On one side of the building, music is blaring, and the room is loud with laughter. Kids are eating pizza and playing cards, shooting pool, and playing table-tennis. Across a dividing wall, tables and chairs are filled with students nose-deep in their textbooks. It’s quiet enough to hear pencils scratching on paper. Student tutors walk among the rows, stopping to help when they see someone struggling. There’s pizza on this side, too.
This is The Lounge, Redondo Union High School’s new after-school hangout and study-hall. In the few short weeks it’s been running, it’s shown you don’t need clubs or sports to keep kids out of trouble after school — you just need something fun, but the food probably helps.
The program is a partnership between RUHS and Freedom4U, a Palos Verdes-based non-profit that works throughout the South Bay. Founded in 2002 by therapist Dr. Greg Allen, F4U’s aim is to give young people safe places to hang, with a focus on helping them express their creativity. Each year, F4U hosts concerts and sponsors film and photography contests. This year it plans to host an area-wide American Idol-esque singing competition.
The Lounge has two focuses: Help Redondo Union’s students feel connected to the school, and keep them off of the streets.
“So instead of having them on Diamond Street or at McDonalds, let’s have them here,” said Adam Genovese, a student advisor at RUHS and a lead on The Lounge. The New York native began his California career at Palos Verdes High School, where he met Allen. He is now an assistant principal at Redondo Union.
“Statistics show that the hours right after school are the highest time for students to get involved with negative activities. That’s when they’re smoking weed, that’s when they’re drinking with their friends, that’s when they’re loitering, which to me can be even worse than drugs or alcohol. When you’re just standing around doing nothing, that becomes your life.”
“The best thing I did was to go out and get 12 of the best students in our school – and I don’t mean best as in really high academically, they’re just awesome kids,” Genovese said. “They pretty much run the show, the entire two hours. I’m pretty much supervising, trying to see where I can plug in support for the kids,” he said.
“If you’re not involved with a sport or a club, that’s who we want to reach,” said Lounge student leader Payton Thatcher, an RUHS senior. “We’re trying to make it as open as we could without making it seem like the admins are super involved.”
Part of the Lounge’s success, Genovese believes, is its diversity: “Not only are we taking the kids who weren’t doing much already, but we have everybody here. We’ve got captains of the sports teams, we’ve got arts kids, so it’s just been a really nice experience so far.”
Teachers and administrators hang off to the side while students such as sophomore Preston Austin dodge ping-pong balls smacked his way by friends.
“Well, if I wasn’t here, I don’t know…I’d probably be at home, cramming those, uh, study-books, you know?” he said, tripping over his words as he watched the new game his friends had started. “It’s a bunch of fun here. I’d definitely come if it happened more than once a week,” he said.
The hope has been that the program would expand beyond its current Tuesdays-only schedule, with plans to expand to two days a week. Though administration has been in talks to do so, nothing is set in stone, Genovese said.
“If 70 kids came each time, I’d be ecstatic,” he said. “That’s 70 kids who would not have had a better place to go.”
“It’s been successful because we’re trying to target the kids who don’t feel connected to school,” Thatcher said.
“That’s about 30 percent of the student population. We’ve got a pretty big school, so we’re not going to get every one of those people in here, but I’m always seeing new kids. It’s not just the same kids every time,” he said. ER
