‘Kids Helping Kids’ : Placentia Students Go on Mission of Love

The encounter was tentative at first, with both groups hesitant about the other.

But 19 wide-eyed seventh-graders from Orange County, bearing food and clothing, eventually broke the ice Saturday with dozens of mothers who carried their babies and their dignity at the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles.

The students from Tuffree Junior High School in Placentia had raised $1,000 through bake sales this spring to buy baby clothes, toys and other things for the poor and homeless families--despite initial discouragement from their school and some parents.

It was the children of the poor families and homeless people at the Skid Row shelter that they had come to help.

On a previous field trip to downtown Los Angeles and the shelter a few months ago, the junior high school students said they had been struck by the number of families they had seen living on the streets. So on Saturday morning, they boarded an Amtrak train from Fullerton to Los Angeles, full of resolve and parcels to do something about the situation.

But on their return visit to the mission at Towne and 4th streets, bath time for the babies broke the ice.

“Many of these mothers live on the street, or in flophouses where they don’t have bath facilities,” Walter Contreras, the director of the shelter, told them.

So 12- and 13-year-old girls from Tuffree gently took babies from their mother’s arms and carried them gingerly to shower and bath facilities on the mission’s third floor, and washed them in a long communal lavatory.

From then on, the students, mission workers and the families who had waited outside in lines, dived into the activities of the day: more babies to bathe; cookies to hand out; donated clothing to be sorted and distributed, and a crowd to feed at lunch.

In the end, the Placentia youngsters and the people at the shelter had bridged the wide chasm separating their lives--at least a little bit.

“I thought it was going to be a lot less personal, but once we got in there, we couldn’t help ourselves,” said 13-year-old Niki Frydman of Placentia. “We got attached to the little babies. You get close to the mothers, and (want to) give them a lot of love.”

“I was wishing I had more hands to help the other kids too,” added Tiffani Milstead, 12.

Contreras said there are never enough volunteers for all the private agencies serving the homeless, the unemployed, the poor or those with alcohol or drug problems. But he said it is even more rare to see young people helping out. And when the students from the Placentia school called to say they wanted to do something for the shelter, he said he was overjoyed.

“Nobody else is recognizing there are kids on Skid Row, nobody, until these students came along,” Contreras said. “Hopefully through showing what these students are doing, others will want to act. This is kids helping kids.”

The idea to return to the mission with clothes, food and toys was the students’, said Jim Perry, a world geography teacher who accompanied them Saturday, as did Rubin Eloise White, a language arts teacher and gifted-student coordinator at Tuffree.

And it came after a field trip Perry had organized as part of his “Trips through the Real World” curriculum. Perry, who was selected as outstanding teacher of his school district last year, is rare among teachers, say his students and his colleagues.

“He doesn’t think you can teach just within four walls,” White said. “Our kids get so cloistered and so overprotected--and we want to protect them. But we also want them to know the outside world.”

During that first visit to downtown Los Angeles, Contreras took Perry’s students on a walking tour of the Skid Row area. At one point, they saw a mentally deranged man collapse on the street, paramedics trying to revive him, Perry recalled. They saw rows and rows of people sleeping on the sidewalk, and many children.

“It was such a powerful experience,” said Perry, adding that he believes students need more of a moral education. He said he also tries to teach them one important lesson: that knowledge without action is not enough.

“It’s not enough to read about homelessness, just like it’s not enough for them to know how to vote and then not vote,” he said. “Knowing and doing are two different things, but they go together.”

Perry said that some future efforts may be directed at poverty and homelessness in Orange County, where he said he and his students recognize it also exists.

Kiran Jain, 12, said Saturday that the lesson hit home on that first visit.

“The last time I came here I was really angry,” said Kiran, one of the main student organizers of Saturday’s relief effort. “It just wouldn’t go away because you knew there were people out in the street. . . . Today, this is really helping me because I know something is being done. I know that I’ve helped. I know you can’t do everything, that you can’t solve all the problems. But we can start.”

Kiran, whose parents were born in India, said she was upset to learn there was so much poverty in the United States. “We’re a First World country looking at Third World problems right in our own back yards,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, really.”

Initially, the students said they were met with resistance from school authorities and some parents.

“Because of all the legal problems, the school didn’t want to get involved in it,” said Tiffani. “They said it was so close to the end of the school year. They wanted us to wait.”

Added Niki: “They just thought it wouldn’t work, so we just did it on our own.”

Perry said his students called Contreras, arranged the bake sales, and even called Amtrak to find out how they could get to the mission.

Eventually, school officials came around, and Principal George Bowman allowed them to hold some of their bake sales at the school. The day before their trip to the mission, when mission staff people came to Tuffree Junior High to pick up the goods the students had collected, Bowman went to a nearby store to buy a tarp and some string to cover the bags loaded in the back of a pickup truck. It had just begun to sprinkle.

“It’s a possibility that we could have done this (as an official school event) if we had had more time,” Bowman said. “But the school is totally behind them.”

He said it is unusual for a group of junior high students to get so involved in such a selfless project. He said the motivation comes from Perry.

“When you have someone who’s as creative as he is, and has a way with students, then things are going to happen. That’s what education is all about--kids getting involved,” Bowman said.