Walkouts at Centinela: Racism or Official Incompetence?

The mannequin in the classroom had been mutilated. It was black. And to Hawthorne High School Principal Ken Crowe, that was racist.

But to some white teachers, the one-time movie prop was nothing more than a teaching tool. For 10 years it had been used in the school’s “Film as Literature” class to illustrate how special effects can distort reality. Crowe, who is black, confiscated it last year, charging that it was just one more example of ongoing racial harassment in the Centinela Valley Union High School District.

The mannequin, which had been disfigured for use in the movie “Coma,” has come to symbolize two years of racial allegations in the district. It also is a telling metaphor for tensions that erupted last week at its two high schools in student protests over Crowe’s forced resignation.

Are the schools plagued by bigotry from a handful of white teachers who, as one district official put it, “are still living in the ‘50s?” Or perhaps is racism simply being used as a special effect of its own--a smoke screen for incompetence among school administrators who happen to be black?

“I thought we were away from this in America,” said parent Sherry Wingo, whose teen-age son is on the baseball team at Lawndale’s Leuzinger High. She said the week’s events have left her outraged and confused.

“The name calling, the looking at each other’s skin. It’s sad that these allegations are being made. It’s even sadder if they’re true.”

A state mediator has been dispatched from the Department of Education to ferret out the answers. And local political leaders hurriedly gathered Friday to develop a strategy to ease tensions.

But on a deeper level, education experts say problems at Centinela--genuine or contrived--stem from dramatic demographic changes that have taken place in the past decade at school districts statewide.

“This, regrettably, is simply a characteristic of our times at the end of the 20th Century in California, “ said James Guthrie, a professor of education at UC Berkeley who is regarded as one of the state’s foremost authorities on education policy. “This is a period of unusually intense racial conflict, and there is no better illustration of it than in our schools.”

At odds, Guthrie and others say, are rapidly changing student bodies, school boards that reflect a changing ethnic mix, the advancement of non-whites to high-level administrative posts and increasingly exacting teachers unions.

All those factors have come into play at Centinela Valley, which has undergone a demographic revolution in the last decade.

The district has seen its share of non-white students soar from 45% in 1980-81 to more than 80% today, with 52% of all students now Latino. In the past decade, the combined population of Hawthorne, Lawndale and Lennox--the communities that feed students to the district--has gone from mostly white to mostly non-white. In an election last fall in which the district’s racial problems became an issue, voters elected a school board that is now dominated by Latinos rather than whites.

Meanwhile, the district’s controversial top administrator, Supt. McKinley Nash, is a black man who last year confronted an overwhelmingly white faculty in an acrimonious contract dispute.

The mix has been a volatile one, not only in Centinela Valley but in other school districts, said UC Berkeley’s Guthrie.

Tensions recently erupted, for example, in the Oakland schools, which have a predominantly black administration and a predominantly white faculty. Amid charges of corruption, mismanagement and academic failure on the part of administrators, the Legislature took the unprecedented step last fall of appointing a state overseer to monitor the administration. The move immediately spawned allegations of racism on the part of white state officials and teachers.

Guthrie said the picture is complicated by the increasing statewide militancy of teachers unions in the wake of the successful Los Angeles Unified School District teachers strike last year that netted teachers a hefty pay raise and a new say in district policy-making. In districts such as Centinela--where the faculty and administration are of different ethnic backgrounds--rancor over issues such as school management and pay can easily be confused by underlying racial tension, he said.

Jeannie Oakes, associate professor of education at UCLA and an authority on school administration, agrees.

“I’m always suspicious when charges of racism come up because as I watched people in schools throughout the state . . . I don’t see a lot of overtly racist stuff going on,” Oakes said. “But when other issues cause tension--when educational issues or policy questions come into play--then these kinds of charges seem to rear their heads.”

Many of the teachers at Centinela Valley say that tension is the crux of their problems, and they say the cries of racism did not surface in earnest until last year’s contract dispute, when teachers began challenging Nash and some of the blacks he appointed to top positions.

