Latinos Lead Campaign for Better Education in Dinuba : Schools: Similar protests against Anglo officials are expected to spread through San Joaquin Valley towns.

Maria Echeverria, her 9-year-old twins in her lap, sits in the small living room of a friend’s cramped home and says that nothing would make her prouder than seeing her five children graduate from college.

That is the reason she gives for pulling her children from the Dinuba schools and joining a 6-week-old boycott by Latino parents that is tearing this San Joaquin Valley farming town apart.

In the white-run Dinuba schools, she concluded, her brown-skinned kids were being taught to work in the packinghouses or tomato fields, not educated to attend the University of California or Harvard University. At home, she at least knows the children are reading--they read aloud in front of her.

“What do they miss (being out of school)? Not much,” Echeverria, herself a college graduate, said in disgust.

The radical nature of the boycott and Latino-led campaign for better schools has shocked Dinuba, a dot on the map that schools Supt. Mark Fabrizio calls a “conservative farm town,” the kind of place where old-timers still show up for the Dinuba High School commencement 50 years after they fought for the Green ‘n’ White.

In the last month, in addition to the classroom boycott, there have been marches through town by hundreds of Latinos, calls for a boycott of white-owned businesses and even an egg-throwing melee at a school board meeting at which nine people were arrested. Another big rally is set for the weekend.

It is a cause that many expect to become more popular in the farm towns sprinkled across the San Joaquin Valley. With their numbers swelling, Latino parents increasingly are protesting the quality of public education in school districts where nearly all board of education members and most teachers are Anglo.

Latino parents have a “deep-seated frustration” over high dropout rates, low expectations for their children by Anglo educators, and limp attempts to hire minority teachers, said Teresa Perez, acting chairwoman of the teacher-training departmentat Cal State Fresno.

“Places like Dinuba, rural places, are accustomed to looking at Hispanics as being especially suited for farm work,” Perez said, adding: “You still see some of the perception that certain groups are not able to function at high levels.”

In Dinuba, for all its drive-in restaurants, high school football games and youth soccer leagues, the rancorous fight is tarnishing the town’s “American Graffiti” facade.

“Someone said we were like in the ‘50s and perhaps they were right,” said Police Chief Ed Hernandez, one of the town’s highest-ranking Latinos and a potential political candidate. “What’s happening will make us move real fast to the ‘90s.”

Dinuba school officials, who say say that only a handful of students remain out of class, are taking a hard line against the boycott. Fabrizio has vowed not to bend to “gangster tactics,” and he complains that the fabric of Dinuba society is being shredded by “out-of-town agitators.”

“We don’t need this,” the superintendent said in a recent interview.

In one of the fight’s nastier turns, Dinuba police this month arrested Ben Benavidez, Fresno head of the Mexican-American Political Assn., on 10 counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors by encouraging them to stay out of school.

Benavidez is the prime target of townsfolk who blame the troubles on outsiders. Benavidez likens the Dinuba fight to the desegregation battles of the 1950s and ‘60s.

He said officials are acting “like hacienda owners” by threatening to expel students who join the boycott. Benavidez, a veteran of many Central Valley political battles, has hit a nerve with the education quality issue.

At a school board meeting last week, upward of 950 students and parents stood in a line around the block to jam into the high school auditorium and vent their emotions, on both sides of the issue, well into the night.

For every success story, there was a tale of mistreatment. A young Latina told how she flourished, pulling down a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and getting a stratospheric score on her college entrance exam. Another told of scholastic failure, getting pregnant at age 13 and being forced to drop out “because you didn’t know how to handle me.”

“There’s problems in the schools--face it,” said Salvator Archuleta, a product of Dinuba High and a father of three public school students.

Even some people who acknowledge the need for change shudder at what they see as radical tactics.

Toni Perez-Gerbrandt, a Dinuba kindergarten teacher and daughter of migrant workers, knows well the need for more bilingual and Latino teachers. Out of a class of 29, nine children speak no English. They lit up when they found their teacher could speak their language, she said, and sometimes they cry when she must take a day off.

“Somebody had to speak out,” she said of the lack of Latino presence behind teachers’ desks.

But she denounced the violence and vandalism connected to the school protests, saying it has many children “scared half to death.”

The battle began quietly when attorney Joaquin Avila, a voting rights expert from the Bay Area, filed a series of suits in 1990 and 1991 against the Dinuba High School board and elementary school board, the city of Dinuba, the elected board that runs Dinuba’s only hospital, and the school board in neighboring Orosi.

The suits allege that the various bodies violate the Voting Rights Act with “at-large” systems of electing members. Avila wants court orders to force candidates to run in smaller districts, a system that federal courts have ruled is more equitable by making it easier for minorities to win office.

Without a push from lawsuits, Avila said, things might not change in towns such as Dinuba for years. The average tenure on the Dinuba school boards exceeds a decade. One member has been on the elementary school board for 20 years, and a high school board member has served 18 years. Dinuba board members receive only health insurance as compensation.

“If you have no elected Latinos, then the board doesn’t respond to the needs of the Latino students,” Avila said.

At Dinuba High School, almost 70% of the students are Latinos, and nearly all of them are Mexican-American. Only one high school teacher, a Cuban-American, is Latino. Only a handful of Latinos teach in the elementary schools.

School officials insist that they try to recruit Latinos and bilingual teachers, but given that Dinuba’s starting pay is a low $22,500 annually, talented young teachers can make thousands more in other districts.

As possible evidence that students are not being encouraged to aim high, only 28% of Dinuba’s seniors took the Scholastic Aptitude Test for college entrance in 1989, compared to 41% statewide, the latest Department of Education figures show.

Of Dinuba’s 165 high school graduates in 1989, 13.3% went to a UC or Cal State campus, compared to 17.2% statewide. High school graduates from the San Joaquin Valley, where 30% of the population is Latino, attend the University of California at less than half the statewide rate.

Dinuba city and school officials say they might be willing to settle the lawsuits, but they fear they will have to pay dearly if they do. Mayor Ray Fudge accuses the plaintiffs of being out to “build themselves a war chest so they can go into the next town” and file more lawsuits.

He points to Avila’s hefty bill in his suit against tiny Alta Hospital, the only local hospital. Avila sued the government-run hospital in October, 1990. By February, the hospital board had agreed to hold district elections.

But the victorious lawyer had a final bit of business: his bill. Last month, U.S. District Judge Edward D. Price sided with Avila, granted him an hourly fee of $300, and ordered the hospital to pay the lawyer and his staff $292,000.

The bill could force the hospital into bankruptcy.

“The irony you’re left with is that the Hispanic community’s ability to elect someone to the hospital board has increased, but there may not be a hospital left to elect a Hispanic to,” said Steve Carroll, the hospital’s lawyer.

Voter rights suits or not, some Latinos here are convinced that, given the population shifts, they will have the numbers to seize control of the schools and City Council within a few years.

In recent years, several other towns have elected Latinos routinely. In the Fresno County town of Parlier, Latinos make up more than 95% of the 10,000 people. Four of five school board members are Latino, as are 49 of the Parlier school district’s 110 teachers.

“We’re at every recruiting fair,” schools Supt. Emilio Garza said. “It’s important to us. Latino teachers may be the bridge from the minority culture to the majority.”

But Garza is most proud that last year, 40% of Parlier’s most recent graduating class of 83 seniors went on to four-year colleges, a percentage that exceeds the state average and one that has grown steadily over a decade in which Latinos have been in control.