The Brief

This isn’t a story of stylish renovations, or of celebrity filmmaker intervention. This is the story of one family who fell in love with a movie theater and did (and even lost) everything to keep it up and running.

The single-screen Gardena Cinema has been owned by the Kim family since 1976, and has always figured out ways to serve its community — even through some very difficult financial times.

After struggling through a pandemic and ill-fated efforts to bring people back through its doors, Gardena Cinema finally hit some success after it stopped dealing with first-run releases and pivoted to repertory films. Many nights at this South Bay theater, you can catch a newish — or oldish — classics like La La Land and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Kim family

The Gardena Cinema has always been a movie theater. It opened in 1946 as the Park Theatre, and operated consistently through the years showing first and second run feature films until it went up for sale in the 1970s.

That’s where the Kim family comes in. John and Nancy Kim immigrated from South Korea and had the goal of operating their own business. They dabbled in a few different industries when Nancy found the theater.

“My mom fell in love with it as soon as she came and saw it,” says current Gardena Cinema owner Judy Kim.

It's an incredible space, tucked between a gym and a Superior Grocers on Crenshaw Boulevard. It’s way bigger inside than it looks — at 800 seats, it’s easily one of the biggest theaters in the city. For comparison, The Chinese in Hollywood seats 932.

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#250: As we continue our series "Revival House," How To LA producer Victoria Alejandro is taking us to the South Bay of LA and the Gardena Cinema. The theater has been owned by the Kim family since 1976, and is now a non-profit run by Judy Kim and a team of 40 volunteers. Kim has saved the cinema from closures a handful of times now, and has recently pivoted to showing repertory films at the theater.

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#250: As we continue our series "Revival House," How To LA producer Victoria Alejandro is taking us to the South Bay of LA and the Gardena Cinema. The theater has been owned by the Kim family since 1976, and is now a non-profit run by Judy Kim and a team of 40 volunteers. Kim has saved the cinema from closures a handful of times now, and has recently pivoted to showing repertory films at the theater.

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There are still fireproof window covers in the projection room, a holdover from old film screening safety practices. And there are “cry rooms” upstairs from the 1940s, balcony seating with speakers and a glass window where patrons could sit with a crying baby and not interrupt their viewing experience.

Kim reminisces about her father using a pole hand to change the letters on the marquee. However, she admits that she lacks the arm strength for such a technique, which led her to invest in a scissor lift.

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Kim updates the marquee letters approximately once a week to reflect the upcoming movies that will be showing at the theater.

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Now it's got that vintage hue.

“Now it's cool! It's really cool!,” says Kim. “Now that I have dreams of trying to raise money to make changes, people are like, don't change anything!”

The early days

When the Kims bought the theater, they saw an underserved audience in Gardena. There was a drive-in theater nearby in Torrance called the Roadium that played Spanish-language movies every Wednesday, and the place would be packed.

One day, Judy Kim says, her parents decided to change the format of the theater from English speaking second-run movies from Hollywood to second-run Spanish language movies. In the 1970s and the 80s, the Kims named the theater Teatro Variedades — “variety theater” in Spanish — and focused on Spanish-language films and live events with Latino filmmakers and actors. If the Torrance drive-in was ever rained out, or if folks wanted to catch a movie in Spanish on another day of the week, they’d head to the Gardena.

“It was meant to be like a neighborhood theater that was typical in the post-war era,” says Kim. “There was always a neighborhood movie theater that you could walk to from your home, just a few blocks away … all of those theaters are now gone.”

The Kims held on to their theater and in 1995 renamed it the Gardena Cinema. Judy Kim and her brother helped run the theater and neighborhood kids showed up too, offering to clean or help out in other ways in exchange for a movie ticket.

It served as a community hub.

“We were almost kind of like a Boys and Girls Club,” recalls Kim. After the movie, kids “would hang out in the lobby, and we would play video games, or talk about what was cool and what was not and, as an adult at that time, I made sure that all the kids that were here did their homework.”

“I tutored them,” she adds. “I made sure that they were doing OK in school.”

Kim always expected them to go to college.

Trouble sets in

Despite the joy found in the theater, like most teens, Judy Kim wanted to get away from her parents and spread her wings, so to speak. She left for college out east and had dreams of moving to New York and becoming a Broadway producer.

