms and your educational horizons.

It was groups on the left—especially teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians—who violated your right to an education by closing the schools for more than a year during the pandemic. Those same state and local leaders haven’t done enough to help you recover the learning you lost in the pandemic. Some even maintain that learning loss is a myth, even though most of you are testing below grade level and many of you are chronically absent from school.

And inside your schools, the left is determined to keep you on their prescribed path by limiting your ability to study what you want. Progressive politicians defend outdated traditional school curricula, while adding new requirements that match their political preferences—like labor rights or ethnic studies. Meanwhile, schools rarely provide the technology courses that many of you want. Unbelievably, just 40 percent of high schools in California, home of Silicon Valley, even offer computer science.

Maybe you think this is a budget problem. It isn’t. Spending on schools is way up, even as the number of students declines. It’s just that the new money ends up going to adults—teachers and administrators—and their salaries.

If you still think your teachers, school administrators, and elected officials respect you, let me tell you a story that will disabuse you of that notion.

During the pandemic, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified Schools faced litigation charging that he was violating students’ right to a good education. He responded by saying that students only had the right to a free education. It didn’t have to be good or even useful.

Perhaps even more shockingly, California’s leaders and schools have embraced the superintendent’s position as their own. In fact, the state’s political and educational establishment is opposing a ballot initiative that would give you the right to a “high-quality” education.

Don’t believe it? Here is language from this measure they oppose: “The state and its school districts shall provide all public school students with high-quality public schools that equip them with the tools necessary to participate fully in our economy, our society, and our democracy.”

The establishment says that you, the students, have to accept whatever dismal education, and whatever meager rights, they choose to give you. In arguing against the initiative, they have claimed that a requirement of “high-quality” education will produce a barrage of lawsuits and demands from you.

For your sake, I sure hope they are right.

Now is the time for students to go on the offensive. If adults chastise or punish you for being combative, you can laugh in their faces—and remind them how loud and combative they are being in their own educational wars.

You could try a one-day-a-week student strike, like the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and spend that day trying to find lawyers to sue your school districts. (Lawsuits, and their costs, are what really move school administrators.)

An even better move would be to demand democracy from the Democrats who rule California. Students know more about how education works than most adults. Why shouldn’t you have the right, regardless of age, to vote and run in school board elections?

Indeed, school boards have been so captured—by teachers’ unions and parent groups, and all their conflicts—that there’s a strong case for turning school boards entirely over to students, who could check adult interests.

This may sound radical, but it isn’t. In other countries, teens have parliaments and councils, some with real powers. And even our state has a number of “democratic” schools—like Diablo Valley in Concord, and California Free School in Altadena—where students set schedules and curricula, and vote on how the campus is run.

Also, please remember that grown-ups like to say that you kids need to learn civics, even though no one provides much in the way of civics classes. Turning school boards and school governance over to kids would be the greatest civics lesson possible.

And it’d be far more educational than the current culture wars in our school boards.

The post Let the Kids Rule School Boards appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One girl, a 3-year-old Australian, has been in the Kurdish-run refugee camp al-Hol and was about to lose her fingers to frostbite because of the lack of heating and infrastructure at the camp. The other Amira, a Canadian, was discovered last year walking through the rubble of Baghouz after both her parents were killed in the aerial bombardment that heralded the end of ISIS’s territorial control. This Amira was also held at the al-Hol camp until international pressure forced the Kurdish authorities to move her to a safer location.

These parallel cases have ignited new debates about what to do with children from war zones, who now find themselves without country, citizenship, protection—or much compassion. The countries from which ISIS children originate are confronted with a grave humanitarian crisis. Leaving children to languish and die in refugee camps and prisons is an unconscionable abuse of human rights. The longer the children remain, the more they could be exposed to trauma and deprivation, and now, even face the threat of an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, all factors compounding the problems of their eventual adjustment. Furthermore, there is concern that children enduring harsh conditions of refugee camps will be even more vulnerable to radicalization in the future.

