60 Students Walk Out of Classes Over Dress Code

Antelope Valley high school students, who boycotted classes and attacked a sheriff’s patrol car Thursday to protest an anti-gang dress code, staged another class walkout Friday and said they were organizing a major protest before the school board next week.

About 60 students at Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster held a peaceful two-hour morning class boycott. School officials and sheriff’s deputies persuaded them to disperse, warning of suspensions and arrests if they refused.

Most returned to class, but some went home with parents. School officials said they were considering disciplinary action against the students for skipping classes.

Meanwhile, at Quartz Hill High School, where a student was arrested Thursday for threatening a teacher when his cap was confiscated, at least six students were suspended Friday for attempting to organize a class boycott, school officials said.

At Palmdale High School, the scene of a walkout Thursday, students passed out leaflets Friday calling for a weekend “strategy meeting” to prepare a major protest before the school board at its meeting next Wednesday, demanding that the code be revoked or revised.

The trustees of the Antelope Valley Union High School District voted last month to impose the dress code to fight gang violence.

Friday’s student demonstration and the larger ones Thursday--by about 200 students at Antelope Valley High and 200 at Palmdale High--were the first in the district in at least a decade, school officials said.

The demonstrations erupted Thursday when school officials began enforcing the dress policy.

During the Thursday protest at Antelope Valley High School, a crowd of about 200 students, some throwing rocks, rushed the patrol car of a sheriff’s sergeant and forced him to flee. The deputy was questioning several suspected adult gang members just outside the campus in an unrelated action, but the students apparently thought he had detained other demonstrators.

On Friday, students who said they were present at the attack said they got caught up in the emotion of their protest, but meant no harm.

However, sheriff’s deputies said, they still plan to seek prosecution of three students involved in the rock-throwing, one arrested Thursday and two who were detained and released Friday. They face assault and other charges, deputies said.

In the past decade, the rapidly urbanizing Mojave Desert region has undergone a drastic transformation, going from a place where gangs were rarely mentioned to one in which gangs have become a dominant concern in the schools.

School officials contend that the prohibition against all but official high school issued baseball caps, and any apparel school officials consider gang-related, is needed to protect students from being attacked for innocently wearing colors or items that provoke gang retaliation.

Students, however, say they ought to be able to wear what they want.

School officials portrayed the student demonstrators as a minority of malcontents and truants. “These are kids quite frankly who have gotten to the point where they aren’t in school much anyway,” Antelope Valley Principal Yvonne Healey said Friday.

But many students disagreed, saying broad student anger over the dress code restrictions has instead united a range of divergent campus cliques--”brains,” “stoners,” “jocks,” heavy metal devotees and even gang members--to fight for a common cause.

“On Thursday, I saw all these kids get along. That was weird,” said Palmdale High School junior Tammy Spargo, one of the protesters. Normally, she said, those groups would rarely associate at school, much less protest together.