Then the calls started coming — a lot of calls from her parents. Sometimes twice a day, begging her to return to L.A. She didn’t really understand what the urgency was all about, but she came home and found her parents — and the theater’s — finances in disarray.

“I realized that they were under extreme financial hardship, and they were embroiled in lots of legal problems,” she says.

Kim explains that her parents had been defrauded multiple times. The Kims lost their house, their car. To help, Judy Kim went to law school, became a lawyer and dug in to help untangle them. It took almost 15 years to get everything sorted. “We were basically surviving off of, like, 99 cent hamburgers,” she says.

The upside in all of this — and the part of this story that might be the reason Gardena Cinema is still around — is that about five years ago, Kim negotiated the purchase of a parking lot.

It was a big-time play. Gardena is one of very few independent theaters in L.A. with its own parking and, says Kim, “it saved our butt when the pandemic came.”

“Nobody was open and I had this big parking lot that I could show movies outdoors where people could sit in their car, safely, away from other people and watch a movie,” she says. “All they had to do was tune into the FM station that I told them to tune into.”

A bumpy road to recovery

As theaters in the city started welcoming folks back inside, the Kim family then had to navigate another major loss. “That time period is when my mom was fighting cancer,” says Kim. Nancy Kim died in 2022.

An altar of Kim's mother, Nancy Soo Myoung Kim, is placed in the lobby of the theater in remembrance of her beloved mother.

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John and Judy Kim closed the theater and took a few months to grieve. Judy Kim sold her condo and moved in with her father, putting that money towards the cinema.

“And then I said to my dad, we’re running out of money.”

The Gardena Cinema reopened with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, expecting it to be a huge hit. But only 10 people showed up to the first screening. Reopening the cinema with first-run movies meant that Kim was actually losing money.

New releases are “loss leaders” for movie theaters. Most of the ticket price is going straight back to the film’s distributor, and contracts mean that new films have to be shown for a certain number of weeks. If a theater isn’t bringing in enough audience members to turn a profit on concessions, theater owners are spending more than they’re making by running a first run film.

“So 2023, I’m running out of money,” says Kim. She says her father was ready to retire and use his “senior citizen card for all the national parks.” Why not sell the theater? Neither Kim nor her brother have children, so “there’s nobody to leave the theater to,” she says.

The theater hit the market, but didn’t sell.

Judy Kim made another last ditch pivot and came up with another plan: “I’m going to set up a nonprofit organization.”

With her father’s blessing, Kim began the process in April of 2023. The theater got official recognition as a nonprofit in July. Between that and the success of summer films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie, the Gardena Cinema had a future.

Volunteer 'grandchildren'

Judy Kim was now running a theater and a nonprofit entirely on her own. But, as she learned years earlier, you can’t underestimate the number of people willing to trade work for a free movie. It took months, but Kim now has a team of 40 volunteers who help her run the theater.

“I’ve got a really good core group of people that are very supportive.”

It’s those volunteers who convinced Kim to move away from first-run movies and start programming repertory screenings. Without the strict scheduling and tiny profit margins of a first-run movie, Kim suddenly had a lot more flexibility. If she needed to step away and take care of her father, or just close the theater on a slow night, those options were now on the table.

Movie posters adorn the lobby walls of the Gardena Cinema.

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The Gardena Cinema volunteers are invaluable to the space. They run concessions, clean the theater, sell tickets, run the projector — and this past November, Kim left the theater in their hands entirely to take a trip with her father. “They did a fantastic job … it’s still standing,” she says.

Cifen, a local filmmaker, helps organize events in the theater. He put together a singles’ night and a screening of his independent film, Age of Embellished Relic, this past February. He calls the theater a “safe haven.”

Conor Holt makes the drive to Gardena from East Hollywood. A former ArcLight Cinemas employee, he says he cares about making sure cinemas stay open. “If you care about something, you gotta go the extra mile.”

Adela Tobon used to manage a single-screen movie theater in Northern California. A friend told her about the Gardena Cinema and she says, “I just lost it. I’m like, this is exactly where I belong.”

