Day Three

I spent Tuesday afternoon volunteering at a tutoring center in a trailer park in Pomona. I began this project last January and despite many twists and turns along the way, I still enjoy showing up. The Latino children and teens live in a very run-down trailer park where many of the units are in fact campers. For the most part, they have very scarce official adult supervision existing in an almost Lord of the Flies setting.

Our work started as little more than crowd control where the kids’ pact-like mentality was very hard to manage. We tried to implement boundaries, standards and limits but we didn’t have the relational capital for those things to take. By the end of the school year, even though some were beginning to trust our team, our work was barely scratching the surface of the kids’ profound academic needs. Over the summer, we took more of a mentoring approach; offering the kids many field trips and outings. At the start of this school year, we raised the expectations only allowing those kids who were serious about completing their homework to participate giving them the chance to earn points they can “spend” on field trips and other prizes. In the short-run of my unemployment, I will be able to spend more time on this project but in the long-run I am scared I will have to completely bail on them.

But the project is not without problems. Yesterday, it was one of our leaders birthday and so another leader brought in a cake. The kids loved it – however a few of them ended up getting into a cake fight causing a huge mess. We insisted the boys clean up the mess as the property manager had just requested I not allow eating in the tutoring room. And during clean up, I caught a few of the boys tagging on the walls – also something the property manager asked me to prevent. Before that, I had to ask a fourth grader to leave because she was being super disrespectful. This was after I had worked my a** off helping her with her homework. Instead of thanking me, she said I was mean and that it didn’t matter she had spelt there t-h-e-i-r.

Another kid, though, a wiry fifteen-year old boy who I worry often will either drop out of school, join a gang or get deported (or worse some combination of all three) spent the whole evening in the tutoring center. Over the summer he came all of the time but ever since school started he seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. And he did more than stop by, he was generally pleasant to be around and even went as far as helping some of the younger students with their homework – one night closer to not being a statistic.

Another kid, who has literally been ping ponged between her mother and step dad all summer, gave me a huge hug when I walked in the door saying she missed me. She worked diligently on her homework despite the fact that her two half sisters taunted her in a way that made me genuinely glad I don’t have a sister. And another older teen, stopped by to talk about her SAT scores and getting into college. She is hoping to get into Cal State Fullerton and I told her I was happy to help her however I could.

Next week, I will be at the center two if not three days.