It’s a Small New World : At one school, race doesn’t seem to matter. ‘It’s bizarre but wonderful,’ says a teacher.

It was a scene to make bigots and egalitarians alike squirm. The assignment for the sixth-graders was to discuss family heritage.

A handsome boy stood before the class, trying to describe his parents, but he was at a loss for words.

He turned to a classmate. “My mother is about that color,” he said, pointing to a girl with skin the color of cream.

“My father looks like this,” he added, touching the arm of a boy with flesh the shade of dark milk chocolate.

In parts of Los Angeles, students battle over skin color. Hate crimes are on the rise. Multiculturalism is synonymous with culture clash.

But in the boy’s poetry writing class at Hancock Park Elementary School, the discussion of skin shades launched an unself-conscious coloration exploration, said Cecilia Woloch, poet-in-residence at the school. Sleeves shot up as students scrutinized their own skin and the skin of their classmates, innocently marveling at an array of hues as variegated as a deluxe set of Crayolas.

Multicultural education, beginning in kindergarten, has been a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s official curriculum since 1975. Even so, teachers indicate this school appears to be the exception rather than the norm: At Hancock Park, racial tolerance is taught alongside reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic as an unofficial fourth R.

As a result, race, creed and color are not a source of friction, parents, teachers and students agree.

“The children tease each other about other things, but not the color of their skin or their accents,” says Donna Goldman, a kindergarten teacher at the school. “It’s bizarre but wonderful.”

The atmosphere of tolerance is especially significant because Hancock Park’s 520 students represent dozens of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, some with long traditions of spurning, enslaving or slaughtering others. Located in the geographical center of the city, the school has a population that is 22% Asian, 18% African-American, 20% Latino and 40% Anglo and other white students.

In fact, it brims with such peace, love and understanding that at any moment students might break into a chorus of “It’s a Small World”--which is exactly what they did at last year’s holiday pageant.

As a United Nations-like crowd of parents peered from behind videocams with beaming, tear-tracked faces, children sang a rap Christmas carol and danced the hora.

And when the first-graders got to “It’s a Small World,” they warbled not only in English, but in Spanish, French, Hebrew, Russian, Hungarian, Korean and Cantonese.

This chorus of languages in the L.A. public schools is often one of the first concerns raised by new parents disoriented by the mosaic of faces they see in this Fairfax to Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, and in this big old two-story school.

Brenda Steppes, the principal at Hancock Park, attempts to bowl over those anxieties with her glass-is-half-full world view.

“Kids learn languages really quickly,” she says, striding down a hallway decorated with children’s imitations of Japanese landscape paintings, Hopi kachina dolls, Christmas decorations and crepe paper menorahs.

To contend with the cacophony of tongues that arrive in the school system each year, Los Angeles educators have constructed a language, in which they speak of FEPs, LEPs and NEPs--students with Fluent English Proficiency, Limited English Proficiency and No English Proficiency.

All the teachers are certified to teach English as a second language, and classes are taught in both English and Spanish. When new children arrive at Hancock Park, their language skills are immediately typed into a computer. When possible, students from other countries are coupled with children who speak the same language in a “linguistic buddy system.”

The philosophy, Steppes says, is to teach the students English, while encouraging them to maintain their own language skills.

But language is only one of the ways people communicate, and the school works aggressively to inculcate an acceptance of differences, says Steppes.

Teachers at Hancock Park recall working at schools where the program clearly fell short as children openly insulted, and sometimes assaulted, each other.

Hancock Park school may, in fact, be at an advantage. For decades, the neighborhoods that feed the school have embraced immigrants from everywhere on the globe, says Steppes.

Jeff Lantos, a sixth-grade teacher at the school, sees the diversity as a huge benefit that the wealthiest private school can’t offer. “When we talk about current events, we have a kid from Syria who can talk about what it was like there. When we talk about ancient civilizations, we have a student from India. These kids are resources for a teacher.

“That’s what’s wrong with private schools. People are not privileged to hear the kinds of stories and be with these kinds of people.”

