PUBLISHED 05/30/2006
On an October afternoon five months before the start of the L.A. Marathon, a Pacific monsoon lashed the Los Angeles Harbor. At three o'clock that day, 30 kids from Banning High School, in the city of Wilmington, met next to the school's football field to work out. They were members of Students Run L.A. (SRLA), a privately funded program that had nudged and prodded more than 23,000 middle- and high school students, the majority from some of L.A.'s toughest neighborhoods, to run the city's marathon since 1990. The Banning kids huddled under an awning over the locker-room door, waiting for their team leader, Joe Mendoza, to show up with the key. On the field, football players rooted around in the mud like hippos.
After a few minutes, Mendoza appeared, hustling through the rain, wearing a Hawaiian shirt flapping over his jeans, waving to the football players. "Banning was once noted for its football teams," he said while opening the locker-room door. "Remember Vince Ferragamo, the Rams quarterback? He went to school here. Lately though, we've been awful. The coach just quit last week, right in the middle of the season." Mendoza frowned. "In some ways I can sympathize with the guy. I'm also the head track coach here. You know what my budget is for the whole year? Four hundred bucks. And we don't have a booster club to supplement it. I'm the booster club. I had an assistant coach last year, a kid who wasn't on the faculty. He did a great job. Problem is, he's still waiting to get paid."
During the past school year, Banning enrolled 3,468 students, 87 percent of whom were Hispanic or Latino, and 69 percent of whom qualified for the free or reduced-price lunch program. Their Spanish-speaking parents, often lacking U.S. citizenship and working at low-paying jobs, could provide little support for their education. The school's faculty was dedicated but overrun. Even if a student stayed clear of the two rival gangs operating in the area, chances were he'd get lost at Banning. The school's dropout rate was 50 percent.
"One time we got back from a run and some guy drove by, spraying the playground with bullets," Mendoza said. "Kids dove onto the asphalt--thank goodness no one got hit. Then last spring, for Cinco de Mayo, the gangs put out the word that any black kids coming to school that day would bleed. So no black kids showed up."
SRLA offers Banning students a haven from the anonymity and turmoil. Since 1997, Mendoza, 37, a Chicago native who besides coaching track teaches history at Banning, personally has guided more than 100 students through the program; over its history, SRLA as a whole has seen 97 percent of the students who toed the starting line complete the marathon, an amazing number considering the organization's grassroots start. The program began in 1989 when two young teachers, Eric Spears and Paul Trapani, decided to train for the L.A. Marathon--while at the same time expanding and organizing an idea another area teacher, Harry Shabazian, had developed. Shabazian previously had run the marathon with six of his students who had washed out of mainstream high schools largely due to low self-esteem and their inability to set and meet goals. Spears and Trapani structured the program and offered it to the rest of the L.A. school district.
"We recognized that the marathon was such an enormous project that it would at first seem impossible for our kids," recalled Spears, who now serves as one of the coordinators for SRLA and is a principal at a community day school within Los Angeles Unified School District. "Yet at the same time, if you broke the training down into progressive, day-by-day units and promoted a noncompetitive philosophy, then the marathon was achievable by almost anyone. We consulted with a kinesiologist at Cal State Northridge who told us that teenagers could handle the physical workload, as long as the goal was to finish, not run fast."
The teachers then established a training program based on a gentle but steady increase in mileage, a model that is still used by SRLA today. (While not promoted, some walking is accepted.) Volunteer leaders at more than 150 middle and high schools independently plan their team's training; they are required only to hold a minimum of three practices per week and prepare their runners to complete a series of organized long runs throughout the year, beginning with a 5-K in October and progressing to an 18-miler in February. Throughout the training, the leaders typically run every step with their students. "The kids learn to trust the adult leaders," Spears said. "They regard them as fellow runners who are struggling to figure this marathon thing out, rather than as authority figures to rebel against."
While SRLA is open to all Los Angeles?area secondary school students, most of the runners are low income, and many will be the first in their families to graduate from high school. Seventy-one percent identify themselves as Latino, 12 percent as white, nine percent as Asian, four percent as African-American, and four percent as belonging to other ethnic groups. In short, SRLA encompasses the kind of population that many school-reform programs--from No Child Left Behind to the Gates Foundation's Small School Initiative--seek to help. Unlike many of these expensive, highly publicized programs, however, SRLA consistently succeeds.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, just 68 percent of incoming freshmen graduate from high school. By contrast, 90 percent of the seniors in the SRLA program who run the marathon graduate, and more than 90 percent of those student-runners will attend college. It has been so effective that SRLA-inspired programs have spread to other cities, including Philadelphia, Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon.
"The comment we get repeatedly from our leaders is that this is why they got into teaching in the first place," said Spears. "It wasn't to play cop for a roomful of 40 students or to spend their time administering standardized tests. They became teachers to have an impact on kids, to change the course of a life. That might happen once every few years in the classroom. It happens every day in Students Run L.A."
The 30 Banning students who gathered on this rainy October day followed Mendoza, his trademark pencil tucked behind his ear, as he led them in stretching. Girls slightly outnumbered the boys, and endomorphs clearly outnumbered the natural runners like Pedro Larios and Esteban Carranza (Itzel's brother), both of whom completed the 2005 marathon in the three-hour range, starred on Banning's cross-country and track teams, and hoped to run competitively in college.
An inveterate stat freak, Mendoza used the pencil to track his runners' progress in a range of categories: miles run since the start of the program, practices attended, times from the previous 5-K and 10-K road races, and average mile splits from those events. Another column contained brief commentary on each runner: "sore hamstring," "works on Tuesday afternoon," "taking SAT on Saturday." In the process, he also tracked his own mile splits, aches and pains, and missed practices. Mendoza was fighting to get back in marathon shape himself. Nine years earlier, when he'd first started leading SRLA teams, he had been a far more intense runner, sometimes running as many as 100 miles a week. But now his knees were in bad shape, aching some days even after a short workout. He'd also put on some weight in recent months, the product, he admitted, of the divorce he was going through.
"We've got to finish a little early today," he announced. "Tonight's back-to-school night, and I've got to get my room ready." This was mostly wishful thinking; even though he taught more than 200 students in six classes, Mendoza knew that, at best, five or six parents would attend the evening's program.
The team finished stretching. The rain bombed down. The kids, dripping wet, looked at Mendoza, who, a dozen years removed from the Chicago winters, made a classic Southern California call. "It's too nasty today for the Industrial Run," he said. "These drivers see a little rain and they go berserk. I don't want you crossing Sepulveda when it's like this. So we're just going to run around the school--all the way around--for half an hour. Okay, let's go."
The kids broke eagerly into a run, splashing through puddles like preschoolers. Julian Valle moved near the front of the pack, running calmly into the slanting rain. Julian ran for the entire half hour, one of only three or four kids who didn't have to walk (even Mendoza stopped to walk). Even after the rest of the team had come in out of the rain, Julian kept running, another two laps, adding one more mile to his column on Mendoza's chart.
