SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND THE PERSIAN GULF CRISIS : Students Plead to Bush in Letters

The youngsters in John Stodder’s class at Los Feliz Elementary School know something about war.

As children who have emigrated from Lebanon, Armenia and El Salvador, they can speak with certain authority when they talk about war’s death and destruction. So this week, in hand-scrawled letters to President Bush, Stodder’s pupils made a plea for peace.

“Dear Mr. President, I don’t want a war with Iraq, because people get hurt and die and the Earth gets destroyed,” wrote Eduardo Rodriguez, 7, whose family is from Santa Ana, El Salvador. “Mothers and their children and grandparents all will be gone forever and ever.”

In war, wrote 8-year-old Jorge Polanco of Lovato, El Salvador, “the animals will die and also the people will die.”

The letter-writing project is one way events in the gulf have filtered into this Los Angeles schoolroom. Stodder, a self-described pacifist who said he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, said the letters--expected to reach the White House next week--followed a group discussion about the meaning of war.

Stodder’s class is a collection of first- through third-graders who are receiving six weeks of special instruction on language and communication skills.

Other students at the ethnically diverse school have become pen pals with soldiers deployed in Operation Desert Shield. When the school’s playground director, Raymond Cruz, was dispatched to the front lines, students followed him with notes and candy.

Principal Betty Castaneda said different teachers have found different ways to focus attention on the war effort.

“We have to be sensitive because many of these children’s parents have come here because of war,” Castaneda said. “Many of these children have seen war already. They’ve seen blood. They’ve seen death. We are approaching this as sensitively as we can.”

In her letter, Josiane Samaha, 8, asked Bush to stop the war. Talking to a reporter, Josiane said news of possible battle reminds her of her native home of Beirut, Lebanon.

“My grandmother was walking once and a bomb came in front of her. She got scared,” Josiane said. “A lot of people died in Beirut.”

Jose Roberto Polanco, 9, described his vivid memories of insurgent warfare in his native El Salvador.

“The guerrillas and the soldiers threw bombs and they killed people when they threw bombs,” Jose Roberto said. “Once I saw soldiers jumping from a helicopter. They fell to the ground and began shooting toward the hills.”

Jose Roberto said he thought Bush would take his letter seriously “because it is important.”

Eduardo, the 7-year-old Salvadoran, said the world has seen enough war.

“I told President Bush not to have a war because that is what happened in El Salvador,” he said. “There have already been many wars.”

Not all the children hail from countries torn by conflict.

“People’s houses and the children will be destroyed,” wrote Angelica Maciel, 8, whose parents came to Los Angeles from Mexico. “Many animals are going to die also.”

Wrote 6-year-old Alana Lloyd: “Army tanks will come and shoot. And houses will be destroyed. Bombs will fall out of airplanes. War is really bad. All trees will fall down and die.”

Stodder, who said some younger students got an assist in writing their letters either from himself or a teacher’s aide, said he planned to mail the 35 missives--printed in English and Spanish on the familiar large, lined note paper used by children who are perfecting their alphabet--over the weekend.

In a sign of just how divisive the issue of war in the gulf has become, a few teachers objected to Stodder’s project, saying the letter writing was a political exercise that is not appropriate as a school activity.

“You have to be more objective in a classroom,” said Susan Levy, a teacher of fifth and sixth grades at Los Feliz.

“This is something they (students) can decide after they hear all sides. It should be something the children decide on their own and not something that is assigned” by a teacher, she said.

Castaneda, the principal, said Stodder had been told to present the issue without bias and to explain the pros and cons of war.