Evans School Is an Island of Refuge for Immigrants

With just the clothes on her back, Siu Ling Li swam to freedom, from Canton across the South China Sea to Hong Kong.

Jose Bautista twice risked muggings by Mexican bandits and capture by immigration officers.

Chhuan Rong lost his brother to a Khmer Rouge bullet, dodged land mines on his way out of Cambodia, and spent three years in a teeming refugee camp in Thailand.

Now all three are Los Angeles residents, their perilous journeys behind them. But their struggles are not over. Needing skills that will enable them not just to survive but to succeed in America, they are among the thousands of immigrants drawn each year to Evans Community Adult School in downtown Los Angeles.

With 13,000 students from more than 80 countries, Evans is the nation’s largest and most polyglot adult school. Known to many students before they set foot in the United States as the “biggest and best” adult school in Los Angeles, it plays an essential role in helping newcomers join the mainstream of American society.

While massive immigration has brought fundamental changes and tensions to many Los Angeles communities, Evans is seen by students and teachers as an island of neutrality.

“This place is heaven on Earth,” said veteran teacher Dave Baker, whose beginning English class has Armenians, Chinese, Mexicans, Salvadorans and a woman from Ethiopia.

Despite this diversity of cultures, Evans students say they all have the same goal. “We all want to learn English and function in this society,” Bautista said.

The campus pulses with activity. On most days, the school is open from 5:50 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. Twice a week, amnesty classes run until 2:20 a.m.

Anchoring the northeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Figueroa Street, Evans is comprised of a gleaming red and white, cube-shaped building and several aging bungalows. The campus is plain, functional and free of graffiti. Except for the occasional multilingual notice, such as the ones posted inside some lavatory stalls on how to use the toilet, most signs are in English.

The school draws much of its enrollment from the large immigrant communities that surround it--Chinatown, East Los Angeles, Echo Park, Westlake and the Olympic and Wilshire corridors. But many students, bypassing adult schools in their own communities, come from farther afield, such as the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys.

Some students come straight from the airport, suitcases in hand.

But the school struggles to fulfill its mission against a background of lagging resources--and with increasing numbers of students who lack even the most basic literacy skills.

Like most of the 27 adult schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, Evans has a lengthy waiting list for English classes--1,500 at last count in February.

The typical beginning English class at Evans has 50 students, which educators say is far from ideal, even when the pupils are well-behaved and highly motivated grown-ups.

School administrators blame the backlog on a statewide funding cap, in existence for the last decade, which prevents enrollment in adult English classes from growing more than 2.5% a year.

“Our city has changed so dramatically in the last few years,” said Assistant Supt. James Figueroa, who oversees adult education for the Los Angeles district. He said demographic shifts have created a demand for adult English classes as well as courses in raising children.

Once given a seat, however, Evans students seem not to mind the crowded classes or long waits to get in. They like the variety of offerings and the six-day-a-week, nearly round-the-clock schedule. They can take courses in English, citizenship, U.S. history, psychology, typing, computers and other basic subjects.

Students range in age from 18 to 80. And the nationalities they represent could rival a United Nations roll-call.

On any given day in the school’s flag-strewn cafeteria, a visitor could find a Thai student sharing a lunch table with a Colombian, or a Shanghai native poring over a book with a Soviet Armenian refugee.

In the classroom, the mix includes a Japanese executive’s wife and a former Salvadoran journalist, or a Vietnamese factory worker and an Argentine physician, all struggling over the same English adjective, expression or figure of speech.

The diversity of Evans’ enrollment is so dizzying that sometimes a student’s national origin stumps even the most sophisticated diviner of cultural background on the school’s staff, such as the time a native of Nauru--an independent republic in the West Pacific near the Solomon Islands--enrolled, or when six Spanish-speaking Koreans from Peru showed up in the registration line a few years ago.

The school traces its beginnings to 1937, when an adult Americanization Office, a precursor of citizenship school, was established on the campus of the Cambria Elementary School in downtown Los Angeles. Eventually, as the need increased, the Cambria Adult School was formed.