These children had little or no say in whether their parents took them to ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq. Governments debating whether to allow those children to return must understand what they experienced as a first step to reintegrating them into society. What were the children coerced to do while they were the so-called “Ashbal al Khilafah” or ISIS “cubs,” the name given to them by the terrorist group? What did they witness as observers of ISIS war crimes? And what might have been done to the children themselves? ISIS would not be the first violent extremist organization whose members sexually abused children they recruited.

The historical context of children in violent extremist groups is complicated. The numbers of such children mostly declined in the two decades following the 1996 publication of the United Nations’ Machel report, which described the impact of armed conflict on children. But in more recent years, groups that once avoided using children on the front lines began to revive the tactic in new ways, with children as car bombers and executioners.

ISIS heralded its exploitation of children. In ISIS propaganda, children were featured giving their “about to die” eulogies; ISIS also distributed propaganda videos of executions carried out by boys as young as 10. ISIS’s tactics led to an urgent call by Western governments and security agencies for increased efforts to prevent radicalization and violent extremism across the globe. But so far, there is little empirical evidence for effective prevention of such radicalization and violence around children. Prevention is challenging because armed groups employ so many various methods of indoctrination for children, and use children in so many different roles in conflict. ISIS’s approach to educating children demonstrates the breadth of the challenge.

By 2014, ISIS had assumed de facto control over schools in the areas under its control in Syria, which had been in chaos since its civil war began in 2011. The chaos came to the classrooms. Female teachers were dismissed immediately from all of their duties. While many male teachers remained in their positions, they were forced to teach an ISIS-controlled curriculum to gender-segregated pupils. These lessons included weapons training and intense ideological conditioning in which every element of education was imbued with military imagery to routinize violence. The mathematics textbooks had the students counting bullets and tanks, and students learned to tell time with clocks fastened to bundles of dynamite.

The schools provided ISIS recruiters with the opportunity to scout for talent or specific traits. For example, children with an aptitude for communication were deployed as recruiters themselves, adopting public-speaking roles to conscript other children, as well as adults, on the Dawa caravan. The goal of child recruiters was to engender a sense of pride, prestige and competition among what ISIS referred to as the “cubs of the caliphate” to increase their status. Students earned this “cub” status in one of the dedicated training camps where they learned the military, tactical, and combat skills needed to become a militant.

The evidence of how children were brain washed is chilling. Between May and July 2015, ISIS released three videos featuring children aged between 10 and 15 years old. A video from February 2015 showed 80 children—some as young as 5—wearing camouflage, standing in formation and engaging in military exercises with guns. They were taught how to behead people and use AK-47s. Clearly, ISIS pioneered a form of individual resilience by combining intense physical and military training with deep levels of ideological and psychological indoctrination. The group designed a systematic process of education, religious indoctrination, and physical training to generate competent militants who were not just mindless drones, but who embraced every aspect of its teachings.

Many people have argued that ISIS’s exploitation of children is no different than the past creation of child soldiers in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Darfur. Yet ISIS’s strategic use of child recruits is very different than the way child soldiers in African were employed. On that continent, such children were recruited throughout the 1980s and ’90s not for the future, but for the immediate exigencies. Most of the children fighting in African militias were killed in battle and few survived to progress through the ranks to become leaders.

This difference between the ISIS approach and the African example has important implications for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers. What may have worked for several Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs in Africa—trying to transform children’s roles with the aid of family, community, educational and religious authorities—may not work as seamlessly in Syria and Iraq, where the religious and education institutions were thoroughly co-opted, controlled, and distorted by ISIS’s control from 2014 to 2018. As a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, these children will likely lack empathy, suffer from attachment problems, and struggle with socialization.

Given that ISIS indoctrination in many cases started at very young age, the children have to unlearn their knowledge of the Islamic faith that was profoundly distorted by ISIS and re-learn basic life skills. They also should participate in vocational training to facilitate their transition to everyday life. This transition requires a long-term process, longer than the standard three-month rehabilitation program that exists in the Kurdish camps where so many ISIS children go.

