A Genuine School of Hard Knocks

His name was Larry Arnett. He was a crusty old man who ran an industrial caster company. He also ran off a series of nurses who tried to care for him in his home as he recovered from a broken hip. Then he hired Margo H. Wainwright, a spunky young nurse who had moved to Los Angeles from Indiana.

Arnett liked this one. You shouldn’t be a nurse, he told her. You were meant to do something more dynamic. I’m going to have my son teach you my business. Wainwright thought the old man was crazy, but these days, more than 15 years later, she admits that he was absolutely right. She was meant to stick her fingers into a lot of pies.

Wainwright went on to start a series of varied manufacturing businesses. Today, at 41, she is beginning an unusual partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District to establish a vocational high school in South-Central Los Angeles for teen-agers who are returning from incarceration and have been rejected by traditional high schools because of their crimes, most of them associated with street gangs.

To many, Wainwright is an example of the type of business professional needed to make a dent in the city’s gang problem at a time when government support for such social alternatives as specialized education programs and job training has diminished.

“She’s perfect,” said Eric A. Becker, principal of the Crenshaw-Dorsey Community Adult School, which is supplying instructors for Wainwright’s 22,000-square-foot industrial building on a dreary stretch of West 62nd Street. “She has empathy, she has enthusiasm, she has an unlimited background. Margo can run any machine that’s out there. She can repair any machine that’s out there. She’s a bundle of energy.”

Bright and headstrong and equally conversant in the minutiae of government job-training paper work and the operation of a punch press, Wainwright first went to work for Arnett’s company in the early 1970s. The daughter of a machinist, she caught on quickly, eventually becoming sales manager. Within a few years she started her own caster company.

Gradually, she diversified. She began a micrographics business, subleased space in her factory to woodworkers and sold furniture to interior designers, contracted with animal regulation agencies to check homes for pet licenses and began constructing industrial scaffolding.

It has not been a picture-perfect entrepreneurship. Four years ago Wainwright began suffering major losses in her Gold Star Machine & Tool caster manufacturing business and laid off most of her 40 employees. Today she imports casters.

As her businesses grew, Wainwright participated in government job-training programs that reimbursed employers for hiring and training economically disadvantaged people. But many of those being trained did not have enough basic skills--reading, writing and arithmetic--to learn the jobs. This is a problem being felt by businesses throughout the United States: The nation’s economic expansion has created so many new jobs that unemployment is at its lowest level since 1974, yet numerous companies complain that they cannot find people with even minimal skills.

Several years ago Wainwright created a nonprofit organization, Youth International Program, to obtain job-training grants. Last year she asked the school district to create an academic program at her building, with the district providing the instructors. The first students referred to her were eight gang members in their early 20s.

“They didn’t all work out, but three of them really took to it,” Wainwright said. “When they were motivated to learn--to learn for a job--they could. That gave me some confidence that we could work here with high-risk people.”

Part of New Program

Becker, principal of the adult school, felt the same way. This spring, Wainwright’s building became a branch of the district’s new Alternative Education Work Centers program, focused on students who had been kicked out of traditional high schools. The first two dozen students--returnees from county juvenile camps or California Youth Authority facilities--began attending school at Wainwright’s building in April.

During the first month, their attendance rate was 89%, a figure that shocked and delighted school officials. The students, most of whom are 16 and 17 but have the basic skills of fifth- to eighth-graders, had been far less reliable in the past.

“It’s working out good here,” said Carl Davis, 17, of Carson, who said he had been thrown out of schools in Carson, Banning and San Pedro because his membership in a street gang made him “too known” to rival gang members and pulled him into fights. “One thing about this place is that everybody gets along--it’s small enough that they can talk to you as a whole group. They can get things through your head. They help you learn you can be somebody.”

Wainwright wants the gang-oriented youngsters to regard her building as neutral turf. Last week, however, an argument erupted between members of rival gangs, disrupting classes for a day. It is one of the risks that discourages educators from working with gang members.

“Nobody wants to deal with classes that are 100% gang members,” said Kwasi Geiggar, the district’s coordinator for school placement of students who are returning from incarceration. “Margo is a never-say-never person; she wanted to take that risk. That’s the only way you can begin to teach these kids that they don’t own that block of 53rd Street,” Geiggar said, referring to the gang mentality that claims blocks of turf.

“Most of these kids are not going to go to college. They may not even graduate high school. But if you can get them somewhere where they can learn a skill, or a trade, and deal with them straight up, no holds barred, you can get somewhere,” he said.

Parental Role

Wainwright looks over most of her students and sees teen-agers who have suffered for lack of parental guidance.

“When I grew up, I never went home from school that my mother wasn’t there. My father had a good job in a steel mill, made a good living. I never walked in the house where there wasn’t somebody there. Most of these kids grow up in a life style where they take the key and open up (after school) and they’re supposed to stay in the house till mother gets home to fix dinner or whatever. They’re not going to stay in the house if the guy next door is saying, ‘Man, c’mon out, let’s go over here and kick (hang out) a while with the guys.’ ”

In the fall, the school district will expand the academic program at Wainwright’s building, providing six instructors who will work with 90 students, providing them with basic skills instruction and building trades classes.

Becker said that because this is the first district Alternative Education Work Center established at a local business, as opposed to an existing “skill center” in the school district, the results will be watched closely. “We’ll look at whether the students are ready to be employed, whether academically they have moved from ‘A’ to ‘B.’ We have to do something with solutions, even if it’s only throwing a little stone in the pond,” he said.