And Bill DeFrance has taken over a lot of John Kim’s duties in the cinema — cutting trailers, ripping tickets at the box office, building the show in the projector.

It’s a family affair for DeFrance too. On Valentine’s Day, he programmed Wild at Heart — his and his wife’s favorite movie. “I programmed it for Valentine’s Day so I could be at the theater and on a date at the same time.”

A sign his daughter made hangs on the side of the ticket booth, and boldly states in red crayon: “NO PRANK CALLS!”

“For a long time, my dad was like, well, we don’t need to leave a legacy. There’s no grandkids,” says Kim. But the volunteers pipe up with a chorus: “We can be your grandchildren!”

Gardena Cinema owner Judy Kim.

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Judy Kim is now planning on leaving an endowment for the theater, so it can continue after she and her family have moved on. And intentional or not, the Gardena Cinema now has a legacy of community building and a fighting spirit.

Keep an eye on the Gardena Cinema’s calendar. You can catch anything from a karaoke party screening of La La Land to Dawn of the Dead in 3D to film festivals featuring shorts from local filmmakers.

The conversation around the cultural relevance of ballet and opera — sparked by Oscar-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet’s recent dismissive comments about the art forms — came to a culmination at the Academy Awards on Sunday, with a joke about the backlash from host Conan O’Brien and a performance by celebrated ballet dancer Misty Copeland.

While the Copeland appearance was planned before Chalamet’s remarks went viral, the fact that a ballet dancer (one raised in SoCal, we should note!) took center stage on Hollywood’s biggest night seemed to fly in the face of Chalamet’s assertion that ballet, as opposed to movies, is something “no one cares about [...] anymore.”

It got us here at LAist wondering about the state of ballet in Los Angeles, so we reached out to leaders of ballet companies who explained what sets the ballet scene in Los Angeles apart, and where it stands in terms of cultural relevance right now.

‘His remarks come from a place of insight’

Maybe surprisingly, neither Julia Rivera, executive director of Los Angeles Ballet, nor Lincoln Jones, founder, choreographer and director of American Contemporary Ballet, took offense to Chalmet’s remarks.

Rivera told LAist that while  ”it's not very neighborly of one artist to bash the other's art form,” once she learned that Chalamet’s grandmother, mother and sister studied ballet and performed with the New York City Ballet, she had more understanding for where he may have been coming from.

“I think his remarks come from a place of insight,” she said. Because he probably heard conversations “lamenting [how] we're always trying to fund these organizations.”

“It is a daily struggle,” Rivera said. And “for a young person, wanting to have a career,” it’s understandable that they may not want to be involved in a nonprofit industry where funding is always a challenge.

‘Like watching ballet in IMAX’

Jones, who co-founded American Contemporary Ballet in L.A. 15 years ago, said Chalamet’s remarks were relatable.

“What I understood him to be saying was that he wanted to be part of an art form that was central to the cultural conversation,” Jones told LAist. “And I actually agree with that. When I was choosing what to do artistically myself, I actually struggled with that a lot.”

While Jones said he was enthralled by ballet from a young age, his brother made a career shooting cover photos for magazines like Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone and later directing film and TV. And he saw the appeal in that as an artist.

“You want a big audience, you want to have people understand what you're doing in a visceral and vital way,” he said. “But  I just couldn't get myself away from ballet. I just loved it so much. And so my big thing became ‘How do I do this in a way that is culturally relevant?’”

That’s led Jones to a unique, more modern approach to ballet that’s designed to be more cinematic, and at the same time more intimate.

Much of what sets American Contemporary Ballet apart from other ballet companies is that they always perform with live music and in unconventional spaces, like warehouses and soundstages, instead of in theaters.

 ”So it's not like you're sitting in this room where there's darkened chandeliers, and you're looking through a frame, which feels a bit 19th century to me,” Jones said. “Instead, it's sort of like, for lack of a better term, like watching ballet in IMAX. The dancers are larger compared to where you are, you're in this shared space and it just feels much more majestic to me.”

The pros and cons of staging ballet in L.A.

As for the state of ballet in Los Angeles, Rivera described it as “appreciated, valued and growing.” The company received its first seven-figure gift from a donor just last season.

“Audiences are very interested,” Rivera said. “The more ballet that is offered in L.A., the more audiences want. That is very good news.”