If Western countries, human rights organizations, and civil society are to have any hope of reintegrating the children who survived being used by ISIS, there must be a level of coordination and creativity not previously employed in any DDR program. Demobilization of the children demands a multi-pronged approach that combines vocational training, psychological intervention, and religious reeducation to address the trauma suffered by witnessing executions and participating in acts of violence. Normalization will be all the more challenging if members of their own families encouraged or exposed them to violence.

In Pakistan, there exist successful programs to treat children who were members of violent extremist organizations (for example, the Pakistani Taliban TTP). The child’s family is expected to play a positive role in their reintegration. However, in the case of ISIS, the families who encouraged and exposed the children to the violence in the first place are less than ideal. To prevent recidivism or re-engagement, the children might have to be separated from their family members. That is far from standard practice, but there is little that is standard about the challenges of reintegrating children of ISIS fighters.

Mia Bloom’s research is supported in part by the Office of Naval Research “Documenting the Virtual Caliphate” #N00014-16-1-3174. All opinions are exclusively those of the authors and do not represent the Department of Defense or the Navy.

The post The Forgotten Children of ISIS Fighters  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On many mornings, I think my state senator has the best policy idea in California.

The rest of the time, I think he’s missing the point.

The idea involves the sleep of schoolkids, and the state senator is Anthony Portantino, who represents me and nearly one million other residents of one of California’s nerdiest regions, the San Gabriel Valley.

Portantino has won plaudits for a bill that would require middle and high schools to start the school day later—no earlier than 8:30 a.m. The bill is grounded in research showing that additional sleep and a later start would reduce tardiness and absenteeism, which in turn should increase school funding (which is tied to attendance) and improve students’ academic performance.

My two older sons’ school starts at 8:10 a.m. So, at around 8:02 a.m., Portantino’s bill has such obvious appeal that I wonder why he doesn’t extend its protection to elementary schools.

Some days, just eight minutes before school starts, I must climb to the top bunk to wrestle my oldest son, a second grader, out of bed, and into his clothes. Sometimes I must dive deep into the lower bunk to pull out my middle son, a kindergartener. I’ve strained my back with both maneuvers and raised my heart rate while racing three blocks to their classrooms before the bell rings.

One could argue this is a failure of my parenting. I could wake them earlier—but this causes conflict, and doesn’t necessarily get them out of bed. I try my best to get them in bed at 8:30 p.m. so they’ll wake up earlier, but they resist, and stay up reading Harry Potter and Captain Underpants books. So another 20 minutes of wiggle room, courtesy of state law, sounds pretty good—even if it makes me arrive later to work.

But when my back stops throbbing and my pulse returns to normal, I remember that the real problem in California education is not how early the school day starts.

It’s how early the school day concludes.

Put simply, California’s idea of a full day of school is far less than a full day. The state requires only half-day kindergarten, which amounts to just three hours and 20 minutes, about the length of a pro football game. First through third graders are required to have only four hours and 40 minutes of instructional time per day. It’s five hours for grades four to eight, and six hours for high schoolers.

School districts are free to do more. But given funding challenges, they rarely can. The calendar at our local elementary school is thus typical. My kindergartener is with his teachers from only 8:10 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. My second grader is in class until 2:25 p.m. four days a week; on Friday, there’s often early dismissal at 1:05 p.m. These shorter school days happen in a California that, following American tradition, guarantees just 180 school days a year.

This has the feel of hypocrisy (our children are our future, but not our educational priority), of rationing, and of missed opportunity. Despite the low reputation of California education, our teachers and schools have made big gains in achievement over the past generation, especially when one considers our relatively low levels of funding and our challenging student populations. So many of the teachers I’ve encountered in California schools are nothing less than magicians. Why can’t we give our kids more time with them?

The biggest answer is money: More hours of school would cost more, and California’s rickety school funding regime struggles to pay for the instruction we currently have. Many educational interest groups—from teachers to school boards to parents—have pushed for more instructional time. But proposals have run up against concerns about inconveniencing certain parents, create scheduling hassles after school, or adding to traffic, since more kids would be transported during rush hour.

But extensive research shows we must find a way to fund and organize more instructional time. Dozens of studies of campuses with longer school days and years have found that such schools do better, especially in serving students considered to be at-risk.

