Poway Schools Charting Course for an Improved Racial Climate : Education: Sensitivity training at problem schools is already under way. Some critics are skeptical that district will do enough.

Beset with charges of discrimination, Poway Unified School District has been searching for ways to improve the racial climate on its 43 campuses.

District officials say sensitivity training at problem schools is already under way, beginning the painful process of examining the cultural fissures between administrators, teachers, parents and students. Poway officials uniformly predict a better racial climate, given time and patience.

Not all parents share the district’s optimism.

“We were asked to take it on faith that the district was doing something about the problems,” said Gregory Hancock, whose daughter is a seventh-grader at Bernardo Heights Middle School. “The reports kept coming. We were asked again to trust that the district was taking care. And still we’re hearing about racial problems and a lack of response on the district level. . . . Now, we’re in a trust deficit.”

Parents are expected to voice their concerns at a meeting of district trustees tonight.

Since June last year, several disputes over racial issues have been voiced by parents and students in the district, including complaints about the lack of minority teachers and administrators.

Other problems have been aired:

* The parents of Simerjot Jassal criticized loosely framed policies to determine valedictorian honors. The Jassals argue that the policies allow for penalizing and favoring certain students. Simerjot, whose parents were born in India, compiled a perfect school record. Her family contends that racial discrimination may have cost her the No. 1 ranking in Carmel Valley High School’s Class of 1991. Although Simerjot is a freshman at Stanford, the family continues to appeal to the district.

* A teacher at a middle school distributed a vituperative critique of Malcolm X’s life during African-American history month in an attempt to “supplement” material already approved by the school. After no punitive action was taken against the teacher, African-American parents questioned whether the district was in effect tacitly condoning the letter.

* A month later in March, a small group of teachers at the same school wrote a letter to the principal suggesting the new assistant principal be a “one arm (sic), black woman, naturalized American, who speaks Filipino and can sign with one hand.” Parents and teachers called for the district to take action against the authors of the letter.

The district human relations committee, which formed two years ago during racial disputes at two high schools, has discussed ways to reduce problems, but racial incidents persist, including a scuffle in which a black student was pitted against five white, Filipino and Latino students at Meadowbrook Middle School.

Gerald Washington Jr., a sixth-grade student, was allegedly tripped and kicked by classmates during a lunch break May 14. Four of the five boys told sheriff’s deputies that they were “playing Rodney King.”

School and district administrators said they did not regard the scuffle as racially provoked, and the matter was closed after one youth was suspended for two days. Gerald’s parents removed him from school, and he remains in a home-study program, the parents said, until the district establishes an environment that discourages acts of racial discrimination.

Schools in the district have begun to provide sensitivity training for staff, but there has been some backlash from teachers and district outsiders. Tom Metzger, the former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who lives in Fallbrook, has asked the district for equal time to discuss racial issues.