It’s Cool to Be a Cadet : Schools: In Inglewood, a popular military program introduces students to discipline. Supporters say the California Cadet Corps helps steer youths away from gangs.

The clipped, authoritative sounds of military commands are not what you usually hear on a junior high school playing field. And the stiff Army boots and drab fatigues are a big change from the popular school wardrobe of neon T-shirts and trendy athletic shoes.

But at Monroe Junior High School in Inglewood, it’s cool to be in the California Cadet Corps, an 81-year-old military program that became nearly moribund after the Vietnam War but is now springing to life again in inner-city schools.

The program was started at Monroe Junior High about four months ago as a means of introducing students to self-discipline, structure and an alternative to gang identity. Already, nearly one-third of the school’s 800 students have joined the corps.

“It’s still new, but we can see the success,” said Lowell Winston, principal of Monroe, one of five Inglewood schools that have added the corps’ military-science program to their curricula.

Begun in 1911 under the auspices of the state National Guard, the corps was organized to promote leadership and citizenship among young people. Today, it is a social program, said National Guard Capt. Robert A. Bradley, state corps director.

“It’s kind of like a positive gang instead of a negative gang,” Bradley said.

“Overall, the participation in Southern California has doubled in the last six years,” Bradley said. Inner-city school districts, he reported, have “just jumped” on the corps as a way to provide positive structure for young people.

The corps is offered at 58 schools in California, 22 of which are in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Inglewood Unified is the only South Bay district offering the program.

The strict protocol of the military-science classes, which offer everything from map reading to first aid and calisthenics, is a startling contrast to the informal parlance of teen-agers.

“Maj. Cooks, sir,” said a 13-year-old boy, sharply saluting Anthony Cooks, the cadet corps commander for the Inglewood Unified School District, also known as the 9th Brigade.

“As we go through the program, sir,” the youngster said, “could you watch and evaluate my performance, sir? I seem to be having a lot of problems, sir.”

Cooks, only 28 himself, assured the cadet that he would watch him closely. Later, in the military-science classroom, decorated with photographs of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Cooks decoded the exchange.

The boy has no father at home, Cooks said, so he goes out of his way to seek approval from older males. Cooks estimates that 60% of the Inglewood district’s corps members come from fatherless homes. Bonding, though, is not limited to males.

Forty percent of the district’s cadets are female, Cooks said, and the structure and identity the corps offers is as important to them as it is to boys.

Indeed, while a group of Monroe cadets practiced their drill, a 14-year-old girl, ill at ease and extremely shy, approached Cooks to say a few words. Had a visitor not been sitting with him, Cooks said after the girl left, she would have sat down and told him everything that had happened at her home over the last 24 hours.

“We’re just getting her back to school,” Cooks said. One of five children in a troubled family, she had dropped out. “We gave her cadets, and this structure will help get her through school,” he said.

Cooks’ primary thrust, he said, is to get the youngsters to focus on goals and objectives.

“A lot of students will tell you where they’re going,” he said, “but they don’t know how to get there. And this program is going to help those students,” he said, stressing that he has made academic success a rule of corps membership by requiring that students maintain a C average to participate.

The second important component of the corps, Cooks said, is community service. On weekends, for example, he has been taking cadets into downtown Los Angeles to work in the missions that provide food to the homeless.

Educators acknowledge that there is a tendency to regard the corps as a big gang. However, they stressed that the corps provides inner-city youths with something all youngsters yearn for in adolescence: identity.

“It gives them a group to join,” said Inglewood school board member Lois Hill Hale.

Only a small group of youngsters can be on the football or basketball teams, Hale and others pointed out, and only a small group of students can forge an identity through academic success.

The corps “provides camaraderie,” Hale said, “acceptance among their peers.”

Identifying with their fellow cadets, she said, will help them resist the pressure to join a neighborhood gang or to take drugs. “It gives our children the coping skills to say no,” Hale explained.

“It’s strengthened our academic program because students are more focused now,” Principal Winston added. “And it has also strengthened our attendance. Now, it’s, ‘I want to come to school because I can identify goals.’ Goals and purpose. . . . It’s amazing. That’s what the program gives to them.”

The protocol and military courtesy they are learning in Cooks’ military-science classes spill over into other classrooms, Winston said. Teachers are delighted to find themselves being addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” he said.

Inglewood Unified Supt. George McKenna said: “The fact that there is such a large turnout in the cadet corps shows that there is a need for this kind of bonding with each other. I think these kids need something to hang their hats on with the collective group.”

Charles Rassaaq, a single father, an Inglewood firefighter and a parent who encouraged his eighth-grade daughter to join the corps, said, “It teaches discipline, which a lot of children lack.”

Hollis Dillon, director of special services for the Inglewood schools, is so impressed by the corps that he said if budget cuts threaten the program’s existence, he will find the money to keep it going--even if he has to tap his own pocket.

“You’re talking about kids who couldn’t find their way to class on time,” Dillon said. “Now, they’re coming (in) at 7 o’clock in the morning and looking for the approval of Maj. Cooks.”

The district’s contribution to the program is about $55,000, which helps cover Cooks’ salary. His four assistants are National Guard members assigned part time by the state. And the state provides all the academic material for the classes, as well as all the equipment for activities such as camp-outs.

The state also supplies camouflage fatigues to each cadet, although the uniforms hang large on their young bodies.

School officials acknowledge that they had some reservations about the military nature of the corps, given the feeling in minority communities that their sons and daughters are the ones most likely to end up on the front lines if there is a war.

“There is the use of military terms and military drill and the use of military discipline, but (the corps) is not designed to recruit for the military,” McKenna said.

As Cooks reports, the youngsters themselves become the biggest advertisements for the corps.

Fourteen-year-old Andre Pena said that before he joined the corps, “I wasn’t considerate of anyone. I didn’t care about nothing.”

Thirteen-year-old Tara Johnson, a squad leader, said that without the corps and the after-school and weekend programs it offers, she would just stay home to “sleep (and) watch TV.”

Enrique Dominguez, 14, said: “Some of us were bad kids, and (Maj. Cooks) showed us how to be respectful and trustworthy. And even with my family we have more good times.”

Cooks, the father of three girls ages 2 to 6, said he knew when he was a corps member in high school that he wanted to work in schools with young people.

After earning his military-science teaching credential at Cal State Long Beach, he went to work with the corps in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Then he persuaded Inglewood officials to hire him to set up a program in that district.

Even if there were no corps program, Cooks said, he would be working with youngsters. There is nothing like the moment when a youngster “looks at you and . . . says, ‘I’m going to be somebody,’ ” he said.

“You can’t beat that. Not for a million bucks. Not today, not tomorrow, not anytime.”