But she said there are also some challenges for a ballet company that are specific to Los Angeles:  ”We are a company town and the company is screened entertainment. But the arts also compete with theme parks and sporting teams and the weather and things that have significantly larger budgets.”

Navigating that “and finding ways for the voices to break through some of that noise,” Rivera said, “is really tricky. It can be done, but it's a challenge.”

Lincoln Jones agreed that running a ballet company in Los Angeles does have its challenges, but said he also saw a unique benefit to founding his ballet company in L.A.

While Jones first incorporated American Contemporary Ballet in New York, he’s originally from Southern California, and every time he would come home he felt “there was an energy and an openness [here], and a lot of that came from the film industry.”

And his view is that ballet has the potential to be just as exciting as popular films can be.

“When I was growing up, people were lining up to see the second Matrix, the first Matrix blew their mind. And now, ‘Oh my God. We have to see what happens in the second one.’ And that doesn't happen in ballet, but that is absolutely what I'm striving for.”

Los Angeles Ballet has also had some fun with the firestorm Chalamet’s remarks ignited, offering a ticket promotion with the code “SUPREME,” a reference to Marty Supreme, the film the actor earned an Oscar nomination for this year.

So far, Chalamet’s comments seem to be having a positive effect.

Rivera, who’s been with the company for 11 out of its 20-year history, said they’ve seen an uptick in ticket sales and donations in recent weeks.  

“Any time we can talk about opera and ballet is a good day,” Rivera (who also previously worked with L.A. Opera) told LAist. “I'm sorry that it's at one artist's expense, but he opened the door.”

Where to see ballet in L.A.

The next Los Angeles Ballet performances (of Giselle) begin April 30.

The Music Center is hosting the New York City ballet in June.

American Contemporary Ballet has remaining performances of Balanchine: Twin Masterpieces running this Thursday, Friday and Saturday and next Thursday through Saturday as well.

“ I guarantee you've never seen ballet like this,” Jones said. “And if Timothée Chalamet wants to come, I will get him a ticket.”

Big Bear’s famous bald eagles — Jackie and Shadow — are often in the spotlight, but they’re not the only wild bird nests in Southern California starring in their own livestreams and capturing human attention.

There are dozens of bald eagles with more than 20 nests across the Channel Islands, clinging to cliffs and tree-like bushes from Santa Catalina to Santa Cruz off the coast of Ventura.

Among them are Jak and Audacity, the resident duo on Santa Cruz Island whose nest is featured in a livestream and followed by dedicated viewers.

“Before Jackie and Shadow, there was Jak and Audacity,” according to the Institute for Wildlife Studies. “Before Jak and Audacity was Chase and Cholyn.”

Several decades ago, there were no bald eagles left in Southern California, according to the institute.

But after years of work by the Northern California-based nonprofit, the population has returned to its historic coastal habitat and grown to an estimated 60 birds across five islands.

“Here's this great success story of nature coming back, and it's happening, you know, really close to one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world,” said Brian Hudgens, vice president of the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

Lay of the land

According to the institute, the Channel Islands eagle population is stable and could grow. As many as 25 eaglets fledge, or leave their respective nests, each year.

But challenges linger for Southern California’s only remaining coastal population of bald eagles. Some pairs continue to have failed nests.

Jak and Audacity have struggled to produce fledglings “not even half” of the years they've tried to breed in their Sauces Canyon territory, according to Hudgens.

Other Channel Islands nests successfully lay eggs and raise chicks almost every year.

“The challenges that they face is this variation from territory to territory and how good they are, and it's one of those things that we don't yet understand,” Hudgens said. “One of the reasons why we want to keep doing this is we're trying to figure out what's causing some birds to do really well, and other birds to not do as well.”

Bringing the birds back

Bald eagles used to be found on all eight Channel Islands, but the population dwindled and eventually disappeared by 1960, according to the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

The damage was driven by long-term exposure to high levels of DDT, a once-popular synthetic pesticide.

