Six Who Make a Difference : Activists Get an Early Start

More than 70,000 teen-agers will graduate from high school in Los Angeles County this month, closing the books on a primary and secondary education that has spanned two-thirds of their lives.

For some, the memories will not just be of football, proms, cramming for tests and the agonies of teen-age romance. They spent their nights and weekends feeding the poor, fighting for causes and expressing their cultures.

Beginning on this page are sketches of six graduating seniors who, in contrast to many their age, have tried to make a difference by getting involved in their communities.

Two campus fights the winter of her sophomore year at Agoura High School shook Kecia Boulware’s confidence that racism was a thing of the past.

The fights, one between a white student and an Asian and another between a white student and a black student, were marked by racial slurs.

Boulware’s response was to form United Colors, a campus group whose aim is to expose the 85% white student body to other cultures.

“Our school is changing, we’re becoming much more racially diverse,” said Boulware, an 18-year-old senior. “I didn’t see that the school administration was addressing this change.”

Half of United Colors’ 25 members are minorities. The group has a lunchtime meeting twice a month during which students give presentations on the music, food, religion and customs common to their native cultures.

For Black History Month the group members profiled black history makers during morning announcements and marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by parading through campus with signs displaying his words. An apple was thrown at the group during one such procession, the only indication that students might not be wholly supportive of the group’s efforts.

Doug Litten, the campus adviser for United Colors, said it has had a “kind of understated and quiet, but really pervasive impact” on the school and has contributed to an atmosphere “of mutual respect and tolerance.” Even though Boulware is graduating, the group will continue meeting.

“Kecia has been a real force for good,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are good and a lot of people who are effective, but Kecia is both, which is rare.”

Boulware said that when white people, such as those who live in Agoura, rarely come into contact with minorities, they sometimes overlook the subtleties of racism.

“They understand what racism is on a large scale, but I don’t think they always see it in themselves and what they’ve learned from society,” Boulware said. “They may not see the racism when they say all the black people in South-Central are criminals.”

Eloquent and usually composed, Boulware shows her frustration when she speaks about commonly held stereotypes and student apathy.

“You see people and all they’re interested in is going to parties and who’s popular and who’s dating who, but that’s not what’s important,” said Boulware, who will enroll at Harvard University this fall to study medicine. “High school is a time for learning about other people.”

Boulware has also been active in her church, St. Jude’s Catholic Church in Westlake, where she is a member of the youth group and has served as a camp counselor and helped lead several church retreats.

She said her religious beliefs support her activism on racial issues. “God sees us as equal so why shouldn’t we see each other as equal? He has the same amount of love for all of us.”

Art Delgadillo has seen the future, and it looks grim.

It’s a world where stepping outside means first slathering on protective sunscreen because the ozone layer has been stripped away, where oxygen tanks are necessary for breathing and where wildlife has dwindled to a few hearty species.

This apocalyptic vision of the future has driven the Sylmar High School youth to work to preserve the fragile planet.

“It’s like a jacket, y’know?” Delgadillo explained, using a characteristic expression. “You can wear it only so many times, and then it starts to wear out.”

Lugging a backpack stuffed with the literature of environmental groups, he spreads his ecological gospel on campus in casual conversations with classmates and as the chairman of school committees on recycling and on the campus Earth Day celebration.

Delgadillo successfully urged that Earth Day this year be extended to include a weeklong series of events, during which he used the school’s public-address system to encourage students to car-pool, to save energy and to conserve water. He also lined up speakers from local and national organizations, such as Heal the Bay and the Washington-based Zero Population Growth.

As important as the message is, he said, it’s not been easy getting the attention of his peers.

“The vast number of students--they have their own plans, their own worries,” he said. “More teen-agers are getting involved, but not enough. And we’re the ones that are going to be living with it.”

The lanky, self-effacing youth with slicked-back hair and a studious air practices at home what he preaches at school. He walks most places, buys recycled paper and tries to avoid buying merchandise that is over-packaged. He also advises his family members on environmentally correct practices.

“The bottom line is to get with it,” he said. “You can’t expect people to do it for you, y’know?”

This fall, as the first in his family to attend college, Delgadillo will pursue his cause at San Diego State, where he plans to major in environmental health. It will be the launching pad, he hopes, to a career of seeking solutions to environmental problems such as the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

“I want to be there. I don’t want to read about it, like, ‘Oh, they’re cutting down 50 acres of trees--I’ll send in $100,’ ” Delgadillo said. “I want to be there and be the one taking action.”

Fifty years after his grandparents were interned in camps during World War II, Kai Matsuda credits his family with teaching him to tolerate and accept others.

“They’ve felt discrimination,” he said. “Growing up, it was shoved down my throat that you have to love all people.”

