By 1920, the Jewish community had moved to the Boyle Heights area, just east of Los Angeles. Brooklyn Avenue was the heart and soul of the Jewish community.

Brooklyn (now Cesar Chavez) and Soto Street, the main intersection, continued to grow through the 1940s and was crowded with stacks of newspapers, the cry of news boys hawking papers, bus traffic and the Jews’ favorite hangout, Curries Ice Cream. Evidence of the Jewish life on Brooklyn Avenue, Zellman’s Men’s & Boy’s Wear, located at 2806 Brooklyn, right before Cornwell Street, is the last Jewish-owned business remaining in the area.

This snippet of Jewish history was not taken from a book or manuscript, but rather written by a teenage girl named Lupe, a senior at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles. The twelfth-grader crafted this historical essay based on research she conducted in her own neighborhood and via the Internet. Soon, other students in other parts of the city will be conducting similar research in literally their own back yards with the help of their teachers and school librarians as part of L.A. Education ACCESS.

Through L.A. Education ACCESS, teachers in Los Angeles are given the opportunity to develop world-class curricula making use of those resources and infusing technology into their classrooms and teaching methods. Teams consist of selected teachers and school librarians who provide teachers with resources, training, and support as teachers develop their technological skills and create content-rich curriculum.

"Everyone’s got a story grounded in some history and this project will help them discover that," said Phyllis Hayashibara, a member of one of the teacher teams developing online community-based curriculum to be featured on the ACCESS Web site, Our PLACE Called Home, this fall. "It’s a good opportunity for students to learn about the community and to understand that it belongs to them."

Hayashibara, a social sciences teacher at Venice High School, along with four other team members, are collaborating with school librarians on a project titled "Unsolved Problems in a Modern World: The Story of My Family’s Migration." The project will involve Venice students taking photographs, speaking with long-time residents and researching the history of their community. They will also delve into the reasons for their own family’s immigration to the United States through interviews with family members.

"We want them [students] to become historians and capture their community in photographs and in writing," Hayashibara said.

Another teacher team headed by Caroline Brown and Yolanda McCoy, science and math teachers from Foshay Learning Center, are developing a curriculum unit on the migration patterns of pigeons and seagulls and their origins outside the United States.

"We’re trying to come up with a classification key to identify the various breeds of birds," Brown said. "We came up with this idea because pigeons are usually so hated at schools, we thought that the students would appreciate knowing where they originally came from."

ACCESS began as a pilot project in 1997 at Roosevelt High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school is located in Boyle Heights, which is currently a predominantly Hispanic area. The work of the teachers involved in the pilot year may be found in the "Teaching Units" section of Our PLACE Called Home. Student work that resulted from those units are showcased in galleries throughout the site.

The current phase of the project expands to take in classroom teachers and library media teachers from two new high schools and a middle school. As these teachers develop and test their curricula, the new units and student work will be added to these pages as well.

"It is hoped that as the project develops, teachers in other areas around the world will replicate and build upon the units found here and share their results with the LA Education ACCESS project, thereby adding a new dimension to these pages and a richness to Our PLACE Called Home," said ACCESS coordinator Deb Palmer.

L .A. Education ACCESS is administered by Libraries for the Future (LFF), which also serves to facilitate cooperation between the Los Angeles Educational Partnership and other LFF ACCESS sites around the country.

This team works with the selected teachers and school librarians to provide resources, training, and support as they develop their technological skills and create content rich curriculum.

This curriculum is then field tested in appropriate classes and the results are shared with other teachers both inside and outside of the greater Los Angeles area, by way of the LA Education ACCESS Web site.