DDT and chemicals were dumped in the ocean basins off the coast of Los Angeles starting around the 1940s. Thousands of pounds may have been dumped until 1972, when new environmental regulations were passed by Congress, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The U.S. banned DDT in 1972, largely because of its environmental effects and toxicity to wildlife. For bald eagles specifically, DDT poisoned the birds and caused egg shell thinning that resulted in many failed nesting attempts, according to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

That’s where the Institute for Wildlife Studies comes in. In 1980, the nonprofit took on its first project — reintroducing bald eagles to Catalina Island by relocating wild birds from Pacific Northwest nests.

The first eggs from those early breeding pairs were laid on Catalina Island in 1987, but they broke soon after.

“They had problems with their eggshells still being very thin because these birds are now feeding in the waters that are contaminated by DDT,” Hudgens said, adding that the eggs had some of the highest levels of DDT on record.

To help the reintroduced Catalina Island population, wildlife biologists removed the fragile eggs from eagles affected by DDT and replaced them with decoy eggs so the adults would continue to incubate.

The real eggs were then artificially incubated in special chambers, Hudgens said. The chicks that hatched were fostered back into nests on the island, as were chicks from wild eagles and those from the San Francisco Zoo’s Avian Conservation Center.

Peter Sharpe of the Institute for Wildlife Studies places a 2-week-old bald eagle chick in a nest on Catalina Island as part of the Bald Eagle Recovery Program via helicoptering to cliffs.

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Dozens more juvenile bald eagles were released to Channel Islands National Park, and by 2006, some of the birds started hatching eggs on their own. It marked the first known natural nest hatching on Santa Cruz Island since 1950, according to the institute.

“So we stopped going in and interfering because the idea is always to do as little as we need to,” Hudgens said. “Ever since then, they've been hatching well and [the] population has been growing quite steadily.”

SoCal’s ‘unique’ coastal habitat

The Channel Islands are now home to 60 bald eagles and nearly two dozen breeding pairs, according to 2022 estimates from the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

Institute for Wildlife Studies biologists work on banding a bald eagle on Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park in July 2004.

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A biologist with the Institute for Wildlife Studies carries a juvenile bald eagle to a hack tower on Santa Cruz Island in 2005.

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Erin Weiner, the nonprofit’s eagle project lead, told LAist the islands’ largely undisturbed coastal habitat is "pretty unique," especially for California.

Rather than sticking to tall trees as seen in Big Bear or Alaska, a lot of the Catalina eagles nest on cliffs, using sticks to shield from the sheer drops, Weiner said. On Santa Rosa, some of the birds build their nests in bushes.

“On the islands, you get a lot of, like, gigantism,” Weiner said. “So, things that are bushy and small on the mainland become tree-like on islands, and so you have eagles nesting in these tree-like bushes.”

As part of the organization’s efforts to study the Channel Islands eagle population, Weiner hikes around all the known historic territories during breeding season to research the adults, eggs and chicks.

Trail cameras are set-up to keep track of the nests when humans aren’t around. Weiner occasionally has to repel down cliffs to maintain the equipment when the birds are no longer breeding.

There are also livestream cameras on a few nests through a partnership with Explore, featuring eagle pairs like Chase and Cholyn in Two Harbors or Andor and Cruz in Fraser Point.

Cruz was the first known chick to hatch naturally on the Channel Islands in decades, but Jak and Audacity in Sauces Canyon are probably the most famous pair right now, Hudgens said.

“I really appreciate the people who spend the time to watch those birds, and often they're telling us what's going on before we have any idea,” he said with a laugh.

The bald eagle population has spread to other islands in the area, including Santa Rosa and Anacapa. Some have flown as far as British Columbia, while others are setting up territories in places like Anaheim Hills in Orange County, Weiner said.

A bald eagle arrives with a fish to feed two chicks in north Orange County in 2023. The tag indicates it's part of the Institute for Wildlife Studies project to rebuild the bald eagle population on the Channel Islands, was hatched in 2013 at Santa Rosa Island and given the name La'i.

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The unions representing Los Angeles Unified teachers and support staff have given the district a "red line" of April 14 to reach a deal for new contracts, or else face an open-ended strike.

The walkout was announced at a rally Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles that brought together thousands of members of United Teachers Los Angeles, SEIU Local 99 and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, an increasingly active union that represents principals and other education leaders.

