This Junior High Principal Was Ready for Protest

When an estimated 150 to 300 of his students streamed onto a playing field Friday to protest campus conditions, Lacy Alexander, principal of Inglewood’s Monroe Junior High School, was ready.

Setting in motion a plan developed the day before at a meeting of Inglewood School District principals, he notified the district office. Soon officials from 13 of the district’s schools, 10 of them principals, converged on Monroe to help security guards prevent pupils from marching off campus.

The students were ushered into the assembly hall, where Alexander and visiting administrators divided them into groups to discuss and write down their grievances. By 12:15 p.m., the pupils were at lunch or in class, little more than two hours after their demonstration had begun.

Alexander and school district officials were delighted with the results.

“I felt so good about it,” said Maurice Wiley, assistant to district Supt. George McKenna. “I can’t wait to tell the superintendent.”

But Alvaro Carrillo, president of the Monroe student council, was reluctant to term the day’s events a success.

“I don’t think they’re going to do what we ask,” he said, pointing to grievances that include dirty bathrooms, poor security, too few textbooks and inadequate counseling. “They were just listening to us.”

The well-oiled response to the walkout follows demonstrations staged for similar reasons Feb. 9 and Tuesday at adjacent Morningside High School.

Wiley said the plan to call in outside help in controlling walkouts was conceived out of concern that demonstrations might spread to other schools in the district.

But he said school authorities discussed the plan at a regularly scheduled principals meeting, unaware they would have to use it the next day.

“It was so timely,” he said. “It was decided that if a person, no matter if he is on the other side of town, has a problem, we would all come help.”

Alexander said he believed the walkout at Monroe was directly related to the Morningside demonstrations: “If this situation hadn’t happened at Morningside, it never would’ve happened at Monroe.”

Alexander and Wiley both promised that the students’ grievances would be studied and, if they are deemed valid, addressed. Both men indicated, however, that they think some of the complaints may be exaggerated.

For instance, Alexander said the problem with textbooks is their condition, not so much their supply. But members of the student council and their faculty adviser, social studies teacher James Lofton, said there definitely is a shortage of textbooks at the school.

“Students get here in September and they don’t get (textbooks) until November or December,” Lofton said. “You have state tests these students have to take, and we don’t have the books to study.”

Seventh-grader Maxine Grant said Friday’s demonstration was a genuine expression of students’ frustrations.

“The main reason for this walkout is to get people to listen to us,” she said. “It’s so we can get something done.”

Alexander acknowledged that many of the problems cited by the students are legitimate complaints stemming from a shortage of funds in the district. He said he told students that to solve such problems, parents, teachers, administrators and students would all have to cooperate.

“That’s my ground-level message,” he said, “that I need all the help I can get.”