Violence, Racial Ills on the Rise in Schools : Education: L.A. board hears a grim assessment of conflict spawned by increasing cultural diversity throughout the district.

Plagued by reports of increasing racial tension and violence on campuses, the Los Angeles school board met Thursday to hear officials describe conflicts wrought by the district’s mushrooming cultural diversity.

The hearing was sparked by reports of racial incidents, ranging from swastikas painted on the walls of a San Fernando Valley school to fights between Latino and black students on a high school campus in Watts.

“The conflicts are not just in a few schools, but districtwide,” Arlene Matsuo, head of the district’s Multicultural Commission, told the board.

At some schools, such as Sunland’s Mount Gleason Junior High, racial tensions are exacerbated by developing gang rivalries and by conflicts between neighborhood and bused-in students, officials said.

“My staff is afraid,” said Principal Patricia Joe. “There is minimal positive instruction going on right now.”

On other campuses, such as Jordan High School in Watts, the confrontations erupted between black and Latino students, separated by language and culture and sharing a campus that has changed rapidly from predominantly black to overwhelmingly Latino.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest with more than 610,000 students, speaking more than 80 languages, has changed dramatically in 25 years. Enrollment has changed from 56% white in the mid-1960s to more than 85% minority--61% of that Latino--today.

Schools in inner-city areas, once predominantly black, have become primarily Latino or Asian as immigrants have moved in. The resulting tensions are often rooted in the fact that the students cannot speak one another’s languages, officials said.

Many South Bay, Westside and San Fernando Valley schools that were virtually all white 25 years ago, now find white students a tiny minority. Their neighborhoods have changed from white to Latino, and the district has filled the schools with busloads of minority students from overcrowded inner-city campuses.

A recent Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission study found that the level of racial tension and misunderstanding among Los Angeles students is higher than in the general community, in part because of a growing intolerance of immigrant students.

At some schools, such as Madison Junior High School in North Hollywood, the immigrant groups have faced off. There, fighting between Latino and Armenian students reached such a level this spring that groups of Armenian parents stormed onto the campus, protesting that they feared for their children’s safety.

While Los Angeles schools had an active multicultural education program during its mandatory desegregation program a decade ago, board members admit the district has done little recently to head off the mounting racial and ethnic problems.

“You think these battles have been fought and won and that they stay won, but what this is telling us is that . . . we need a constant and consistent effort” to fight racial intolerance, said board member Rita Walters.