And for Matsuda, that includes one of the most maligned groups in recent times: homosexuals.

Since Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a bill last summer that would have outlawed job discrimination against gays and lesbians, the former student body president of Quartz Hill High School has become active in promoting gay rights, firing off angry letters to local lawmakers and attending protest rallies more than 60 miles away from his Lake Elizabeth home.

“This is one of those issues that get completely ignored,” said Matsuda, 18.

It’s also a cause few of his age have contemplated, much less dared champion. But Matsuda--a wiry, impatient young man whose thoughts often outrun his words--knows something of being an outsider.

He is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian in an area that is largely white. At Quartz Hill this year, he was off campus about as much as he was on, because of the many classes he took at a nearby community college. And although he was student body president for a semester, he views his election as “almost a fluke,” since he counts himself as neither popular nor a part of the “in” crowd.

Matsuda is described by teachers as an extremely bright, sometimes secretive young man who at times acts as if he is superior to his classmates.

For his part, Matsuda criticizes his peers for being too self-absorbed--for not thinking, he says a bit acidly, “outside their own skin.”

He left his post as student body president after opting for a midyear graduation, explaining that he was frustrated by his inability to achieve major changes, such as reducing class sizes.

He first became involved in gay issues when Wilson vetoed AB 101--hailed by supporters as the “gay civil rights bill”--in December, 1990. Matsuda read up on the subject, but discovered gay-oriented publications such as the Advocate magazine were in short supply in the Antelope Valley.

He said he was dismayed that local newsstands did not carry such publications, given that homosexuals are widely believed to comprise 10% of the population. “Even if it’s not 10%, even if it’s 2% up here, that’s 2,000 people,” he said.

A budding linguist and a computer wizard, Matsuda now finds himself on the phone lists of such vocal organizations as ACT UP, which regularly solicit his participation in group activities.

He is uncertain, he said, of his own sexuality but often thinks of himself as gay. He said many of his classmates believe him to be gay, and that he has felt some hostility and heard homophobic remarks.

But in his eyes, protecting homosexuals against prejudice should not be the sole province of gays and lesbians.

“You don’t have to be gay to empathize with the discrimination they go through,” he declared.

He plans to continue his involvement with homosexual issues at UC Berkeley this fall.

“If people grew up around openly gay people, they’d see they’re no different,” he said. “They’re your uncles, they’re your aunts. They’re your brothers and sisters.”

Stairs, not Shakespeare, were the most trying part of freshman English at William S. Hart High School for Randell Resneder.

Even worse than being carried into class by his teacher, however, was his classmates’ teasing about his disability.

But Resneder, whose cerebral palsy gives him a jerky gait that makes climbing difficult, refused to accept the ridicule or drift into alienation. Instead, he spent months in 1988 planning a Handicapped Awareness Week at the Santa Clarita school.

“I was tired of the smart remarks,” said Resneder, who said before coming to Hart he’d led a “sheltered” life in Texas. Classmates said things such as “ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘Where’s your Mommy?’ ”

The Handicapped Awareness Week that Resneder planned, a showcase for motivational speakers who are disabled and a way to introduce the able to activities such as wheelchair races and “beeper” baseball for the blind, has become an annual event.

Resneder, now 18, said he is no longer lonely. And getting around is easier since the campus has been retrofitted to be barrier-free and he was assigned an aide to take notes and dictation.

“People talk to me. They yell, ‘Hey, Randell,’ and when I say ‘Hi,’ they’ve gone,” says the sandy-haired youth, laughing good-naturedly at his own slowness of speech.

But Resneder, who is among 700,000 nationwide with cerebral palsy, is serious when it comes to educating others about disabilities. Those fortunate enough not to have a handicap, he says, should learn sensitivity while young so that they do not behave as some of his classmates did, whether out of malice or what he terms “a lack of knowledge.”

In another effort to close the awareness gap, Resneder, now 18, has made sure that agencies serving the disabled participate in Santa Clarita’s annual Teen Fest in a neighborhood park.

People who have joined Resneder in his projects say he is indefatigable, gutsy and unafraid to put himself on the line. He makes his own telephone calls, taps out letters to community businesses on his computer--whatever it takes--despite a spastic condition that slurs his speech and makes writing by hand impossible.

He said he relishes his role as a leader. But he looks forward to when his efforts are no longer necessary, when being sensitive to the disabled is, as he puts it, “a natural instinct.”

But until then, he says, he is determined to see his consciousness-raising efforts at Hart continued, even after he moves to a community college in the fall.

One of the most rewarding outcomes of his activism came recently, Resneder said, in the form of a letter from a classmate. She had heard him speak at school and said the courage he had shown had inspired her to come to grips with her weaknesses.

