The ColumnistsAaron Robinson
Every other Saturday around
8:00 a.m., Robert Roach rolls up
the doors of the cluttered auto
shop at Carson High in south Los
Angeles and welcomes anyone
who wants to stop by. During the
week, Roach teaches auto shop
at the school, and on odd weekends the Boys
and Girls Club of Carson kicks in a few bucks
to sponsor “Cars & Gu ita rs,” Roach’s
informal name for these Saturday gather-
ings. W hen I poked in the other day, about
15 young people were there, both current
students and alumni who have moved on but
are still drawn back to friends
and comfortable surround-
ings. A pair of teenagers
dabbed paint on a metal stand
on which an old Buick V- 6 had
been partially stripped and
its parts labeled for learning.
Another was pulling the front
springs off a well-worn Stude-
baker pickup. A nd, sure
enough, a couple of kids were strumming
guitars. Oil changes, brake jobs, and pet
go-kart and ATV projects are common
activities on these Saturdays.
You may recall Roach from a column I
wrote back in 2012 about the decline of
high-school auto shops and the failure of
public education to recognize that America
needs people who can make and fix things
as much as it needs English-lit majors. Ever y
so often, Roach emails me with the latest
twists and turns in the fate of Carson’s auto
shop. He spends a lot of his free time writ-
ing grant proposals and talking to car com-
panies and others about donating castoff
stuff for the kids to learn from. He’s excited
about a grant proposal that he recently
submitted to the RPM Foundation, which
supports education in resto-
ration and preser vation.
Get to know Roach, and
you become convinced that
just about every thing good
happens because of the ini-
tiative of one or a few tire-
less individuals swimming
against a current of indiffer-
ence. W hen these people dis-
appear, often so does the good. To wit: An
amazing after-school program at Honda’s
nearby U.S. headquarters that gave kids
introductory training as auto technicians
has since quietly folded because the Honda
manager who volunteered to make it hap-
pen got moved up the ladder. So far nobody
has stepped in, though the company has
since donated tools to Carson’s shop, which
also has come face to face with the ax sev-
eral times. “Three months ago, the princi-
pal knocked on the door, and I thought that
was it,” says Roach. The constant uncer-
tainty over whether the shop will live or die
has made Carson “a very weird place,” he
says, “but I’ve gotten used to it.”
Charter schools and other options have
taken a bite out of Carson’s enrollment, and
as the student population shrinks, so doesthe funding. In response, the school broke
apart a couple years ago, two pilot schools
spinning off completely and the remainder
reorganizing itself into three “small learn-
ing communities” with their own separate
principals and administrators. Roach’s
class is part of the ESET academy, or
Environmental Science, Engineering, and
Technolog y. Other incoming ninth graders
are plugged into the Global Business or
Performing Arts academies, depending on
where there’s space. Students often don’t
have a choice, and the school has made it
hard for kids in the other tracks to take auto
shop as an elective. Roach has heard from
kids who want to transfer into ESET but
the school won’t let them.
Roach is only given $200 in classroom
budget per school year, which isn’t enough
to buy a decent torque wrench. So all the
tools and cars are begged or borrowed or
left over from former glory days. Some of
the teaching aids hanging from the walls
date back to the points-and-condenser era.
W hich is okay with Roach, since he
doesn’t see his job as preparing high-school
kids to become Porsche techs. That hap-
pens further down the line, in the much
better-funded and -equipped programs at
some of the local community colleges. His
mission, as he sees it, is to not lose the kids
before they even get that far by giving those
who prefer sockets and spark plugs to son-
nets and square roots a reason not to drop
out. Roach teaches automotive survival
skills, like tire changes and jump-starts, as
well as shop safety and basic system knowl-
edge. “Applied chemistry and physics with
a real-world practicality,” he says.
If you were to ask your teenager where
he or she is going on a Saturday morning,
would it concern you to learn that it’s the
high-school auto shop? Me, neither. W hat
might concern you is that as the nation tilts
increasingly toward school fragmentation
over the universal public-education system
that built this nation, the options for kids
who want to work with their hands are
shrinking and are becoming entirely
dependent on the efforts of individuals like
Robert Roach.THE WALLS OF CARSON’S AUTO SHOP: A
COLLAGE OF QUAINT ANTIQUE TEACHING
AIDS AND STUDENT PROJECTS.
- CAR AND DRIVER. MAR/2017