Centinela District Trustees Plan New Set of Meetings

Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees say they will go ahead with a series of private get togethers with people from the community, despite being forced by protesters to cancel the first of two such evenings Tuesday.

The trustees had planned to meet in a series of 30-minute sessions on two nights this Spring with small groups of parents, students and teachers who signed up to speak with them about issues confronting the district. The first of those was to be Tuesday.

However, trustees canceled the evening before it got under way when about 15 protesters took seats in the board room where the closed discussions were to take place.

“We had to cancel the whole thing because a certain section of the community took over the board room,” Trustee Jacqueline Carrera said Wednesday. “If we had called our security or police to move them, I had no idea how they would have reacted. I didn’t want to take a chance of any pushing or shoving.”

The protesters, however, said they intended no physical confrontation. Instead, they wanted to voice their concerns about the treatment of black administrators and teachers by the predominantly Latino school board, several said.

About half an hour after the first session was to begin, Supt. McKinley Nash emerged from his office and told both the protesters and those who had signed up to speak with two trustees that the informal sessions for that night were canceled and would be rescheduled.

The board last month decided to call off a regular meeting in May and another in June to set the private sessions after previous board meetings turned into shouting matches among factions in the district.

Black community activist Don Jackson, who organized Tuesday’s protest, said the trustees’ decision to cancel that night’s sessions was proof once again that “any time there’s a confrontational issue, either about racism” or the status of Hawthorne Principal Kenneth Crowe, the trustees “close the meetings down.”

After being told he would be reassigned, Crowe, who is black, submitted his letter of resignation as principal in March, to be effective at the end of the school year. He has since asked the board to rescind his resignation, but the board has instead ordered him placed on medical leave.

Crowe’s resignation, along with allegations that his reassignment was racially motivated, were factors in two days of student walkouts in early March.

Although some say the district is rampant with racism, others say the allegations are overblown and are being used by black administrators as a smoke screen to deflect criticism about their management abilities. The state Department of Education’s Office of Intergroup Relations is assessing the district’s racial climate and expects to issue a report by the end of May.

More than 35 people signed up to participate in Tuesday’s sessions, which were to run in half-hour segments with no more than two trustees and six community members.

Trustees Pam Sturgeon and Carrera both said Wednesday that they planned to meet only with those who had signed up by May 4. Protesters pointed out that a letter informing the public about the meetings did not mention there would be a cutoff date for sign-ups and several sought to sign up Tuesday night.

The meetings were called off, Sturgeon said, when protesters who were not signed up “overtook the board room . . . and the community was at risk” of violence.

“Had they (protesters) been out there picketing, being calm, cool and collected, we would have gone through with the meetings,” she said.

But Jackson said these fears of the school officials were unwarranted.

“We didn’t have an army of people down there. . . . We had 10 students, two teachers and one couple, a parent and his wife,” Jackson said. “They (trustees) keep portraying it as if they’re under attack by legions of angry mobsters who are totally not compassionate and indifferent to basic forms of communication. These students and parents just want their issues to be heard.”

Zyra McCloud, a representative of the South Bay chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said the board’s rules about signing up in person at the district offices “made it difficult for people to participate. . . . When they came up with this concept (of private meetings), we felt it was another attempt to divide and conquer and sweep the real problems and issues under the carpet.”

But one parent who was signed up expressed disappointment. Nancy McKee, a white parent, said she believed the protesters “just want to start trouble.” McKee said she was angry and disappointed that the meetings were canceled. “I really wanted to ask the board some questions tonight, like, ‘Do we have some hope here?’ ” McKee said.