Abuse Incident Revives Questions About Racial Tension in Poway Schools

An incident in which an African-American elementary school student was tripped and kicked by a group of classmates who later described the attack as “a game of Rodney King” is drawing renewed attention to racial problems at the Poway Unified School District.

Gerald Washington Jr., a sixth-grader at Meadowbrook Elementary School, was not injured seriously in the May 14 scuffle with five white, Filipino and Latino classmates. His parents said this week that they are still disturbed by the response from the school’s assistant principal and the district.

Beatrice and Gerald Washington called sheriff’s deputies and reported the attack on their son as a hate crime after they found out the school had not suspended the boys involved. Deputies interviewed the boys, and the school later gave a two-day suspension to a youth who admitted kicking Gerald.

According to sheriff’s detectives, the boys said they were “playing Rodney King,” but that race was not a factor in the scuffle. Four of the five denied striking Gerald.

At a meeting of the district’s board of trustees earlier this month, Poway Supt. Robert Reeves described the incident as “horseplay that got out of hand” and said racial hatred did not motivate the youths. The one boy who admitted kicking Gerald Jr. had been disciplined and the matter was considered closed, Reeves said.

Earlier, Reeves said the conflict resulted from a joke made by Gerald Jr. before the incident. When discussing Halloween costumes with classmates, Gerald Jr. had said his would be Rodney King Jr. The not-guilty verdicts for four white police officers charged with beating King sparked riots in Los Angeles.

Gerald Jr. said in an interview Thursday that he made the joke about a month before the attack--before the riots--and that he did not recall it until the group of five boys began taunting him and mocking his T-shirt. The shirt bore the words “King Remembered” and a picture of Martin Luther King Jr.

Gerald Jr. said the group asked him if he “remembered what happened to Rodney King,” and the beating followed shortly after.

“It wasn’t a joke when they were kicking me,” Gerald Jr. said.

After being told that the matter was closed, the Washingtons removed Gerald Jr. from Meadowbrook and enrolled him in a home study program for the rest of the year.

“The district wants us to say, ‘Let’s put this behind us,’ ” Beatrice Washington said. “And they want to know why we won’t allow our son to go back to school. The way I see it, these kind of things are going to keep happening. If something like this isn’t racial to them, it’s not safe to send my son to their school. Right now, as far as I can see, my son has no protection from getting beaten up because of the color of his skin.”

Tom Graham, a member of the district’s African-American parent support group, said of the district’s response to the scuffle: “It’s always back to business as usual. . . . We’re beginning to see a pattern established by this district . . . one in which acts of racism can occur and be labeled something else.”

In the last year, parent groups complained repeatedly that racial incidents were handled insensitively by the school district or were ignored.

Parent members of the district’s Human Relations Committee have suggested changes to improve the campus racial climate. They have urged the district to hire teachers of color and help them to develop into administrators. They contended that the district’s teaching staff, which is 97% white, is ill-equipped to serve a student population that is nearly one-quarter nonwhite.

“Every week, it seems like we hear something new involving race,” said Linda Jones, a white parent whose sixth-grade daughter is half black. “I don’t think the district realizes the kind of risk it’s taking right now. Ninety-seven percent white teachers is inexcusable. . . . If people start bringing up discrimination lawsuits, this district is in for real trouble.”

The district for its part has embarked on a search for racial accord. There have been intensive talks between administrators and ethnic parent groups. A zero-tolerance policy on fights resulting from racial disputes was recently adopted into the district’s code of conduct. The district’s 50-member human relations committee met twice a month when race-related issues began heating up. A workshop on cultural sensitivity took place at a middle school where several racial disputes flared.

It is a delicate journey made all the more difficult by a budget-slashing state Legislature, Poway Supt. Robert Reeves said at a recent meeting of the board of trustees. For the past four months, the district has studied how diversity training would benefit the staff and fit into the district’s dwindling budget, Reeves said.

“It’s not that the spirit isn’t willing,” Reeves said. “ I think we are taking it hard financially all the way around. Our priorities are to figure out how to incorporate these programs and not let the quality of education suffer. These are vast cuts we are facing.”

Diversity workshops scheduled for next fall were canceled because the district expected a $7-million cut in state funding next year, said Bill Chiment, director of district staff development.

Despite financial restraints, gains were still made in the number of teachers of color hired this year, Chiment said. At least nine of 15 current openings have been filled by people of color, Chiment said. In the last three years, 13 of 212 hired teachers were people of color, according to district records.

However, some parents and teachers say a backlash to affirmative action is building.

Bernardo Heights Middle School was a flash point for much of the district’s unrest this year, including an incident in March, when a group of teachers wrote a letter to the principal suggesting he hire an assistant principal who is a composite of half a dozen groups targeted by affirmative action programs.

Copies of the letter were circulated among teachers, then to parents. Parents complained to the district’s board of trustees. They decried the note as mocking their concerns about staff diversity. The authors defended the letter as “a non-derogatory, tension-releasing, funny joke . . . a joke gone sour.”

The two interpretations define the gap between many whites and minority groups in the district, said Oliver Brown, a staff member of the city of San Diego’s Diversity Commitment Program.

The push to diversify the staff has been taken as a threat by many white teachers, said Brown, who conducted a workshop at the school in May.

“From the comments I was hearing, some of the staff feel like being white has become a disadvantage,” Brown said. “What’s coming across is, the only way the school can satisfy parents is to not hire a white person.”

Feelings of resentment have had time to fester as Poway’s teaching staff failed to evolve along with the student population, said Morris Casuto, director of the regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.

“There are many teachers who would have you believe nothing about teacher composition has to change when the students are changing,” said Casuto, who was invited by Bernardo Heights to speak to staff. “That is very disingenuous. And candidly speaking, to describe that letter to the principal as a joke is something that a professional educator should realize is entirely inappropriate.

“The letter may not have been racist, but it was extraordinarily insensitive. The parents have expressed their desire to have role models for their children. They are not joking.”

Still, there is a palpable feeling that whites have been directly threatened by the call for diversity, or that they are being accused of being racist if asked to attend a cultural sensitivity workshop, Casuto said.

When solicited for comments on whether racial sensitivity training is necessary, a teacher at Bernardo Heights Middle School wrote, “I feel it is an acknowledgment of something wrong on staff, when that is not the case.”

Another teacher wrote: “The emotional browbeating needs to be eliminated.”

Another requested a “presentation of typical ‘American’ culture.”

Solomon Hose has watched the district change during the nine years since his children enrolled in Poway schools. He removed his two sons from Pomerado Elementary School and took them to an all-black Muslim school east of downtown San Diego after he was told by a Pomerado teacher that his son, Ankoma, then 6 years old, required remedial reading courses and was flunking the first grade.

“I strongly believed that the teacher wasn’t communicating very well with my son,” Hose said. “The message Ankoma kept getting was that he wasn’t a good student, that he was somehow more stupid than his classmates. There were very few black kids then, and there were no black teachers who could give him support or who were concerned about his self-esteem. . . . When we left the district at that time, I told them they had a problem with race.”

After four years, the boys were doing well academically. At Ankoma’s request, the boys returned to Poway. Ankoma took the standardized Multiple Achievement Tests with his fifth-grade class, and scored in the 97th percentile on reading and vocabulary tests, Hose said.

“He wanted to come back and show he could do it,” Hose said. “Those were the areas they said he could not keep up.”

Looking back, Hose tried to account for lost time. His and the district’s.

“Where would we be, if we didn’t have to go through these things?”