“I opened a new door for her,” he says, his face slowly breaking into a satisfied smile.

It took a little coaxing, but when Urmimala (Minnie) Sarkar finally agreed to perform a classical Indian dance for the first time before an entirely American audience, she was pleasantly surprised by the response.

“They really seemed to appreciate the fact I was different,” she said. “I’ve never felt that good about a performance before or since.”

That talent show three summers ago acted as the catalyst for Sarkar to begin sharing her heritage with those she had hitherto thought would be uninterested. Soon previously all-Indian audiences for her Bharatanatyam dance performances included her school chums and others of various ethnicities.

The culmination of her classical Indian dance studies came this month when Sarkar, now 17, made her official dancing debut before family and friends. It was an achievement that--or so she has been told by her teacher--ranks just below getting married in significance.

“It’s a very big day in your life,” Sarkar said.

The debut, or Aarengetram, was an important landmark on a path of cultural exploration and celebration for Sarkar that she started on at an early age.

“When I was in nursery school, I tried to teach all my classmates how to speak Bengali,” she said with a laugh. “And I was so completely upset that they didn’t want to learn.”

Born in New Jersey, she spent most of her childhood in a small town in Upstate New York where she, her parents and her brother were virtually the only Indian residents.

After moving to West Hills several years ago, her family tapped into the Southern California Bengali community and became active in several cultural organizations. Still, among her largely white classmates at Calabasas High School, Sarkar knew she stood out.

“I’ve always felt different,” said Sarkar, who is dark-haired, slender and articulate. “I had moments, of course, when I wished I was like everyone else. But I was taught, especially by my mother, to be proud to be different.”

To be--to use a term she uses often--”bicultural.”

At home, she speaks Bengali and English. She also helps teach folk dancing to children for small dance and theater productions at annual Bengali social events.

Two summers ago she journeyed to India to volunteer in an orphanage run by Mother Teresa. For six weeks Sarkar helped feed and care for some two dozen infants and toddlers.

“It was a good opportunity for me to see a different side of Calcutta,” she said. “It was like an assault on my senses. I felt like I was from another planet. . . . I grew up a lot.”

At Stanford University beginning this fall, Sarkar hopes to fashion her own double major--Indian studies and engineering--to get even more in touch with her ancestry.

“It’s nice to have thousands and thousands of years of life and history and traditions to draw on,” she said. “It really gives you an anchor.”

For Harvard-Westlake student Cari Schwartz, spring break this year meant making hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the homeless people who live at the parks and beaches of Santa Monica.

The experience, and others helping the homeless, have caused Schwartz to scrutinize her own comfortable life in Tarzana.

“It’s hard for me to look at people who are suffering from hunger, from homelessness or from poverty and for me to be able to feel good about myself,” she said. “So even though it isn’t something I have ever experienced . . . it just seems very real and very close to me.”

For the past two years she has co-chaired Youth Ending Hunger, a relief group based at her exclusive private school’s Studio City campus, and she helped revive the practice of weekly food drives.

When donations dwindled two years ago, Schwartz, 17, spearheaded the making of a video about homelessness in Santa Monica called “We Can Make a Difference,” which has been shown to parents and students.

She said the visits to feed the homeless are sometimes discomfiting. Homeless men sometimes make sexual remarks to her and she has had to learn to deal with unpredictability of the mentally ill people who experts say comprise about a third of those who live on the streets.

Schwartz’s efforts come at a time when Los Angeles County’s homeless population grew by 16% last year to an estimated 68,000 people, according to a report last month by Shelter Partnership, a support organization for shelters and homeless programs.

Harvard-Westlake is one of a growing number of schools that require students to perform some type of community service as part of their curriculum. But Schwartz went way beyond the school’s requirement of 15 hours of service and has spent 60 hours or more in each of the past several years collecting canned food, writing letters about the issue to elected officials and feeding the homeless.

The campus group she helped lead is affiliated with Family Assistance Involving the Homeless, a Santa Monica hunger relief organization. The student group also raises money to buy food over and above that collected in their food drives.

“I think people fail to keep in mind that the simplest things can make a difference . . . when you’re dealing with such a colossal problem,” Schwartz said. “My feeling is that every can of food makes a difference.”

In addition to her activities with the campus group, Schwartz for the past five years has also helped pack Thanksgiving baskets with turkeys and canned goods donated by her parents for families of a Santa Monica elementary school.

The most rewarding aspect of helping the homeless, Schwartz said, is getting others to become involved.

“It’s explosive and it’s contagious,” she says of her involvement. “When I want people to get involved I know it’s because it can help them and it can change them.”