A Question of Bigotry, or What’s Best for Our Children?

Jesse Frankel, 14 years old, is an honor student. He’s a small kid, kind of shy, wears braces on his teeth. He lives in Westminster.

Which is the problem.

Jesse says he doesn’t want to go to Westminster High School in the fall. He is afraid. Two older boys shot at Jesse and his younger brother with a pellet gun earlier this year. The tough guys, arrested and turned over to the Probation Department, go to Westminster High.

In his junior high school yearbook, a friend of Jesse’s wrote this: “You’re a great person with many talents, and I’m sure you’ll do good in life. You better get a transfer so you don’t have to go to murder school.”

Murder school is kidspeak for Westminster High, an exaggeration, but you get the idea. The crime statistics on Westminster High, and its environs, are not good. Gangs are a problem, so are drugs. Academically, Westminster’s test scores tie for last place among the six schools in the Huntington Beach Union High School District.

Then Jesse’s friend wrote this: “MHS Rules.” MHS means Marina High School, which is where Jesse’s friends are going and where Jesse wants to go too. Marina’s not far from his house, and he can ride his bike there with no sweat.

If it’s test scores you’re counting, Marina ranks third in the district. And the crime statistics are nowhere near as bleak as those of Westminster High.

So Jesse’s parents, Sandy and Jeff Frankel, have asked that their son be transferred. They thought that this wouldn’t be a big deal. They thought their case was clear, their cause just: They want the best for their son. They’ve taken him to two counselors who agree: Jesse would be better off at Marina, where he feels safe.

Except the school district, and its board of trustees, see things differently. They have turned down the Frankels’ request several times. Other parents have asked too; they have their own “Jesses.” I have talked to many of these parents myself.

The district tells them the same: You live within the boundaries, you go to the school. Exceptions are rare. Case closed.

So these families move, or they try to, or they transfer their child to another school district entirely, which the County Board of Education approves. Sometimes, they try tricks. They rent an apartment within the boundaries of another school for a month or two, then use that as proof that their child can attend the school of their choice.

“But the mistake they made with me is that I am not going to give up,” Sandy Frankel says. “It’s gotten down to the principle of the thing. We have got to have more choice in schooling. Our children should go to schools where they are going to excel. I care about how secure my child feels at school.”

I am sitting in the Frankels’ living room now. Sandy, a mail carrier in Seal Beach, has just come from work. Jesse’s here too, telling me about how life as he knows it will end if he is forced to go to Westminster High.

“I was really looking forward to going to Marina,” Jesse says. “At Westminster, I wouldn’t get involved in anything. A lot of the characters there, they scare me. When I go to the mall, some of the Hispanics, they mess with you.”

So there goes the red flag. Race. Sandy says she doesn’t want to paint this issue in racial tones. It is not, she says, an issue of us-against-them or we-don’t-want-to-mix-with-their-kind. She says it comes down to doing right by your kids.

Yet the issue of race always comes up--here, and everyplace else. Westminster, like most communities throughout Southern California, is becoming “more ethnically diverse.” The cops talk about it, school officials talk about it, parents and especially their kids talk about it. Even if they don’t always use the same terms.

At Marina, most of the students are white. Their families, by and large, are middle and upper class. A lot of the students at Westminster High are poor. Whites, once a clear majority, are now 38% of the student population. Asians and Latinos make up more than half.

“We all need to get along,” Sandy Frankel says. “It’s like we are a big puzzle, and we all need to fit. But that takes time.”

Time, this mother says, that her son doesn’t have.

So there is a problem, one that the school district certainly recognizes, but one without an instant solution.

“I wish we knew what the solution was,” says Doris Longmead, the district’s director of alternative education, who handles transfer requests. “I think we are going to have to do some good P.R.”

Bonnie Maspero, principal of Westminster High, says we should just cut through all the bull, say it like it is, and then fix it.

“It all comes down to issues of prejudice and bigotry,” she says. “I think these parents are overreacting. Their way of coping when people of color move into their neighborhood is to flee, just like they did in L.A. I say stay here and be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

Except in areas like Sandy Frankel’s Westminster neighborhood, that can be a very hard sale.

“Yes, we are leaving a ship, but that’s because we see the ship as sinking,” says Shari Jolicoeur, who says her younger son, who is in the seventh grade, is already worried about the prospects of attending Westminster High.

“But we are doing it for our children. That is the bottom line.”