“They are using racial issues to cover up what essentially is a labor-management dispute,” said John Wheeler, a social studies teacher at Hawthorne High School.

But other people say the racism is sadly real.

There have been 40 alleged incidents of racial harassment--involving administrators, teachers and students--at Centinela’s two high schools in the past two years, Nash said. They cover a broad spectrum, ranging from allegations of white teachers referring to black students as intellectually inferior to black teachers and administrators receiving racially offensive cartoons and notes.

The incidents, almost everyone agrees, began about two years ago when Crowe, then an assistant principal, was promoted to principal at Hawthorne High, where most of the racial allegations have arisen. Crowe, who announced his resignation on Feb. 27 after being told the school board intended to remove him, insists that he has been the victim of systematic harassment by a small group of white teachers. The board gave Crowe no official reason for his removal, but one member said it was because of his “management style.”

“I feel there are some (whites) who don’t want to take orders from minorities,” said former school board member Ann Birdsall, who was a strong supporter of both Crowe and Nash before being ousted in last fall’s elections.

In a memorandum to Nash early this year, Crowe detailed “a series of discriminatory incidents” at the school, some of which, he wrote, “have been clear violations of my civil rights as an American citizen.” In his resignation letter to the school board last month, Crowe complained about “the racist attitude of some of the Hawthorne High School staff.”

Crowe’s allegations were supported by an investigation by the school district that concluded in January.

“There was really an ingrained redneck element,” said attorney Melanie Lomax, a black attorney who led the investigation. “Ken Crowe and other minority administrators were constantly being harassed and denigrated and having double standards applied to them. Their authority was questioned every five minutes in ways that appeared to be connected to who they were in terms of their race.”

But many teachers aren’t so sure.

Ten years ago, for example, when Rudy Crew became the first black principal in Hawthorne High’s history, teachers said they had none of the problems that have occurred since Crowe took the post. Union organizer Lauren Sanders said teachers liked Crew so much, in fact, that he asked Crew to reconsider his decision in 1983 to move to a job in the San Gabriel Valley.

“I had a wonderful time at Hawthorne High School,” said Crew, who now is superintendent at Sacramento City Unified School District. Crew said there were initial “concerns” about his taking over as principal in 1980, but they “quickly vanished once I got to the campus to work with kids.”

Crew, a friend of Supt. Nash, said he got along well with the faculty, which was then, too, mostly white.

“It’s such a good school with so much potential,” he said. “I’m really surprised that these issues are unresolved.”

Crew’s success, teachers say, underscores their argument that the problem is Crowe’s competence--not his color. They say Crowe and his boss, Nash, have intentionally twisted legitimate concerns about their performance into outlandish accusations of racism. When some teachers challenged the dismissal of a popular white Hawthorne High drama teacher last year, for example, Crowe complained of racial overtones. Teachers say they were simply defending a deserving colleague.

“I think it is all made up,” said Nancy Nuesseler, a Leuzinger High social studies teacher and president of the teachers union. “I am not saying that everything here is perfect. But I don’t believe any of us are racists. You could not survive here if you were racists, with over 80% minority enrollment. You have to love all kids to survive in this place.”

Some teachers have gone so far as to say that Nash may have encouraged some students to walk out of classes last week. A week before the demonstrations, Nash made comments about racism at a student assembly that teacher Debbie Douglas said “laid a poisonous seed in fertile grounds.”

The special education teacher, and others, said the talk appeared to give some students permission to protest. On Friday, several dozen Leuzinger High teachers signed a petition, aimed at Nash and his supporters, urging that criminal charges be filed against adults who encouraged the demonstrations.

According to teachers at Hawthorne High, Nash told students that the problem of racism in Hawthorne and in the Centinela Valley Union High School District is worse today than it was in the ‘60s in the Deep South.

Nash acknowledged that he spoke about racism during a special assembly commemorating Black Heritage Month, but he characterized as “ridiculous” the claims that he may have incited students.

“I had nothing to say about Centinela or Hawthorne,” he said. “The kids weren’t riled at all.”

