Activist’s Students Protest Cancellation of Course

More than 50 Spanish-speaking parents met Wednesday at San Fernando Junior High School to urge reinstatement of a parent training course by an Eastside Latino activist, which school officials say they canceled because he made anti-black and anti-Semitic remarks.

But at least two Los Angeles school board members said they will back school district officials who fired Horacio Quinones, a Baptist minister who since the fall of 1988 has conducted parent training classes in Spanish at 20 schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District.

District officials canceled Quinones’ course last week.

“They can protest all they want, but that won’t change anything,” Roberta Weintraub, the school board member representing the east San Fernando Valley, said in an interview. She described Quinones’ course as “a program of hatred.”

Quinones, who has been active in educational issues for several years, had been hired at a cost of $3,000 to teach 15 classes over nine weeks at the San Fernando school. The classes instruct Spanish-speaking parents in ways to help their children succeed in school.

School officials said he told parents during one class session last month that the Los Angeles school board majority was composed of Jews who controlled the fate of students in the predominantly Latino district.

Quinones also told parents that top financial administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District are all black, officials said.

Quinones does not dispute the account, but said he made his comments to illustrate the failure of the Latino community to receive proportional representation in the district. More than 60% of the district’s 625,000 students are Latino.

“My talk had to do with equal representation, affirmative action and active participation of parents,” Quinones said. “I said there were four Jews, one Hispanic, one black and one Japanese on the board and that it takes four votes to pass something.”

But Eastside school board member Leticia Quezada said Quinones’ methods are “creating racial disharmony” and must be stopped.

“In a district that is so racially and religiously diverse, we need to speak about the differences in a way that promotes an understanding relationship,” Quezada said. “The incident at San Fernando Junior High does the opposite.”

Sara A. Coughlin, the regional superintendent responsible for San Fernando Junior High, said Quinones’ comments, no matter how they were intended, do not deserve district endorsement.

Quinones was the center of a controversy early this year over his leadership of parent protests at Gage Junior High School in Huntington Park.