Races Find Harmony if Only for a Weekend

As year-end euphoria wafted like a breeze across the campus of Mark Keppel High School last week, a handful of students and faculty members gathered on the school’s broad front lawn for some hard summing-up of the school year. A bold experiment in human relations in the racially divided school, they decided, had ultimately failed.

Failed? Well, at least Project Harmony, as the program was called, had fallen far short of total success, they said.

“Sometimes we want to gauge our success in yards,” said Rudy Chavez, principal of the Alhambra school, where final exams ended last week and students moved languidly around the campus, savoring the last sweet days of the 1987-88 school year. “But in this business, you have to gauge it in fractions of inches.”

Keppel is a cliquish school. According to staff members, the school’s fragmented student body is a byproduct of rapid demographic changes in the surrounding community, where Asians are rapidly supplanting whites and Latinos.

Student Retreat

The centerpiece of Project Harmony, the yearlong effort to cut through some knotty communications problems among the school’s 2,667 students, was a weekend retreat in December. At a camp in the La Crescenta foothills, a racially diverse group of 90 students--using rap sessions and Esalen-style sensitivity techniques--laid their confused feelings about each other on the table and vowed to somehow overcome their differences.

The weekend was to have been the icebreaker to bring the Keppel’s divided student body together.

“After the weekend, everyone was optimistic,” said sophomore Cuong Huynh. “But as the days passed, the spirit disappeared. People ignored each other. It’s sad, after they shared the experience.”

“You’ll never get rid of cliques,” said junior Randy Chen. “It’s deep-rooted. No one wants to break the barriers.”

‘Made New Friends’

But others were less emphatic. Though Project Harmony, which was co-sponsored by the Alhambra School District and the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), produced no tidal wave of interracial chumminess at the school, which has gone from a predominantly Latino school to one that is 60% Asian in just five years, some individuals have begun to cross the racial divide. And organizations were in place to ensure that it could happen more often, they said.

“A lot of my friends are Latinos now,” said junior Grace Huang. “People are starting to make friends outside of their cliques.”

The retreat began tentatively, with members of different ethnic groups skirting their differences. But after some hard-hitting intergroup sessions, guided by NCCJ facilitators, harsh criticism and misunderstandings spilled out. From conflict, however, came the means to healing. By the end of the retreat, the students were a unified group, brimming with good feelings, hugging each other and clasping hands as they boarded the buses to take them back to their community.

They also were armed with a program, arrived at by consensus. They would start an organization, they said, to reduce culture shock for new students, many of whom are from Asian and Latin American countries. They would work for an Asian “lunar new year dance,” to balance other established ethnic events. And they would form a Harmony Club to keep the spirit of the weekend alive.

For the most part, the rest of the student body met the Harmony crowd with indifference. Some were hostile. “They came back as the shining stars, with a lot of publicity for having achieved positive things,” said principal Chavez. “When they got back to the campus, some asked, ‘How come you were chosen? How come I didn’t go?’ It was the normal pettiness of kids.”

Attempts to organize a club were rebuffed by other clubs. “There are easily 15 clubs of various ethnic backgrounds in the school,” said Chavez. “The idea of formulating another club to somehow harmonize these groups was not readily accepted.”

The Harmony group succeeded only in organizing a lunar new year lunchtime festival, rather than a dance. “The question came up, ‘How dare you even think of having a dance when you’re not even a club?’ ” said Juanita Sales, a bilingual instructional aide who worked with the youngsters.

When the festival organizers, in their new-found spirit of eclecticism, invited a Latino folkloric group to perform, members of the student government criticized them. “We got lambasted for being non-representative with a poor choice of entertainment,” said Maria Luisa Barajas, a school librarian who served as co-chairman of the weekend retreat.

Only the Big Brother/Big Sister program appeared to be an unmitigated success. As of last week, 30 students, most of them bilingual, had signed up to smooth the way for new arrivals. “They help the newcomers to know the school,” said counselor Clara Wu. “It’s very valuable, if you’ve ever experienced the fear of being a new freshman in a foreign country.”

By February, though, many of the Harmony students were beginning to lose interest. “At first, you saw a lot of unity,” said sophomore Lia Avila. “But little by little, it kept decreasing. It happened to me. I’d see a person (who had gone on the retreat), and I’d say, ‘Hi,’ but they’d just turn and say nothing. Or someone would just ignore me in the hall, though I’d knew they had seen me.”

Part of the problem was “senioritis,” said Barajas. “It’s in the nature of the beast called ‘senior,’ ” she said. “By February, they’re not interested in anything but grades and graduation.”

Most of the 20 or so staff and faculty who participated in the weekend were critical of both the school’s adult community and the district administration, which put up the $10,000 financing for Project Harmony, for failing to support the program.

“I was very disappointed with the way the district followed up on it,” said social studies teacher Janeane Vigliotti. “They said, ‘Give us a nice report,’ then they dropped it.”

Supt. Bruce Peppin said the district had been the impetus behind Project Harmony. “We put $10,000 into it, as well as providing transportation to the camp,” he said. “I don’t know what other support was needed.” He said there are plans to extend the Harmony concept to all high schools in the district next fall.

Others said that Chavez should have aggressively promoted Project Harmony. Chavez, who insists that the program was “extremely successful,” accepts the criticism stoically. “Project Harmony was here because of things that we did,” he said. “At first, I was reluctant to let them (NCCJ) in because of the risk.”

Now, he says, he is committed to building on the program next year.

For their part, Project Harmony veterans insist that the program was valuable at least in terms of breaking down some personal barriers. Several said they are able to overcome their shyness with members of other groups.

Nobody expected Project Harmony to create a utopia at Keppel, insisted Terrance Cheung, who lauded the program in a speech at Wednesday evening’s graduation ceremonies in the Keppel Stadium. “It involved fewer than a hundred out of a total of almost 3,000 students,” he said. “What we expected was to open the first real lines of communication between different racial and cultural groups.”

Added Lia Avila: “A lot of us feel that if we get the chance to do it over again, we’ll do it. The spirit is still with us.”