“We have a common vision, and we're in it together,” said Maria Nichols, president of AALA. “We’re understaffed, we're overworked, we don't have the necessary resources to really say we have safe schools and to really say that we're servicing students.”

All three unions have been negotiating with the district over pay, benefits and additional support for students for more than a year.

In response to the rally, LAUSD issued a statement and plans to hold a press conference Thursday morning.

“Los Angeles Unified is actively engaged in negotiations with our labor partners and remains committed to reaching agreements that balance the needs of students, families, and staff while ensuring long-term fiscal stability,” the statement read.

What happens now?

A strike would almost certainly shutter schools for about 400,000 students, as was the case during a three-day work stoppage in 2023.

Emily Reyes, a fifth grade teacher at Laurel Cinematic Arts near West Hollywood, says she hopes families understand why a strike may be necessary.

“A strike this year ensures that your children are going to get all the resources that they need in the classroom, that they're given the best teaching resources,” she said.

The unions are seeking increases in pay for their members. The district has said it cannot afford what the unions have proposed.

The unions are still working their way through the bargaining process, but have said the district's offers do not meet their demands. UTLA appealed to LAUSD’s board ahead of a committee meeting Tuesday.

“We can settle this contract before we have to go on strike if you all are active in that process,” Julie Van Winkle, UTLA's vice president said. “But if that doesn’t happen then we’re still ready to go because we need to be able to afford to live in our cities and we need our schools to have basic resources.”

Los Angeles Unified has maintained that it values employees, but needs to make tough financial decisions to reduce an ongoing budget deficit. This month, layoff notices were sent to more than 650 LAUSD employees, including hundreds of support staff.

Danny Martinez teaches art at Mendez High School in Boyle Heights. He’s witnessed multiple strikes over his 20 years in the district.

“They were tough, but worthwhile,” Martinez said. “We did get a certain raise and stuff, but you know what, how the economy is right now, everything goes up, but our pay doesn't.”

How did we get here?

Earlier this year, members of United Teachers Los Angeles and SEIU Local 99 voted overwhelmingly to give their leaders the power to call a strike as negotiations over pay and benefits stalled.

UTLA’s bargaining team has met with the district more than a dozen times since negotiations began last February. The union declared an impasse in December, a legal step that triggers intervention from a neutral mediator appointed by the state’s labor relations board. That stage of the process, “fact finding,” ended this month without resolution.

The teachers union seeks 17% raises for educators over two years and changes to the salary schedule so that newer teachers who complete professional development can earn increases more quickly.

The district has countered with an 8% salary increase and 3% one-time bonus over two years. Here are the other details of the district’s proposal.

SEIU’s contract, meanwhile, expired in June 2024. That union wants 30% wage increases over three years and more hours for workers who don’t have enough to qualify for benefits.

Maria Avalos is a supervision aide at Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley. Avalos said she’s only assigned four hours of work a day and also cleans houses and sells tamales to support her daughter.

“We need more hours,” Avalos said. “I live in an apartment that has one bedroom for ten of us.”

The district has countered with a 13% wage increase over three years. Here are other details of the district’s proposal.

Associated Administrators of Los Angeles declared an impasse in February, an assessment the district disagreed with, but it agreed to continue negotiating and has another meeting scheduled Friday.

The union’s primary demands include salary increases, a reduced workload and the ability to use flex time more easily.

“Our intent is not to disrupt schools and students and families,” Nichols said. “Our intent is to get a fair and equitable contract, [and] dignity and respect for the folks.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

For 15 years, The Garage Board Shop in East L.A. has been a safe, welcoming place for students to go to do their homework, get tutoring, hang out with their friends and learn how to skate through its Skate 4 Education after-school program. 

But the program was put on pause Saturday after mounting issues, including a lapse from the initiative that has provided paid mentors and dwindling sales at the shop caused by immigration raids. Skate 4 Education founder Maria Patricia Ramblaz said she’s now looking for new funding sources to bring the after-school program back, but its future remains in limbo.

“Our best option to ensure the program continues for future generations is a momentary pause to not only find funding but also regroup as a team to see how we will work moving forward,” wrote Ramblaz, who runs The Garage Board Shop as well as The Urban Warehouse nonprofit organization, in a letter sent to partners, sponsors and community members Friday.

