Cultural Awareness Sessions at Centinela : Education: Seeking to defuse racial conflicts, students at Leuzinger and Hawthorne high schools talk about how their ethnicity affects the way teachers treat them.

In a bit of role reversal, two student panels fielded questions from teachers in the Centinela Valley Union High School District this week as part of a program aimed at broadening cultural awareness to avoid the racial tensions that divided the district last year.

The eight-member panels at Leuzinger and Hawthorne high schools represented a diverse range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. After discussing how their ethnicity affects the way they are treated by teachers and other students at school, the panelists were then asked to provide suggestions for promoting harmony in the district.

Although most of their comments about teachers and the schools were positive, a few students expressed frustration at what they perceived as cultural ignorance and insensitivity by some of their teachers.

“Because you have a Hispanic name, immediately a teacher thinks you’re Mexican,” said Jorge Guandigue, a senior at Leuzinger High School who emigrated from El Salvador two years ago.

Rodrick Horne, a senior at Leuzinger who is black, was critical of some teachers’ selection of material for their classes. “There’s not enough about our race in the books. I’d like to learn about my people, what they were like and what they did.”

The student panels, which met for about an hour Monday morning, launched the first of what will be six days of staff development and training programs scheduled throughout the school year. Teachers spent the rest of the day in seminars on cultural characteristics and stereotypes, teaching techniques and building self-esteem.

The training comes as teachers, students and administrators try to make sense of the racial divisiveness that erupted into allegations that blacks are not treated fairly in the district and led to a two-day student walkout in March. The allegations continued through the summer when trustees fired Supt. McKinley Nash and demoted Hawthorne Principal Kenneth Crowe, both of whom are black. Crowe has since left the district.

Centinela Valley has seen drastic demographic changes over the past 10 years. Once predominantly white, the student population today is 53.4% Latino, 18.4% black and 8.5% Asian. About 80% of the teachers are Anglo. Four of the five school board members are Latino and one is Anglo.

The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating the allegations of racism, and several lawsuits have been filed against the district.

In August, a state report on racial tensions recommended that the district develop programs to reduce racial conflicts, including the appointment of an ombudsman to look into complaints.

Although an ombudsman has yet to be appointed, the district contends that it has already put into effect many of the recommendations. In its own investigation, the district concluded that the disruptions were the product of a conspiracy by school employees intent on discrediting the school board for political reasons.

Many students on Leuzinger’s panel indicated they would like to put the events of last spring behind them. But some of the teachers’ questions, which were passed forward on index cards, made it clear the adults were still looking for answers.

“How do you think the perception arose that teachers and staff are uncaring and racist and create other problems?” the students were asked.

Todd Tyson, a senior at R. K. Lloyde Continuation High who is black, said he believed that the allegations reflect that some teachers are indeed prejudiced. When they make biased statements, he said, “they think other people don’t hear it, but then it gets around.” Tyson was part of the Leuzinger panel.

But Courtney Day, a senior at Leuzinger who also is black, disagreed: “I think there’s a stereotypical image in students’ minds that all teachers are tyrants, so that when things come up and students are primarily wrong . . . they come up with these stories, trying to portray teachers negatively.

“As time goes on, there is an image that teachers are racist,” she said. “It’s really based on a lot of rumors and untruths.”

Many teachers later said they were surprised to discover that most of the students said they thought highly of them and the school.

“To me, it was a nice, big, warm fuzzy,” said Leuzinger social studies teacher Nancy Nuesseler, a former union president who came under fire last year after she called Nash a “Stepin Fetchit” for state Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, a remark that some people considered racially insensitive.

Some teachers, however, said they were struck by the negative experiences some of the students conveyed.

Magdalena Alvarez, a Leuzinger employee who serves as a community liaison, said the students’ comments showed that “they want teachers to be aware of where they’re coming from and who they are. What they mainly resent is that we don’t know much about their cultures.”

Leuzinger science teacher Nikki Jones, who is black, said: “I thought it was pretty interesting that some of the kids picked up on things going on with the adults. They see things that a lot of teachers won’t recognize--the tension between the teachers.”

A few teachers said the students’ comments merely confirmed what they already knew. Others said they regarded the cultural training sessions as punishment for the events of last spring.

Foreign language department Chairwoman Linda Cummings, who is Anglo, said: “A lot of people felt, ‘Why are we doing penance for past wrongs when the people who were responsible for that were fired or left the district?’ ”

Although she said she sometimes felt the students’ answers needed clarification and that the discussion was too short to be really useful, Cummings said she was “pleased that they seemed in general to perceive teachers as helpful and cooperative.”

The student panels were the brainchild of Jo Bonita Smith Perez, a multicultural educational consultant with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, who was brought to the district after teachers expressed a desire to learn more about the ethnic and cultural groups that make up the student population.

The teacher-training sessions were made possible by a state-funded program aimed at improving instructional practices, student attendance and school environments. The funding allows the schools to schedule student-free days for teacher training.

For the 1990-91 school year, Centinela Valley received $93,000 in state funding and allocated an additional $80,000 in general fund money for the program. It will devote one-third of its training sessions to multicultural awareness.

At the end of Monday’s program, Perez said the best lesson of the day was found during Leuzinger’s student panel, when senior Long Trinh described the pain of leaving his parents in Vietnam and his shock in learning soon after that his father had died. As Long began to cry, Tyson, the senior at Lloyde Continuation High, put his arm around him.

“What they generated spontaneously is what we want to see happen in the classroom,” Perez said. “The physical closeness, the empathy, the laughing with each other and joking with each other comfortably. Many people might not have noticed that, but that meant a whole lot of space-sharing and acceptance. It was a graphic illustration to teachers that they can also demonstrate those kinds of feeling in accepting kids (of) different backgrounds.”