The Boston Globe
Sunday November 1, 1992
Learning
By Marja Mills Special To The Globe

LOS ANGELES - Outside his new apartment building in this riots scarred neighborhood, 11-year-old Kenton Cottingham steers clear of the gangs looking for trouble -and looking for new recruits. He steps over the litter collecting in gutters and walks past the graffiti scrawled across everything from liquor stores to the occasional tree trunk.

Inside his new four-story, cream-colored apartment complex is another world. A handyman tends jasmine flowers in the tidy courtyard that all the apartments overlook. College tutors greet Kenton and other young tenants after school when they arrive to do homework- in a freshly painted study room stocked with computers and encyclopedias.

They have powerful incentives to study. Pupils who keep up good grades earn pocket money and trips to places such as Disneyland. Parents can get up to $140 off their monthly rent if their young students do well.

But the biggest prize is that any youngster in the building's study program who graduates from high school and meets minimum requirements is promised a full scholarship to the prestigious University of Southern California.

These are the EEXCEL apartments, an extraordinarily ambitious and unusual partnership between developer and a university. They represent an effort to give the black and Hispanic children of one inner-city building the kind of motivation and educational advantages at home that their suburban counterparts often take for granted.

We think this can be a model for the country said USC doctoral candidate Toni Acevedo. She is coordinating the program in an area of South Los Angeles that suffered its share of looting and fires during List spring's rioting.

Acevedo embodies the motivation the program hopes to instill. She gave up her luxury apartment in downtown Los Angeles to move into the 42-unit complex with lower-income families. The complex was selected for the experiment in this crime-ridden area more known for its grinding frustrations and, sometimes, dead-end despair.

Launched just last month, the EEXCEL, for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations, project sets its sights on overcoming that despair as it brings together an unusual mix of people not accustomed to doing business together. Kent Salveson, a developer from a well to do Orange County suburb, came up with the idea after talking with a mother of five who was working at a fast-food restaurant he frequented during one Los Angeles Construction project. The woman was working two low-wage jobs and struggling to give her children the education and work opportunities she never had. Salveson started thinking about what could be done to help such families out of poverty.

After years of planning, Salveson and another Orange County builder, Dan Hunter, constructed the $4 million EEXCEL building with the help of $2.3 million in low-interest loans from federal and state agencies.

"The big push in education is getting parent involvement"' Salveson said,, "It's like fuel injection for education." You go directly into the home with all the services, all the wisdom, all the experience that is out there but the parents don't necessarily have."

Academics at USC, Salveson's alma mater, were eager to participate in what they believe will be a laboratory for a closely watched educational reform, an integrated effort to link home with school.

The University is contributing the tutors, the promise of scholarships and an array of complementary services, such as workshops for parents on raising children and informal Counseling for residents who want it.

Teachers at the local public schools have agreed to send out special progress 'reports every other week so Acevedo and the parents can make sure the students are going to class -and keep up with how they are doing.

The project is just a pilot, the seemingly safe new apartment complex and enclave in this troubled corner of Los Angeles. Even with the generous donations of USC (university officials would not put a price tag on their contribution) EEXCEL only reaches a tiny fraction of the families who cry out for better education for their children.

Salveson is planning four other EEXCEL buildings in the Los Angeles area, and has fielded calls from other communities interested in the concept.

At a time of fierce budget pressures for public schools, universities and local governments across the country, some of the project's supporters acknowledge there are daunting obstacles to implementing similar programs throughout inner-city America.

Still, for parents struggling to make ends meet and raise their children amid this city's hostile streets, the program is stirring considerable excitement. EEXCEL asks a lot from parents and, for the most part, they are responding enthusiastically. The apartment building includes a mechanic, an office clerk, a K-mart cashier and two racetrack horse groomers among its new residents. They moved in only after signing an agreement to be engaged actively in their children's education.

" You try to give them what you didn't have," said resident Barbara Walker. She has promised to help supervise the study room where her 8-year-old son, Christopher, gets a tutor's help with computers and vocabulary lists.

Program coordinators readily acknowledge they selected families they believe are most likely to stick with the project. The three dozen pupils enrolled in-the program so far range from kindergartners to high school students. Most are in elementary school.

More than 200 families applied to live in the apartments. A two-bedroom unit rents for between $470 and $525 a month, depending on a family's income.

Only 36 of the 42 units are occupied, however, and building manager Charles Kendrick says he will take the rest of the year if necessary to select the remainder.

"We could fill the building up in a day with people who could pay the rent" said Kendrick. "But parents who can participate in the education of children, that's hard to find."

Program organizers also are seeking to keep a racial balance in the building, filling it about equally with black families and Hispanic families.

Resident Toni Cottingham, 32, a cashier at X mart, believes the racial mix will be as educational as all the tutoring sessions and field trips the children AU take around Los Angeles.

"I hope it will give him an opportunity to scratch away the first layer of skin and see we're all the same," she said of her son, Kenton, a Nintendo fanatic.

Gangs have claimed a nearby park, leaving few safe places for Kenton and the other children to play. Now he plays in the courtyard of the locked building, sheltered, his mother hopes, from the dangers outside. "I can go outside at night," he said, "because it's closed in and safe."

But Kenton's mind was not on play this particular afternoon, at least not yet, as he looked around the tutoring room.

"I came down for those," he said, nodding at the computers, then turning back to his spelling worksheet. There was time for play later, he said. "I've got to do my homework first."

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