Students Give a Lesson in Awareness : Education: Seeking to defuse racial conflicts, they talk about how their ethnicity affects the way Centinela district’s 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 to broaden cultural awareness and avoid 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, the panelists were asked to provide suggestions for promoting harmony in the district.

A few students expressed frustration at what they perceived as cultural insensitivity by some teachers.

Rodrick Horne, a senior who is black, criticized some teacher material selection. “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 Monday morning, launched the first of what will be six days of staff development and training programs scheduled throughout the school year.

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.

Once predominantly white, the student population of Centinela Valley 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. Many students on Leuzinger’s panel indicated they would like to put the events of last spring behind them. But some teachers’ questions 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 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.”

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.