Some schools in California have acted on such research, with strong results. Catholic schools in Southern California extended their school year to 200 days some six years ago. The chain of charter schools known as KIPP has become a national model by increasing learning time with a school day that extends more than eight hours, typically from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Beyond educational needs, a longer school day would address other social problems. California politicians of both parties often talk about the need to offer more and better child care. Extending the school day would be a straightforward approach to that problem. It also might blunt the effects of inequality, since better-off parents can fill off-school hours with enriching activities.

Both my wife and I work more than full-time. We cope with short school days by enrolling our elementary school-age children in the after-school program offered on campus. That costs more than $700 a month, combined, for the two boys. (As a result, our 6-year-old typically spends twice as much time at school in day care as he does in his actual classroom.) We’re spending another $1,500 per semester on after-school enrichment classes in subjects like robotics and Mandarin, offered by our community’s educational foundation and by our city’s Chinese club. We’re lucky we can afford this. It’s unfair so many other parents can’t.

Up in Sacramento, there’s talk about legislation to exempt teachers from some taxes. Okay, give the tax breaks if you like, and pass Portantino’s bill right along with it. But there ought to be one condition: a huge increase in the length of the school day and the number of days in a school year.

What would that look like? Well, 9 to 5 was good enough for Dolly Parton. And if a longer day means the kids come home tired, so much the better. Maybe they’ll finally get to bed on time, and wake up early enough that I don’t have to wrestle anyone out of his bunk.

The post California’s Idea of a Full School Day Doesn’t Make the Grade appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair—ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts—while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer.

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp!, despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank.

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around January 15, just after the three-week-long Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation.

Our daughter, now eight, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a week-long, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork.

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves web sites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens.

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources–public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries–is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation.

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again August 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling.

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly.

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD Board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move towards a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass.

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position—and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the State of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance.

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained—yes, abstained—when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond.

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy—there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10 a.m.

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

The post Where’s the Laid-Back Fun in Kids’ Summer Vacations? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I can. Over the years, for the sake of my children’s enrichment, I have ordered gold-standard wrapping paper, reusable polyurethane bags, various types of overpriced produce, several mugs embossed with childhood art of questionable quality, and a decidedly non-miraculous miracle sponge.

Most working parents I know have a love-hate relationship with the PTA, that benevolent oligarchy in yoga pants. PTA parents are cliquish and relentless, but hard-working and sincere. And ultimately, they’re not the ones to blame for all of the needling flyers, fundraising packets, and soul-crushing suggestions that if you don’t buy gourmet grapefruit, the field trip to the petting farm won’t happen, and everyone will be sorry.

No, the real problem is a system that has yanked the parent organization from its roots: an advocacy group, founded in the 19th century by women who couldn’t vote, which has successfully pushed for kindergarten, mandatory immunizations, and child labor laws. There’s still a National PTA, based near Washington, D.C. But over the years, many school-based groups have lost faith in its agenda—or decided the dues weren’t worthwhile—and gone independent.

And without a common purpose or an overarching mission, many PTAs have evolved into school-based fundraising machines, largely divorced from the “teacher” part of the name, and generally turned inward. (By the time the country song “Harper Valley PTA” came out in 1968, its clannish reputation had been sealed.)

In the process, PTAs have replaced true community with something that’s essentially the opposite.

Alexis De Tocqueville gushed, long ago, about Americans’ peculiar version of enlightened self-interest, the way selfish motives still somehow led people to lend their time—and property—to the greater good. “The principle of self-interest rightly understood,” he wrote, “produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.”

Modern parenting culture, though, allows for no denial. For many, the birth of a child is the start of true civic engagement—a stake in the future, a reason to get involved. But that self-interest is channeled to the community that’s exclusively yours.

It starts with the way many American states fund education, with shrinking state aid bolstered by local property tax rolls, so that haves and have-nots are enshrined. Even within smaller towns, school funding is a zero-sum game: Every tax hike becomes a face-off between the needs of kids and the fixed incomes of the elderly, every school board debate a proxy for anxiety about real estate values.

