CLOSE-UP

Check out the shoes. Sturdy Florsheims, with thick soles, a new pair every two months. Mr. Fred goes through shoes quickly because he makes his living walking Watts’ toughest housing projects--Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts, Nickerson Gardens. His job? To get the neighborhood dropouts back in school.

That’s hundreds of youngsters around these parts, and the typical excuses for ditching can hardly be explained in a note--a mother’s too high to wake up her son, a 13-year-old has to tend to her newborn. But Fred Williams, 31, is no ordinary truant officer. When he cruises his beat, kids follow him as if he were the Pied Piper, clamoring, “Mr. Fred, Mr. Fred.” The truth is, Mr. Fred can relate: He dropped out of high school himself (he since has received his GED through night classes) and is an ex-Crip leader who spent a good portion of his youth doing time. “If you sell drugs, you have to deal with the consequences,” he explains. “I was tired of jail.” So three years ago, he retired from gang life and made education his mission. The result is Common Ground, a grass-roots, basically one-man organization run on a school district contract of $22,000 a year. Operating from a bungalow at Markham Junior High School, a few feet from the railroad tracks that divide the Bloods and Crips territories,Williams keeps in touch with teachers, who tell him who’s cutting, and patrols the neighborhood during school hours looking for truants. When he finds them, he lectures, cajoles, yells--whatever it takes to persuade them to go back to school. He’ll do anything, from appearing in court on the kids’ behalf to cutting their hair so they’ll look sharp when they go back to school.

Since 1988, he’s retrieved 17,000 kids, and of them, about 90% stayed in school. “The kids fall through the cracks, but Fred finds them,” says Warren Furutani, a Los Angeles Unified School District board member.

What if Mr. Fred caught one of his own four kids (the eldest is 14) ditching class? “I would be very, very surprised,” he says with a laugh. “But if they did, I’d tear up their butts and then I’d go sit there in school with them--for a month, a year. I’d chase them down the aisle all the way to their diplomas if I had to.”