Jesus Vargas, 17, works on developing his own iPhone app (Anne Artley/Staff Reporter

 Three years ago, former technology consultant Oscar Menjivar, 35, was working for the Los Angeles Unified School district. He was evaluating schools to determine what kind of technology they should use in the classroom when he noticed an upsetting trend.

It began when he visited an eighth grade classroom and saw that a teacher had posted grades for a recent paper. Out of 16 papers, all but two had received an “A” or a “B." The two “C” papers belonged to male students.

His interest piqued, Menjivar asked the teacher if she noticed that most of the low grades belonged to her male students and was surprised to learn that she said that all the failing students were indeed male.

“I went to the detention rooms, and 95 percent of the kids there were young men,” Menjivar said. 

Disturbed, Menjivar researched dropout and incarceration rates. Sure enough, he found statistics to validate his observations: male students were falling behind at a much faster rate than female students.

Even now, three years later, male underperformance is still a trend nationwide and in California. At the high school level, male dropout rates are higher than those of their female counterparts. Girls make up 54% of L.A. Unified graduates compared to 42% of boys.

This achievement gap continues into the university level: California women earned 10% more college degrees than men in 2012, according to the California Post-Secondary Education Commission. 

In response, Menjivar founded URBAN TxT, a nonprofit organization to help male teens from South L.A. develop leadership and technology skills. He employed a team of five to staff a 15-week summer academy where the boys learn computer programming and web development. Students are divided into teams that compete against each other to create the best website by the end of the summer.  

To put their leadership skills to work, the boys pitch their projects to investors, who give them feedback. The winning team receives $500 to launch its creation in the fall. The top three winning teams take a trip to visit Google headquarters and Stanford University. 

Besides a $10,000 donation from Edison electric company, the startup funds came largely out of Menjivar’s pocket, as he put $35,000 toward his business. Admission is free, but Menjivar says that when his students succeed in a technological profession, they should expect a phone call from him expecting them to give back to the next generation of “TxTrs.”

Last year’s winning team developed www.youpolitic.me, a website that encourages young people to become more politically active.

“All the time, decisions are being made by adults, but rarely is the youth opinion taken into consideration,” said Jesus Vargas, 17, the project manager for the group of boys that created the site.

The site featured a mock Los Angeles mayoral election for kids ages 12-18. Vargas and his team conducted video interviews with candidates Emanuel Pleitez and Kevin James.  The site contains an “issues” page with the most frequently discussed topics in the debates.  Visitors can rank them in order of personal importance.

Vargas, a rising senior at the Thirty-Second Street /USC Magnet School, said that the skills he learned at URBAN TxT gave him the confidence to run for, and win, the position of senior class president.

“My life up to March 2012 was the life of an ordinary youth from South Central,” Vargas said. “I went home, did homework and played video games.” 

He said that URBAN TxT “provided me with a hard-working environment, which is something I never would’ve had, because high schools now don’t really have that.”

Since joining the program, Vargas’ G.P.A. has risen from a 2.6 to a 3.8. He is now applying to schools such as Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. 

He also encouraged his friend, Luis Moctezuma, 17, to attend the summer academy with him. 

Moctezuma became the project manager and graphic designer for The Artist Network, a social networking site for artists, dancers, singers and painters.

A lover of both salsa and hip-hop dance, Moctezuma got his inspiration while attending World of Dance, the largest international Urban Dance Competition.

“I met so many people there, and they all said ‘you can search me on Facebook.’ When I got back, there were so many results. It was too much,” he said. “We all love to dance, I thought, ‘What if there was a way to connect us based on our interest?’ At first it was just dancers, and then I thought, ‘Why not make it bigger?’”

Like Vargas, Moctezuma said URBAN TxT helped him come out of his shell.

“It’s helped with presentation skills for classes in school,” he said. “I used to be intimidated by people and now I just go up and talk to them.” 

Menjivar tries to instill confidence in otherwise bashful boys by turning the tables on the more outspoken leaders of the class.

“He’ll pick out different people and say ‘you take the lead,’” Vargas said.

Moctezuma, also a student at Thirty-Second Street School, ran for Vice-President of the senior class.

He will represent the class of 2014 next year alongside his friend Jesus Vargas.

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With his thick, square-frame glasses and messy black hair, Oscar Menjivar looks as though he may once have fit the description of a “cool nerd.” He laughs and jokes with the boys, letting them know he is a friend as well as a teacher. His high expectations though, are clear from the information session before the summer academy even starts. 

Any latecomers must drop and give him 10 pushups, a requirement that comes with the admonition: “You will be on time or you will be tough.”