On policy, we’re no better. When it comes to pitched battles over education, where you stand is often a function of what your own child needs. In Massachusetts, a recent ballot question—which would have lifted a legal cap on charter schools—pitted desperate urban parents, eager for good options, against parents who feared erosion of support for public schools. The measure lost, but in the end, nobody won.

And because we don’t fund education as we should, we’re slaves to fundraising drives, easily co-opted by corporate goals. When I was in high school, a local supermarket chain ran a contest: Win an Apple computer for your school by collecting some vast sum in grocery receipts. “Isn’t that unfair to poorer districts?” I asked. My father called me a communist.

This is where the women (yes, it’s still mostly women) of the PTA and independent “PTO” come in—working hard for their kids and no one else’s. It’s not a matter of greed or cold-heartedness, but of structure. In my town outside Boston, the elementary schools in the fanciest neighborhoods hold fundraising galas with silent auctions, and host smoothie bars for the teachers. The ones like mine, filled with dual-working-parent and working-class families, scrape by with bake sales and patched-together carnivals—heartfelt and sweet, but far less lucrative. There is teacher appreciation, for sure, just no smoothies to go with it.

And because so many “extras” deemed important to enrichment are left to the schools to finance, a cottage industry of fundraising schemes has cropped up, purveying products no one really needs. PTAs are deeply susceptible to these ideas.

It all amounts to taxation by guilt, essentially unfair, and inefficient to boot. Once, I spent $25 on a book of coupons to various stores I was unlikely to ever set foot in, on the promise that half of the proceeds—$12!—would go back to the school.

I’ll forever regret that I didn’t put $25 in an unmarked envelope, drop it in the school office, and run in the opposite direction. For the good of the children.

The post PTAs Are the Opposite of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The South Central corridor has long defined the larger region. It was a destination spot during the 20th century jazz heyday. Its struggles during the 1970s and ‘80s reflected struggles throughout South L.A. And today, the revival of S. Central Avenue, at the hub of this very dynamic corridor, demonstrates South L.A.’s progress and possibilities.

One of the corridor’s thriving institutions is A Place Called Home, a nonprofit that serves young members ages 8 to 21 with programs in everything from the arts to urban agriculture. Zócalo Public Square asked participants in the summer photography class to document life on the corridor.

Their images capture the improvements of buildings and businesses, and the constant traffic of an area where finding a parking space is often no easy feat. They also show a homeless population far more visible than in the past, a change attributed within the community to higher housing costs and the pushing out of homeless people from downtown, just to the north. Both trends are recounted in an essay by Vivian Bowers-Cowan, longtime owner of a dry cleaning store and retail complex on Central Avenue.

South L.A’s improvements have raised new questions for the corridor, as CVS and other larger retailers mull moving in. How can it accommodate bigger and broader businesses, without displacing smaller shops that have loyally served customers there through earlier, tougher times? The photos capture a signature Los Angeles thoroughfare, growing and adapting to a promising and challenging future.

The post Cruising South Central Avenue appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My brother and I taught ourselves to play the game
no one else would’ve shown two kids:

how to lean forward under the counter,
under our mother’s billowing apron

and imagine a darker shadow,
a more complete darkness rising

before and after the small spheres of light
we knew our lives were. And then, with a little effort,

I could, for a single breath,
almost taste it, what it would mean

to not be anywhere, to never have been.
Darkness filled the space

and left its pale fingerprint on my heart.
And the lesson of our game, one I still can’t fully grasp,

one that my brother and I would stare
into each other, trying to articulate, was this:

that it would have been okay if we’d never lived.
That we were glad, relieved, we did,

but that it would have been okay.

The post The Game of Non Existence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Among the many offerings at A Place Called Home is an urban agriculture program. It’s popular with members—and fits well in South L.A., where residents have a long tradition of community gardens and locally grown food.

Two years ago, the young members of A Place Called Home took charge of a strip of land outside the Newton police station at 3400 South Central Avenue, a five-minute walk away. Their goals for the garden were twofold. First, create South L.A.’s first gateless, large-scale edible garden. Second, collaborate with the local community and the police in the process of creating and growing the garden, thus, helping to build trust and make South L.A. safer.

