SOUTH-CENTRAL : Manual Arts Parents on Truant Patrol

The two young men hopped over the fence at Manual Arts High School and onto Walton Avenue--right into the path of Guillermo Vasquez and Helene Parlms.

“Good morning, gentlemen. Where are you going?” Parlms asked pleasantly. After questioning the students, who claimed they were leaving school because they had been suspended, Parlms and Vasquez allowed them to go with a handshake and a smile.

“So we’ll see you here on Monday, OK?” Parlms said.

Parlms and Velazquez are two of five local residents who serve on the school’s Parent Patrol. Parent Patrol “officers” walk the perimeter of the campus every morning, looking for wayward students and gently encouraging them to get back to school. The patrol members, who are paid a part-time salary of $10.25 an hour, even venture over to the fast-food restaurants across the street to corral students and send them back to campus.

At least one pair of Parent Patrol officers is on duty from 7:30 to 11 every morning. They keep an eye out for broken locks and holes in the fence surrounding the campus, and they monitor cars that cruise by with groups of students in them.

“We can’t really stop them (from leaving school), but we try to make it harder,” said Parlms, whose own children are in elementary and junior high school. “Kids want to make sure they’re loved. They want someone to tell them what to do . . . but in a loving way . . . in a respectful manner.”

The patrol is just one part of the school’s Safe Passage program, a state-funded, multifaceted project aimed at steering students away from drugs and gangs and back into school. Safe Passage provides students and their families with job training and placement, drug- and alcohol-abuse counseling, and medical services, including dental and optometric screenings.

The program was begun in April, 1991, by former Manual Arts Principal Marvin Starr. The Arco Foundation provided $5,000 for an educational consultant who helped draft the proposal, and the state Alcohol and Drug Program Office then committed $500,000 annually to the program for three years.

The Parent Patrol highlights the program’s community-involvement goal. Vasquez, for example, began working at the school after his 17-year-old cousin, a Manual Arts student, became pregnant by a local gang member. “I was real mad and I went to the school and was telling (school officials), ‘It’s your fault,’ ” said Vasquez, 34.

School officials invited Vasquez to help at the school, and soon he was assisting with campus security and Spanish translation. He also helped students form a Latino musical group.

Other patrol officers agreed that their purpose is more to be friends and counselors to students than law enforcers.

“We’re not actually security,” said Cedric Wright, an amiable 1978 graduate of Manual Arts. “We make it known we’re here for the safety of the students. We talk to the kids, try to find out what problems they have.”

Although some students said the patrols haven’t kept them from ditching class, others said their presence has made a difference. The number of student cars cruising the neighborhood has dropped, some said.

“I’ve noticed a good decrease in the number of students hanging around,” said Kelvin Young, a manager at the McDonald’s on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, across the street from Manual Arts. “When the students see (Parent Patrol officers), they know it’s time to go.”