The abrupt closure of the program has left parents saddened and worried their children’s grades and personal development will also be affected.

Ramblaz, known by students as Ms. Patty, told Boyle Heights Beat that when she announced the news last week, the kids sprang into action to brainstorm ways to save the program. 

They planned to spread the word about the program by making TikTok videos and handing out flyers to their friends and teachers at school. One girl handed Ramblaz two folded dollar bills she had in her pocket that day, a gesture that Ramblaz said filled her heart with joy and sadness. 

“These kids should be the next governor, the next mayor, but because we’re cutting the education, I don’t think it’s gonna give us a chance to open more bridges for the kids,” Ramblaz said. 

A place for students to thrive 

When Rose Duran, 10, went home after learning the program would shut down, she surprised her parents with her idea to bring it back. 

“I don’t want a quinceañera anymore,” she told her mother, Itzel Tlapalco, asking to donate the money that her family has been saving for her huge, coming-of-age celebration for years. “I want to help Miss Patty.” 

Rose has been attending the Skate 4 Education after-school program since she was 7 years old, following in the footsteps of her older brother, who got involved after walking into the store to buy a skateboard with his parents over three years ago, Tlapalco said. 

Maria Patricia Ramblaz talks to Itzel Tlapalco and Guillermo Duran about the Skate 4 Education program being put on pause inside The Garage Board Shop on Thursday, March 12.

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Tlapalco and Guillermo Duran said their son was struggling in math at the time, and soon after starting, they saw significant improvement in his grades thanks to the tutoring and attentiveness of the mentors at the program. 

“It helped him a lot; he developed significantly at school, and he came here to learn even more,” Duran said in Spanish. They saw the same improvement when their daughter began participating, too. 

Tlapalco said she has tried to understand her daughter’s homework, but she can’t help as well as the mentors at The Garage Board Shop do. She’s now worried her grades will take a hit. 

Bernardo Lopez has been bringing his two daughters, Eliana and Emily, to the after-school program for over a year and said the girls offered to donate their birthday money to save it. They have also been spreading the word to their friends at school, Lopez said. 

The program has been a great way for his daughters to socialize with other children and stay off of their phones and tablets, he added. “That’s really important because they don’t have that anymore,” he said. 
”I feel like kids don’t have that anymore.” 

A plan to keep it going

The program began 15 years ago, when Ramblaz set out to create the type of education program that she needed when she was a young student growing up in Boyle Heights. 

Maria Patricia Ramblaz stands in the classroom located at the back of The Garage Skate Shop on Thursday, March 12.

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Over the years, with the help of grants from the county and organizations including L.A. Care, LA2050, Nike and Southern California Edison, Ramblaz was able to create a multifaceted program with paid mentors via America’s Job Center of California, offering students homework help and working with them on projects and activities. Through getting good grades and completing their assignments, students were rewarded with skate supplies at the shop, giving them a place where they could not only stay on track in school, but also spend time with friends and lean into their skating hobby. 

Ramblaz said that this school year, AJCC was only able to provide paid mentors through December, with a new cohort set to start in July. Normally, she’d cover the gap out-of-pocket, but over the last year, her business has faced rising costs and the lasting effects of immigration raids. 

Last June, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids hit her business hard. She went from making $400 a day on average to suddenly only making one or two sales per day in the weeks following the raids. Now, sales have steadily gone up, but it’s still not like before. Ramblaz said she’s had to take money out of her retirement fund to cover rent and bills at the shop.  

The raids also caused some families to stop bringing their kids to the after-school program out of fear. Attendance went from 12 to 15 students a day to 3 to 5. Parents pay a $50 donation per month to keep their children enrolled, so the drop in attendance has also caused the program to take a financial hit.

Her only option, she said, is to put the program on pause to continue seeking out other avenues for funding.

Ramblaz said she needs about $50,000 to guarantee that the program survives for the rest of the year. That money would cover mentors’ salaries and pay for school supplies, projects, activities and snacks for the students.

Ramblaz said she has submitted over 30 grant applications in the past few months. Some remain under review, and others have been denied. 

“It’s really depressing,” Ramblaz said. “This is my dream. This is my mission.”