Parents, meanwhile, are furious that students have been pulled into what they view as an adult dispute. “I know I speak for a lot of my friends when I say I would like some answers,” said Bonnie Miller, whose daughter is a cheerleader at Hawthorne High.

Newly elected school board member Pam Sturgeon, who ran with strong teacher support and as a critic of the superintendent, said parents aren’t alone in their outrage.

“Most of these kids don’t even realize what is behind all of this,” Sturgeon said.

But some parents say it is Sturgeon and her fellow school board members who are to blame. Sharon Ratliff, whose son, Malcolm, helped organize protests at Leuzinger, said many blacks tried to warn the board over the past several months that racial tensions were running high.

“I have been going to meetings since December, and they don’t want to hear what you have to say,” Ratliff said. “If the board had listened, all of us could have come together and worked this out. But when they don’t listen, you have to turn to the community and the students for assistance.”

Sturgeon, who said her life has been threatened in the past week, said it is unfair to blame the newly elected board for problems that have plagued the district for years. She said the former board, which strongly supported the superintendent and his administrators, should shoulder the responsibility.

“They should have called for these investigations and dealt with all of the allegations out in the open,” Sturgeon said. “Most of the allegations coming from the black community about racism took place before the new board members even thought of running for the board.”

But former board member Birdsall, who lost her seat in November, said the board did attempt to lessen tensions by hiring Lomax to look into the complaints. She criticized the new board for not acting more decisively on recommendations to defuse tensions that were made in January by Lomax.

“My fear is for the kids,” Birdsall said. “They are the ones being hurt by all of this.”

Board President Ruth Morales, who was first elected to the board in 1979, said neither board is to blame. She said the former board worked behind the scenes to reduce tensions, and the current board has not been given a chance by the public.

“Instead of people coming to help or offering solutions, if you were at the board meetings, you would see they are making constant accusations,” Morales said. “We are trying, but you can’t do much when the climate is like this.”

State Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), who organized a meeting Friday of local officials concerned about the allegations, said district officials have been naive. “People wanted to protect the status quo,” she said.

In the midst of the turmoil, school officials are looking for long-term solutions to racial tensions in the most likely of places: the classroom. Among other things, officials are preparing an application to the state Department of Education for a grant to begin a human relations course for ninth-graders. State legislation establishing the grant program states that the curriculum must promote “positive interaction” among racial and ethnic groups and should teach the dangers of stereotypes and discrimination.

“We think we can help ourselves with this,” Nash said. “It is the one mechanism that is crucial when you have the kind of ethnicity changes we have: to have people communicate.”

Staff writers George Hatch and Hugo Martin contributed to this story.

ETHNIC MAKEUP OF CENTINELA SCHOOLS

STUDENTS

1980-81 1986-87 1987-88 1988-89 Whites 45.6% 30.7% 28.5% 18.7% Latino 33.7 38.7 43.9 52.4 Black 12.1 16.4 15.3 17.2 Asian/Pacific Islander 6.3 11.0 9.9 9.9 American Indian 1.4 0.5 0.5 0.4 Filipino 0.9 2.7 1.9 1.5

TEACHERS

1986-87 1987-88 1988-89 Whites 86.8% 83.6% 83.5% Latino 4.8 4.9 4.3 Black 4.8 7.5 7.8 Asian/Pacific Islander 3.1 3.5 3.9 American Indian 0.4 0.4 0.4 Filipino 0 0 0

ADMINISTRATORS

1986-87 1987-88 1988-89 Whites 56.3% 53.3% 62.5% Latino 6.3 6.7 6.3 Black 31.3 33.3 31.3 Asian/Pacific Islander 6.3 6.7 0 American Indian 0 0 0 Filipino 0 0 0

Sources: state Department of Education, Centinela Valley Union High School District

ETHNIC MAKEUP OF COMMUNITY

(includes Hawthorne, Lawndale, Lennox)

1980 1989* Whites 51.2% 43.6% Blacks 10.5 8.9 Latino 30.0 38.7 Other 8.2 8.9

Source: U.S. Census Bureau * Estimates