The journey of our Mar Vista Gardens (MVG) classroom started in 2007, when we first began to engage with the young people of Mar Vista Gardens—a Section 8 housing community— to imagine and co-create a different kind of learning environment.
The Learners who attended the LAUSD continuation program at MVG were young people ranging from 15-21 years old, most of them living in and around the MVG community. These Learners repeatedly stated that they had never had their needs met by any school they had previously attended. On the contrary, they shared stories of having been consistently traumatized at school, including experiences of being:
bullied by school administrators for their perceived shortcomings.
profiled and harassed by campus security, or otherwise "pushed out" of school.
surveilled, searched, and detained by school police.
labeled as a “problem” when their safety could not be ensured by school personnel.
left unsupported when their family’s housing was unstable or when they did not have enough food to eat on a regular basis.
brushed aside by teachers who assumed that their lack of engagement was a moral failure and who didn’t take time to follow up and learn what was really going on in their lives.
All of these experiences emphasize the need for Alternative Education. These are symptoms of the larger failures of an inhumane schooling structure rooted in systemic racism, which attempts to ensure that vulnerable youth internalize a sense of inferiority and therefore accept their “place” in the bottom rungs of our social economy.
The MVG classroom invited young people to collectively imagine a new way of learning. It became the blueprint for LLC’s approach, based on meeting learners’ educational and psycho-socio-emotional needs, ensuring that they have equitable access to opportunity structures that can help them thrive in, and even transform society at large.
With the support of their community and LLC co-founders, MVG Learners led multiple city- and county-wide wins for justice and peace in Los Angeles.
Some of these wins include:
Filing the first successful federal civil rights class-action lawsuit against Los Angeles Police Department and District Attorney's office to overturn daytime curfews and eventually gang injunctions that harmed thousands of low-income youth of color, 2012- 2020. [1]
Initiating a successful district-wide #StudentsNotSuspects campaign, 2014-2020, to end random searches that criminalized tens of thousands of BIPOC, queer, trans, immigrant, and disabled youth in LAUSD. [2]
Building multiple coalitions to end truancy citations 2010-2012, compel Los Angeles School Police to return military-grade assault weapons to the Department of Defense in 2014, and defund school police to invest in wellness-centered resources for BIPOC youth in 2020.
Sparking a movement of school and community food and medicine-producing gardens, including four active ones today in Lincoln Heights, South Los Angeles, and Culver City, that continue to be locally sustained today. [3]
Sustaining an alumni network of dozens of leaders who have started small businesses, taken leadership roles in organizing/movement spaces, and returned to MVG as service providers, educators, and mentors for newer generations.
In Fall of 2020, while LAUSD lost over half their students district-wide, and other continuation schools fared far worse, our MVG classroom maintained 100% attendance and engagement. However, LAUSD administration then began pressuring MVG Learners and their teacher to use technologies that were geared toward surveilling [4] rather than educating young people. When these Learners— from one of the most over-policed and over-surveilled communities in Los Angeles— refused this unreasonable invasion of privacy, their entire student-directed approach to learning was undermined and ultimately dismantled by administration.
Almost all our Learners dropped out. This learning community could no longer be sustained within such an unsupportive institution. And thus, LLC was formed— an alternative learning community fully independent of LAUSD.
At the start of the 2022-2023 school year, LAUSD admitted it had been unable to recover nearly 50,000 students across the district. [5] But this number doesn’t include those students who were 16 and 17 years old at the start of the pandemic, became adults within those years and were therefore administratively transitioned off school rosters without ever finishing school.
Those students deserve resources, support, and an opportunity to learn. These staggering numbers alone demonstrate the urgent need for spaces like those cultivated by LLC.