Steppes, a Jew of Spanish, Portuguese and Russian descent, is married to an African-American. She went to kindergarten at Hancock Park. Now, as she strolls through the hallways, she grabs pupils right and left, showing them off like flowers picked from a wildly eclectic garden.

The school’s student council members stop to chat, looking like a poster for the Rainbow Coalition: An Asian, a Latino, an African-American and an Anglo.

Steppes swears she didn’t rig the vote.

Running into Steppes in the hallway, Jose Cruz, a sixth-grader, says he remembers the day he arrived at the school. An immigrant from El Salvador, bused to the school from Hollywood, he spent the morning sobbing in Steppes’ office.

“I was afraid at first. I didn’t know anyone,” he says, as two Asian girls emerge from a classroom and tease him flirtatiously.

Three other buddies, all 10, appear: Brian Landau, Kamrouz Ghadimi and James Im.

Landau is the only native English speaker. The other boys speak Farsi and Korean at home, but are now fluent in English as well.

Neither ethnicity nor language affects their friendship or the way they think of other kids. “We don’t pay attention to it,” Ghadimi says. “Everyone’s the same.”

“Except for (extraterrestrial) aliens,” adds Im.

“If you believe in them,” says Landau.

While the children apparently take their diverse ways for granted, their parents are not always as nonchalant.

“I came from Montgomery, Ala., where it was only black and white . . . and there’s a clean line between the races,” says Reba Standard, a black woman of African-American and American Indian descent, whose 5-year-old daughter is in Goldman’s kindergarten class. “When a kid grows up in a one-race community, they miss out on a part of humanity.”

Laura Teti moved to Los Angeles eight years ago from Grand Island, Neb. “There was one black child in the entire town,” Teti says. Teti is in the school’s computer lab, doing volunteer work on one of the school’s Apples.

Now her daughter Agatha, a kindergartner, and son Joey, a second-grader, have friends of every cultural background imaginable. “My son comes home amazed. He’ll tell me, ‘We learned to say “Hi” in Japanese today!’ ”

Some parents admit that they might not be so content with exposing their children to cultural diversity if that diversity were not such a balanced blend. For example, one mother, who asked not to be named, pulled her child out of another public school and transferred him to Hancock Park because the other school was predominantly Latino. Not that she has anything against Latinos, she says. But “our son has platinum blond hair. He was very aware of being different.”

Poet Woloch is olive-skinned, a blend of a Polish mother a Ukrainian father, and a grandmother the family calls a Gypsy. Growing up as a first-generation American in Pittsburgh, she learned quickly how it feels to be an outsider.

At Hancock Park, she has been awed by the way pupils treat each other. “There is such an emphasis placed on respect here. Kids write poems about not liking each other. But it has nothing to do with culture or color.”

In her own work as a poet, she mines her personal history for inspiration. She also urges the children to delve into their cultural and family heritage.

I come from people that work hard and

I have my mom’s eyes and I have

my father’s temperature (sic) . . .

writes a girl from Guatemala.

I come from a place you would not believe

until you’ve seen it for yourself.

I come from beautiful streams and

a cheerful blue sky.

I come from a place called Africa,

writes another boy.

Sometimes, Woloch says, the pupils read their poems, and she and the principal step into the hallway and cry. Often Woloch goes home inspired, she says.

Woloch’s family lives in Kentucky now. When she visits she is struck by the sameness of the place. “I find I miss the different accents and skin tones back there in that black and white world.”

And when she returns to her neighborhood near the school, she is always relieved.

“The diversity nourishes me in a way I can’t explain.”

ETHNIC MIX IN SCHOOL

Los Angeles County White (not Latino): 26.1% Black (not Latino): 12.7% Latino: 50.4% Other: 10.8% Orange County White (not Latino): 55.41% Black (not Latino): 2% Latino: 29.2% Other: 13.5% California White (not Latino): 47.1% Black (not Latino): 8.7% Latino: 33% Other: 11.2% Figures are for the 1989-90 school year. “Other” includes Asian, Pacific Islander, Filipino, Indian and Native Alaskan.