Menjivar will guide the boys in learning about computer programs such as Python, Javascript and Drupal but said that one of his aims is to get his students to turn to each other for help, rather than going straight to him. He informs them that at URBAN TxT, “we will put you in an environment where you will break if you don’t rely on each other.” 

The URBAN TxTers are introduced to a creed that encourages their personal and academic development. Menjivar drew from various sources to create his own philosophy. His muses include Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Sun Tzu, creator of the ancient Chinese military text, The Art of War. The guiding principles include affirmations such as, “I believe nothing is hard just a lot of work,” and “I believe in the habit of doing more than asked for.”

Menjivar said he hopes that the creed will foster self-development beyond the classroom, since, as he says, “In real life, there’s no G.P.A.”

Some former “TxTrs” are applying the skills they honed at the summer academy to personal projects. For example, program alum Alejandro Bernal, 17, is developing his own video games using the program Unity and Moctezuma put his graphic design knowledge to work in coming up with t-shirt designs for his hip-hop dance team, “Contagious Crew.”

Menjivar, who emigrated from El Salvador at age seven, became fascinated with computers after his dad brought home a broken one he had found. His father’s profession also influenced him to seek out a different path.

“My dad was an electrician and he would wake me up at five a.m. in the summer to paint, build and put up lights. I hated it,” Menjivar said. “I was always determined to do something different.” But Menjivar might have become a dropout statistic himself if not for one well-meaning teacher.

“I was in sixth grade when Mr. Wonders, a history teacher, caught me ditching,” Menjivar said. “He was also the lacrosse coach, and he told me, ‘You can come to lacrosse practice after school today or you can go to the principal’s office.’”

After that day, Menjivar played on the lacrosse team through his senior year of high school. 

He credits his old teacher, a “dad away from home,” with showing him how to set goals and stick to projects he started. He said that playing lacrosse as a kid from Watts, Menjivar attended Jordan High School, exposed him to different communities.

“Lacrosse is a wealthy sport. Playing at the private schools was a great way to build determination,” he said.

Menjivar went on to attend Cal Poly Pomona, where he majored in computers and information systems. He earned a Masters degree in Educational Technology from Pepperdine. 

His own experience with a positive role model has fueled Menjivar’s conviction to give back to his community. And he said he hopes he is providing the sort of inspiration and guidance to others that Mr. Wonders gave him. Vargas’ cousin, Guadalupe Perez, 29, said that her relative “goes to Oscar for help, and not just for URBAN TxT.”

Vargas was selected for a Questbridge scholarship, which provides funds for low-income students to visit colleges. He will return to Stanford for a conference in May where he will find out the amount of money he was granted.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who applied who said they interviewed mayoral candidates,” Vargas said.

According to Menjivar, none of the 76 summer academy participants have dropped out of the program, and all of the alumni have gone on to four-year institutions. He also said that 75 percent of the graduates became engineering majors.

And the program, now in its third year, continues to grow as more URBAN TxT alumni are telling their friends about the summer academy. 

Menjivar said he received more than 60 applications for 25 positions this year, as opposed to the 40 that came in last year. He reaches out to potential applicants through partner organizations such as the Watts Boys & Girls Club. Though he is considering adding girls to the program, Menjivar said he wants to focus on closing the gap in academic achievement that still exists between boys and girls, and pushing the boys from South L.A. to a place where they can compete against students from outside the state.

 Menjivar described an instance when he was invited to speak at a middle school in Watts to an audience of about 60 kids. When he asked if any of them knew how to develop a website, only five of them raised their hands. 

“It made me sad because I used to be one of those kids, from the poorest neighborhoods. I come back 15 years later and the same kids are still struggling. If something is not done about this, they won’t be able to compete globally or locally.”

On a recent Saturday, on the first day of this year’s summer academy, the 25 boys already owe their teacher 50 pushups. They took too long to complete their first team-building exercise: organizing themselves in a line in order of their birthdays, but without speaking. Menjivar is observing them to identify the leaders and get a sense of how they might work together as a team.

After finishing the pushups, the boys gather in a circle to discuss the icebreaker and brainstorm strategies for better communication. Everyone is required to keep a journal, where they must answer questions to discuss the following week.

What’s this week’s assignment? Ask five people how they have failed and what they learned from it. Before they leave for the day, the boys must repeat Menjivar’s favorite saying, a belief in the creed and the cornerstone for the entire program: 

“Success is not hard; it just takes a lot of work.” 

Reach Staff Reporter Anne Artley here.