The high school where I taught English and journalism in 1994 was an oasis in a desert of simmering, street gang violence. The student population at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, was more than seventy percent Latino. Nogales was in a school district where I had taught since1975. I had ten years left before I would leave teaching.
My first teaching assignment in 1976 was at an elementary school a few blocks from Nogales. Coiled strands of razor wire protected the roofs. On Mondays, the parking lot was often littered with broken glass from lights that had been shot out during the weekend.
The classroom doors sometimes had bullet holes in them. Once, I arrived to discover that the doorknobs had been beaten from the doors with baseball bats or sledgehammers. It took a locksmith to open the school so teachers and students could enter the classrooms.
The custodians arrived at six each weekday morning to paint out the graffiti and make repairs before the teachers and students arrived. A little putty and paint hid most of the damage.
* * * *
As the 1994 school year reached closure, I felt a room change was necessary. There was a reason for this. My Nogales classroom faced a busy street. Since moving into that portable four years earlier, there had been two drive-by shootings. The only thing between my students and the shooters was a thin plywood wall, some foam insulation and a chain-link fence.
That windowless, portable classroom also had a bulging floor that was growing like a tumor. It was difficult keeping the desks on top of that bulge in one spot as students slid down the slope towards the next row.
The first drive by shooter aimed at a house directly across the street. It happened as school let out at three in the afternoon. I was in the doorway watching the last of my students leave. The street was full of parents waiting in cars. As the shooter’s car sped by, I saw the arm extend holding the revolver. Several shots rang out, and the car sped away.
The ‘San Gabriel Valley Tribune’ quoted a district administrator, who wasn’t there, saying that the shooting took place several blocks from the campus. The evidence was based on the fact that no shell casings had been found near the school.
There was a reason for this lie.
Anytime violence was linked to the high school, a few parents would take their kids and move. This cost the district money since schools in California are primarily paid based on student numbers and attendance.
Revolvers do not spit out shell casings like an automatic weapon does, so how could there be any shell casings in the street?
An ugly chain link fence surrounded Nogales. In less than a decade, during campus beautification, that fence would be replaced with a taller one constructed of black, wrought iron. The idea being that parents would keep their kids in a school that didn’t look like a prison.
When school started each day, most of the gates to the parking lots were locked and the gate that wasn’t locked had a guard on it. During the school day, there was a campus police force of six. Two of the officers patrolled the campus on ten speed bikes.
The staff had been warned to stay out of the neighborhoods around the school, since one of our students had been shot dead one weekend when he crossed the street from his house to complain about loud music coming from a neighbor. The neighbor dragged his body to a drainage ditch and stuffed it into a culvert.
It was obvious that no one was going to tell that shooter to turn down his music.
This happened on a Sunday, after the boy, a student in good standing, returned from the local Catholic Church with his mother and younger brothers and sisters. The father was in prison. The fifteen year old was the man of the house. His mother was determined her son would not follow in his father’s gang-clad footsteps.
To the west and south of Nogales were the Asian gangs, the best dressed and the most dangerous. An Asian gang member could be a polite, honor student.
One year, several members of an Asian gang broke into a house and shot a rival. They videotaped the execution and were caught watching the video several hours later. A witness to the shooting wrote down the license number for new Buick sedan they drove. It was registered to a doctor, the father of one of the gang members.
The Latino gangs had lived north of the campus for generations. The name of the gang I heard the most over the years was Puente Thirteen.
At one time, the Hell’s Angels had taken up a block in that same barrio. I taught a couple that tribe’s kids while I was still at the grade school with the razor wire protecting the roofs.
The Hell’s Angels left one day when the entire clan mounted their bikes and rumbled out of town.
In the east toward West Covina, the sun came up on the Crypts and Bloods. There were so many gangs killing each other and tagging the neighborhoods with spray paint, it was difficult to keep all the names straight.
Some of the better neighborhoods nearby had block walls built across streets to keep the gangs from driving through.
Another reason to move from that portable classroom with the bulging floor was the dead, stray cats underneath. They were starting to stink. It was difficult enough to teach as it was. The stench of death made it challenging. The atmosphere in the room gave me headaches and caused me to wheeze. Students complained. I purchased several HEPA air filters and the charcoal in the filters helped with the smell.
* * * *
The second shooting took place in the evening at half-past seven. A teenage gangster up for expulsion took a short cut across the forty acres one night by climbing the east fence and crossing the campus. As he reached the open gate next to my classroom, he took a blast in the guts from a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Rival gang members had been waiting for him.
At the sound of the blast, the editors, one Caucasian and six Asian girls, rushed the door to have a look. At the time, I was the faculty advisor for Scroll, the high school newspaper. The paper’s editorial staff was working late to get the last monthly edition out for that school year.
“Don’t touch that door knob,” I said.
The editors stood in a pack by the door. The future editor-in-chief’s hand hovered above the knob.
“Why, Mr. Lofthouse,” the sports editor asked. “We want to see what happened.”
“That wasn’t a car backfiring. It was a shotgun. I suggest you get under the desks until the police arrive in case someone out there decides to use this classroom for target practice.”
