THE LOS ANGELES TEACHERS’ STRIKE : In Plain Language, These 2 See Strike as Another Barrier

Odir Romero, 12, and his best friend, Hugo Ruiz, roamed aimlessly across the crowded playground at Le Conte Junior High School on Thursday morning, discussing the teachers’ strike that has turned their school lives upside down.

The boys, who immigrated to the United States less than a year ago, casually dodged balls and ballplayers as they ambled through basketball and volleyball courts, never breaking stride or losing the thread of their conversation.

While more and more of their classmates are staying home each day the strike continues, these two keep showing up for class. Like the majority of this school’s non-English speaking students, the boys share one overriding ambition--they want to learn English. And strike or no strike, they plan to keep coming to school.

“The problem with the teachers’ strike is that they’re sacrificing us,” said the Spanish-speaking Ruiz, 15, who arrived in the United States from Mexico five months ago. “My father says they should resolve their differences without going out on strike.”

“But you think they’re going to give them the money they deserve just like that?” Romero, snapping his fingers, asked his friend. “ No, hombre ! (No, man).

“I want to learn English fast,” said Romero, who joined his mother in Los Angeles about 10 months ago from El Salvador. “The faster I learn, the faster I’ll be able to communicate with people. When you don’t speak English, sometimes you feel lonely.”

The boys said trying to learn through the strike has been frustrating.

“My parents have taught me that the more you study, the better you do in life,” Ruiz said. “I want to learn, but because of this strike, I can’t.”

At one point Thursday, a voice over the public address system directed students in the schoolyard to pick up the day’s attendance cards, take them from class to class and turn them in at the end of the day. The instructions are in English, but Romero headed straight to the tables where the cards are distributed. “I just follow everybody,” he explained.

The boy said he felt lost when he first arrived at Le Conte.

“The school seemed so large,” he recalled. “And I had never seen so many different people talking different languages.”

The two-story brick school in Hollywood boasts one of the city’s most diverse student bodies. Although Le Conte’s 1,500 students are predominantly Latino, Soviet Armenian and Asian, the school has counted 34 different native languages among its students.

“Now I have friends from different countries and I know words in other languages,” Romero said.

As they waited to go inside the school for their second-period class, the boys said they would have liked to have joined one of the informal basketball games. Instead, they sat on the bleachers watching several groups of Armenian youngsters play. Generally, they noted, the two ethnic groups play only among themselves. When they do play with each other, it often ends in a fight, they said.

When the bell calling them to class finally rang, Romero and Ruiz went their separate ways, each headed for one of 10 English classes scheduled for non-English speakers. The boys miss their regular teachers, but said things have improved since the first day of the strike. That day, they spent most of the time watching cartoons and wandering around the schoolyard.

“My mother says that as long as some teachers are still teaching, I should keep coming to school, that learning a little is better than nothing,” said Romero, whose mother works in a garment factory. “I want to know everything about life and to get a good job so that my mother and I don’t have to live in such a limited way.”