The photos show both the before and the happy after in the garden. For their most recent harvest, members in a number of A Place Called Home classes, including Edible Garden & Food, grew tomatoes, tomatillos, basil, artichokes, okra, lettuce, chard, kale, collard greens, edible flowers, and various other things.

The food from the garden was cooked as part of A Place Called Home’s culinary program. Students used harvest potatoes and basil to make healthy baked potato chips with a pesto dip. The garden’s bounty was also shared with local families who don’t have secure sources of healthy food, and distributed during large annual community events.

The post In South L.A., a Growing Interest in Urban Gardening appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

America was still mired in the Depression when my family moved into the south Los Angeles neighborhood of 61st Street, just east of Main Street, which was characterized by peaceful stillness, interrupted in the afternoons and on weekends by the shouts of children at play. My brother Raul and I were 5 and 7 when we moved into that house, oblivious to the difficulties facing the nation.

On the contrary, we felt blessed by the abundant opportunities to explore nature in our new home, even as it stood in the middle of the big city. A bedraggled yucca plant stood in the middle of our front yard besieged by crabgrass. Even there we found things to study up close and wonder at—the grasshoppers that hopped in during the summer months and the bright yellow dandelions that grew there in profusion. When the dents-des-lions went to seed they became translucent globes that we held up and blew at to watch their tiny filaments fly off into the air and disappear.

Our summers provided endless opportunities for exploration, as well as a challenge for us to entertain ourselves on days that languidly stretched themselves ever longer. In the backyard, we observed an enormous web that connected bush with bush. When an insect flew into the web, we watched wide-eyed as a big spider raced to deliver the coup de grace to a struggling but doomed captive. And then wrap it, weaving the silk with its legs into a gray shroud that would hang on the web to await future consumption. We discovered the daddy long-legs with its long, spindly extremities. In dark, out-of-the- way places like garages, we sought out the ominous black widow and strained to see the red hourglass that marked its underside. That activity we knew was fraught with danger. Mother had warned us about black widows.

In the heat of summer nights as we sat in the front room, we heard loud pinging at the front door—hard-shelled June bugs that, attracted by the house lights, came crashing against the screen. When it was very hot, we caught sight of the swift, darting creatures we called horny toads that were neither toads nor horny. More conventional lizards stopped and froze and then scurried away as well. We learned to coddle ladybugs and recite to them the verse that urged them to fly away home because their house was on fire.

Once in a great while we saw turtles—or maybe they were tortoises—that we suspected were brought in from the desert and had wandered away from their keepers’ homes. We fed them lettuce leaves and looked on as they munched on them. The rule that we should not watch as people ate did not apply to turtles. On the hottest nights of the summer, crickets loudly proclaimed their presence. Many were the times, especially when intense summer heat made staying indoors intolerable, when we played outside until well into the night, our child sounds competing with the chirping of the crickets.

Nights in Los Angeles were very dark then and the stars shone brightly. The sight of shooting stars was not uncommon in the era before we became a megalopolis. Occasionally, the darkness was pierced by enormous shafts of light that moved dramatically across the sky, from searchlights placed in front of a market or a carpet store announcing a grand opening. Or a movie premiere.

When the war came, I was in fifth grade. The nights became even darker, as blackouts were ordered to hide us from marauding Japanese planes. Several times we heard the nighttime wailing of sirens that announced a practice air raid drill and alerted residents to prepare their windows with blackout curtains. Helmeted air raid wardens in armbands patrolled the streets. When they spotted any light in a house, a warden would knock heavily on the front door and bellow out an order that it should be covered.

But for the most part, the real world didn’t intrude much in this realm where we were free to be children, even older siblings like me who were genetically programmed towards seriousness. Raul and I did a lot of digging and playing with dirt in our backyard. We spent many days on our knees inspecting the legions of red ants that entered and exited holes they had dug in the ground. I’m not proud to confess that, like boys before and after us, we inexplicably indulged in macabre experiments on the poor ants, involving a magnifying glass and concentrated sun rays. Enough said on that.