* * * *
We left at midnight. The school newspaper had to be out on time. It was a source of pride for the student staff that the paper was never late. For five consecutive years between 1994 and 1998, Scroll won first place International Awards for School News Media from the International Honorary Society for high school journalists. One year, the staff would be nine points away from earning the prestigious George H. Gallup Award.
Since we did not witness the incident but only heard it, we had nothing to report to the police. However, there was a witness. One of the English teachers was leaving late. She was in her car at the gate when the victim walked in front of her at the time the shooters blew him apart.
That English teacher didn’t return for a week. She came back only after the principal went to her house and talked her into returning.
The Marine Corps and a tour in Vietnam in 1966 had conditioned me to deal with this kind of violence, but my journalism students were not ready for it. A few days later, while working another late night with my editors, a pack of gang members climbed the fence and attempted walking into the classroom.
I’d heard them rattling the fence, so I was at the door and blocked the way with my tall, lanky body. I was six-foot-four and weighed one-hundred-eighty pounds with little to no fat.
When I told them to leave, they didn’t budge.
They looked at me as if to say, ‘Hey, we know you are all alone in there. You can’t stop us.’ The gangster closest to me looked inside the room and saw all the young girls. All college bound. All lovely.
I didn’t like the look in his eyes. There were a dozen of them and one of me. I shoved him back and reached for the door knob. I wasn’t sure I was going to win the tug-of-war for that door, but with a surge of energy and desperation, I managed to close it almost smashing a few of their fingers in the process.
For the next thirty minutes, the gangsters pounded on the outside walls, yelled threats and rattled the door sometimes kicking it.
With a frantic look in her eyes, one of the girls crawled under a desk. The others kept working. There was nothing else to do. The only phone in the room was an intercom to the front office and no one was there to answer if we called.
Cell phones weren’t common, and no one had one. We were cut off. For once, I was glad the room didn’t have windows. I hoped the gangsters didn’t have any weapons or think of setting fire to the room since the portable was made of plywood.
“Mr. Lofthouse,” Jia Mingmei asked, while the assault was still under way, “what should we do next year? Should we start training the cub reporters in July, the week before I go to leadership school or the first week in August after I come back?”
Jia’s words worked like magic. It was as if she had brought out a chocolate cake and sliced it. The tension in the room dissolved like ice cream melting.
Jia was a junior. She was going to be Scroll’s editor-in-chief her senior year. This wasn’t her real name. Jia Mingmei seemed appropriate, since it means ‘lovely’ and ‘good’ and ‘intelligent’. She was all that and more.
“You’re going to leadership school?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned it before.
“At the University of Santa Barbara,” she said.
I knew what she was doing while the gangsters banged on the outside walls and threatened us. She didn’t need to go to a leadership school. She already had the skills. This was Jia’s third year in journalism. Years later, she would graduate from law school.
“Why are you suggesting we do staff training before you go to Santa Barbara?”
“I am in Academic Decathlon and we have to study during the summer. Our coach has us working until midnight sometimes.”
The Academic Decathlon classroom was deep inside the campus in a much safer location. That was when I decided I was going to ask for a different classroom. After all, I had the two shootings and this campus invasion by the gang. I could threaten to go to the newspapers with the truth. The principal would have no choice.
The pounding stopped, but we could hear them boasting and laughing. There was a lot of profanity.
I would be careful how I wrote my threat, so it wouldn’t sound like blackmail. That wasn’t going to be easy, since I wanted to shout the truth from the rooftops. The trouble was that no one would listen to the truth unless one or more of us were killed. I’d end up being labeled another disgruntled teacher, which had happened to friends of mine. It would be easier to ask for another classroom, one in a brick building.
“We need some journalism textbooks so we can do the training right,” Jia said.
“Yea,” the feature editor said.
The five editors left the layouts they were working on and gathered around my desk. I had been correcting papers from my English classes and recording grades. The sound of voices outside had stopped.
“If we had a textbook, we could train the cubs better.”
“Academic Decathlon is studying in August, aren’t they?” I asked. I was hoping that the gang members had short attention spans and wouldn’t hang around.
“Yes,” Jia replied.
I looked at the other editors. The girl that had been under a desk earlier was out and working on her page layouts again. “How many of you are in Decathlon?” I asked.
Three of the seven raised hands.
“Jia, don’t worry. We will train the cub reporters in August. There are enough editors here to do it. You don’t have to be here. We also have enough money that the staff raised from this year’s advertising left in our account to buy a set of journalism textbooks.”
“Really,” the feature editor said. “That would be great.”
“We might even be able to squeeze in a couple of new computers and a scanner,” I said. “Since you seven are going to be in charge of the school paper next year, why don’t you find a textbook you like. You have my phone number. When you’re ready, call me and I’ll fill out the purchase order. The class set should be here before August.”
As the advisor for the school paper, I was the one that had to fill out the purchase orders and sign them. Jia had to sign too.
“You want us to pick out the textbook?” the opinion editor asked.
“Why not?” I replied. They all smiled.
“Once we have the textbooks, you don’t mind if I plan the training exercises?” Jia said. “During August, I promise to drop by during breaks. After all, I’ll only be a few buildings away.” Jia was seventeen.
“Jia, we won’t be in this room in August. We will be in another classroom behind a brick wall away from this street and fence. I’ll talk to the principal tomorrow. If he wants a school newspaper, he will move us somewhere safer.”
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