In 1972, the adult operation moved to its own campus at Sunset and Figueroa, and Cambria was renamed Evans Community Adult School, after E. Manfred Evans, the first adult-education superintendent in the Los Angeles school district.

Through the years, the school has remained true to its original purpose. Although officially open to all adults, Evans’ main mission, said Principal Douglas Holmes, is to help immigrants become “competent (to live and work) in the United States.”

The school’s biggest draw is the English language program, which starts with courses in “pre-literacy” for students who lack the ability to read and write in their native language and proceeds through seven levels of English instruction. After completing the English series, many students advance to the high school diploma program, which is next in popularity and offers general academic courses.

Evans also offers the largest college preparatory program in Los Angeles for foreign visa students. According to foreign student adviser Peter O. Share, the school has about 350 such students, who pay tuition of $1,050 a year. Classes are free for all other students.

For some of the students, the struggle to attain a better life in the United States is almost as painful as their flight here.

Rong, who arrived in the United States two years ago after fleeing Cambodia, said he despairs of ever finding a decent job because he has a physical handicap and lacks sufficient education for skilled work.

But Rong, who asked that his real name not be used, spends each weekday working toward a high school diploma at Evans, even though he finds the curriculum difficult.

“Every lesson I have to read at least five times,” said Rong, who shares a house near downtown with 10 relatives. “I have to study more than other people. I (learn) just enough to pass the class. I am worried all the time (about money).”

Other students come to Evans already highly educated, wanting only to become fluent in English so they can continue to practice their professions in the United States.

Some students see Evans as their second chance to obtain the education that eluded them earlier in their lives. Bautista, 23, who is student body president at Evans, offered himself as an example.

“I thought I couldn’t learn,” Bautista said, detailing a past marked by frequent changes of schools because of his family’s itinerant lifestyle. He and his family immigrated to the United States from Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was 9. But his father moved from one construction job to another during most of Bautista’s youth.

Eventually, Bautista dropped out of an East Los Angeles junior high school and went to work. He had never learned enough English to write a simple note, he said.

But a sympathetic boss urged him to go back to school, so Bautista started taking English classes, soon advancing to Evans’ academic program. Now he is a few months away from earning a high school diploma. His goal, he said, is to study theology in college and become a priest.

At Evans, teachers “treat you with respect,” he said. “You realize that you can learn and that . . . your dreams are reasonable, if you work hard enough.”

Li, 38, recalls just how limited her world was before she came to Evans.

One of 11 children born in Nanning, China, to a well-to-do family, she was 22 when she decided that life under communism was too stifling for her. With two brothers and a few friends, she escaped through Canton, swimming for hours across the South China Sea to reach Hong Kong.

After spending five years in the British territory, she moved to the United States, got married, had two children and settled into a routine that she said consisted of staying home, taking care of her children, cleaning the house and tending her vegetable garden.

“I was a very typical Chinese woman,” Li said over lunch in the school cafeteria.

Her husband wanted her to take a job in a sewing factory, but Li wanted to go to school to learn English. Eventually, they were divorced, and Li enrolled at Evans, taking classes in English, science, psychology and other subjects.

Now she proudly describes herself as being “half-American, half-Chinese.” And she said that learning English “changed my life” because it expanded her horizons. She expects to earn a high school degree by fall, but said her dream is to study psychology in college and become a social worker helping senior citizens.

Like many Evans students, Li squeezes her classes into an already demanding schedule. She attends classes all day, goes home for a few hours, then works as a waitress from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. With 10 minutes between classes and 30 minutes for lunch, Evans students have little idle time.

The fast pace, along with the faculty’s efforts at cross-cultural education, may contribute to what teachers and students say is a generally harmonious campus.

Teacher Florene Rozen, who often provides cross-cultural sensitivity training to businesses and other private groups, said the rest of Los Angeles could learn a lot about human relations from Evans.

“There is too much ethnic politics out there. That mentality is going to tear up L.A.,” she said. “That’s why I love this school. We are a perfect example of what can happen in America. Maybe Evans will save L.A.”