Digging in dirt was great fun. We flooded an area with water from the garden hose and ran it through little ditches we dug, damming the water up at intervals with pieces of wood we half buried in the muck. We made little paper boats and sailed them down our boy-made rivers.

But the best way we used our dirt paradise was as a spot for playing a game at which we spent countless hours—marbles. Ernie, my friend from across the street, often joined us. Playing in dirt got us very dirty. We tried to avoid kneeling in the dirt by squatting, which didn’t work at all. We wore overalls like the ones worn by farmers and garage mechanics, and canvas tennis shoes.

With a stick, we traced a large circle in the dirt and in its center placed several marbles that formed the pot we would play for. That is, assuming we were playing “for keeps.”

The boy whose marble stopped closest to a line drawn in the dirt played first. The shooter selected a spot on the circle and, forming a fist with his shooting hand, he knuckled down to play. With his thumb, he propelled a marble toward the pot with the aim of knocking one or more of the marbles out of the ring. He pocketed the ones he knocked out and earned another shot. If the shooter was very good, he could continue until all the marbles were knocked out.

We’d play for countless hours, so many that the fingernails of our right, shooting thumbs developed holes from the pressure of the hundreds of marbles they propelled.

Marbles and other games taught us the importance of playing by the rules. Arguments occurred when a player insisted on not conforming to them. Ernie’s father, an otherwise extremely mild-mannered man, came over to our house one evening demanding of our parents, for Pete’s sake, the return of his son’s marbles. Losing one’s marbles was not a good thing, then or now.

In summertime we’d also play a lot of tag, with other neighborhood kids, as well as hide-and-seek. The cry of olly olly oxen free rang out, signaling the all clear when hiders could emerge from their hiding places. After Frankenstein became a cinematic sensation, the child who was it became the monster. The mere thought that a monster was on the hunt for us was chilling, even though we knew that it was only a boy, or a girl.

On hot summer days, the iceman from Kirker Ice Company made his customary rounds. While he was out of sight, lugging a block of ice into our house for the ice box, children clustered around the back of his truck, packed floor-to-ceiling with ice, and engaged in a harmless but refreshing bit of thievery, helping ourselves to shards of ice that remained on the damp truck bed. We wiped slivers of wood off our pieces of ice and sucked off the ice-cold water, rubbing our faces and necks with them. On many summer days, Mother prepared frosty pitchers of lemonade that included pieces of the block of ice that now sat in our ice box.

We had roller skates that we fitted over our shoes and tightened against the leather sole. A neat little metal key did the tightening. We skated only on the sidewalk. I never got the hang of braking so I just headed onto the grass until I stopped moving.

Police radio dramas and cowboy movies were popular at the time and boys liked to wear badges. We made our own. The metal caps of soft drink bottles were lined with cork that we pried out. Then we held the metal cap on the outside of our shirts and pushed the cork into the cap from the inside. The cap stayed put. We became walking advertisements for soft drinks including that new drink, Dr Pepper. We wore holster sets that handled two pistols, the large, silver colored ones being the most popular. Some boys had BB guns that actually shot steel or lead pellets. We didn’t. Mother considered them dangerous and beyond the pale.

Flying kites was fun, too. Raul was much better than I at maneuvering a kite, running to get it airborne and flying like a good kite should. Mine had a maddening tendency to fly in frustrating circles. And then crash.

On especially hot days, we made use of the garden hose and sprinkler that we set in the middle of the lawn. Other neighborhood children would join in as we frolicked around in our bathing suits through the fountain of cool water the sprinkler created for us. Loose grass and weeds and little twigs stuck to the bottom of our feet.

When you’re 10, your summer is one big block of freedom to be a kid. When it’s 4:18 p.m. in the middle of July and you’re scraping those twigs off your feet, laughing with your friends, the life ahead of you appears as one of infinite possibility. Mostly all things, starting with your own imagination, just seem wondrously infinite. I worry that kids today aren’t allowed such space.

As we grew older, the summers got shorter, and our playtime scarcer, until it all became a sepia-tinted memory in a life full of purpose, work, and seriousness.

But that’s another story.

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