Moms, Dads Of Gang Kids Ordered To Parenting Class

It's a Saturday morning and a half-dozen adults are sitting in a high school classroom, staring at grim photos of sickly drug addicts and hearing about the deadly consequences of gang crime. They'd rather not be here, but a judge made them come.

The moms and dads were ordered to attend the class under a new California law giving judges the option of sending parents for training when their kids are convicted of gang crimes for the first time.

Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, the lawmaker behind the Parent Accountability Act, said it is the first state law to give judges the power to order parents of gang members to school, though other court-mandated classes exist at the local level.

"A lot of parents do not know how to handle teenagers," Mendoza said. "Now more than ever, parents need a guide."

The new law went into effect in January and eventually will be in place across California. Budget cuts in Sacramento meant implementation of the classes was delayed and only in the past month or so have they been rolled out on a limited basis in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Several of those first classes were canceled due to low attendance, something organizers blamed on judges' ignorance of the new law. But the sputtering start also speaks to the difficulties of trying to engage parents who may be too busy or apathetic to take a more active role in their kids' lives.

Authorities say Los Angeles County has about 80,000 gang members, though those estimates vary. Parents in gang neighborhoods often struggle to make ends meet and find themselves working more than one job. The long hours mean they can't spend much time with their kids and some youngsters say they are tempted into gang life by a sense of companionship missing from their own family.

"The most difficult thing is to have control of the kids," said Socorro Gonzalez, a housekeeper who was ordered to a recent class after her son, a member of the San Fer gang, got into trouble. "When I come home, I don't know what they have been up to."

At the class last month with six parents, an instructor speaking in Spanish flashed images of drug paraphernalia and showed pictures of addicts before and after they acquired their habit. At a later session, another instructor outlined classic warning signs of gang involvement — tattoos, secretive behavior, sudden changes in musical tastes and the use of gang hand signals.                                   

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