22 <strong>Pitzer</strong> <strong>College</strong> <strong>Participant</strong>
Teaching By Example Unique as their approaches may be, the one thing that rings true for these three alumni is that they are giving back to the community, a do-goodism inherited from their alma mater. By Alissa Sandford Susan Price ’70 read about <strong>Pitzer</strong> <strong>College</strong> in Time magazine and thought it would be an exciting place to be. Lynda “Peppi” Wray Clark ’68 decided on <strong>Pitzer</strong> after hearing a recruiter speak at her high school in the Southern California mountains. Michael Sturtz ’91 knew a private, liberal arts college might do his creative interests some good. So he, too, picked <strong>Pitzer</strong>. But more than having a college in common, these three former students all went off into the big, big world to do a remarkably similar thing: teach. Price has been leading a Southern California tutoring program for the past 10 years, serving low-income children and teens. Wray Clark is teaching juvenile offenders at the Pine Grove Youth Conservatory in Northern California. Sturtz opened a nonprofit art school and business in the Bay Area, offering low-cost industrial art classes to artists and the community at large. Unique as their approaches may be, the one thing that rings true for these three pioneers is that they are giving back to the community, a do-goodism inherited from their alma mater. Says Price: “What <strong>Pitzer</strong> was, and still is, is a gathering of people who are excited about what they’re doing and learning. It wasn’t just the get-your-ticket-punched school. These are creative people who believe this is all one place, and we have to be good to each other.” Susan Price Susan Price and some of the participants and programs at the Century Freeway Housing Program she directs. Susan Price ’70 had already spent 10 years on Century Freeway Housing Program’s payroll when she walked into her boss’s office one afternoon and talked her way into a new job. The nonprofit had just started a fledgling tutoring program for disadvantaged children and teens living in its affordable housing projects, and the boss thought it was time that the program start blooming. Price essentially rolled up her sleeves and spelled it out for him. “I said, ‘Well, you need someone who can understand the program, work with the teachers, work with the construction issues and our construction people, work with the board, and you need someone who can work with the foundation and grant people, too.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re narrowing the field.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know that.’ And he let me take it over two years ago.” What started as four seedling tutoring sites for low-income children in first through 12th grades has flourished into 11 sites running 12 hours a week after school, across Los Angeles County. The children are tutored by peers, parents and other adults who go through a training process though Century, an organization also financing social services such as childcare for working families, job training for women entering construction trades and transitional housing for veterans and the homeless. Tutoring sites within the housing complexes have been established in the southern Los Angeles cities of Echo Park, Downey, Mar Vista and—as of February—in Long Beach, adjacent to the Century Villages in Cabrillo, where old Navy family housing has been turned into a shelter for abused and battered families. Price says that the 280-plus children and teens—mostly African American and Latino—enrolled in the tutoring program are destined to fail in public schools without the interventional bridge between school and home. “Public schools are in dire straits, Photo Illustrations by Greg Dymkowski <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2001</strong> 23