Superintendent Acts as School Fights Spread

Fighting and shouting matches erupted at two more Los Angeles Unified School District campuses Tuesday, prompting the superintendent of schools to issue an unusual directive ordering principals to rally student leaders to forestall the spread of racially motivated violence and other incidents.

Four students were arrested and two others suffered minor injuries at the Hamilton High Schools Complex on the Westside after a brief fight erupted among about 30 black and Latino students during a nutrition break. More than 30 Los Angeles police officers responded to quell the disturbance.

At Olive Vista Middle School in Sylmar, groups of black and Latino students engaged in rowdy shouting matches and stare downs at lunchtime, prompting the principal to send home 12 youngsters.

District Supt. Sid Thompson instructed all junior and senior high school principals to step up security measures at schools and to conduct discussions with students this week that would allow them to vent their frustrations and anger instead of fighting.

Other top school officials asked parents, and community and church leaders to talk to students about the urgent need for racial tolerance.

“I think it’s clear to anyone in our schools that things are very tender and fragile right now,” school board President Leticia Quezada said. “We have to care for our students, especially at the high school level, with even more sensitivity about their feelings.”

The incidents came one day after several hundred black and Latino students at North Hollywood High School clashed in a racially motivated melee during lunch. Police patrolled the campus Tuesday to ward off renewed fighting. Attendance among black students was markedly down; some parents said they feared for their children’s safety.

Tensions are at an all-time high at campuses throughout the district for a variety of disturbing reasons that include unresolved anger stemming from the April-May riots, the inability of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds to get along, and labor unrest among teachers and school staff that has propelled the district to the brink of its second teachers’ strike in three years.

Though acknowledging that racial problems run deep in many schools and must be dealt with, Thompson said that the recent fighting needs to be put in perspective.

“There were fights in several schools. We have 640 others. In the vast majority of schools things were calm,” said Thompson, the district’s first black superintendent. “That doesn’t mean I’m content with the status quo. We need to look at each of these situations in depth.”

Principals and teachers throughout the city said that they are watching for potentially volatile situations. Some principals said they will hold small, separate meetings with black and Latino students before bringing both groups together for a broader airing of their differences.

“If people don’t try to talk and calm things down, these things have a tendency to multiply,” said Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias. Officials said the district’s resources to offer human relations programs are severely limited because of budget cuts.

Several school board members said the fights should serve as a strong signal that a threatened teachers’ strike could have a potentially volatile impact on schools. School and union officials said the incidents have put pressure on both sides to settle their disagreements over impending teacher pay cuts.

“I wish that the teachers would call off any threat of strike. I realize that may be too much to be asking, but with this kind of tension we need to maintain the order,” said school board member Roberta Weintraub.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said the fighting adds to the “terrific conflict” teachers feel over walking out and said she remains “highly motivated to reach a settlement.”

School officials downplayed the significance of the Hamilton High fight, saying that classes were not interrupted and lunchtime activities were calm. Some said that a surge of reporters and camera crews to the campus worsened the situation and upset students. Many parents, alarmed by news reports of the disturbance, rushed to school to pick up their children.

A wedge of about a dozen Latino students marched across the quad during a nutrition break, triggering pandemonium as fistfights broke out. Excited students pushed, shoved, slugged, climbed up on tables or ran for safety, witnesses said.

“It seems to have been a black/brown confrontation,” said LAPD Sgt. Doug Abney, who said the youths were booked at the West Los Angeles station and released to their parents.

Acting Principal Elizabeth Metzelaar said paramedics took two injured girls to a nearby emergency room. One was a pregnant student who was pushed, the other student suffered a seizure.

Teachers and students at Hamilton said there have been several minor incidents at the school in recent weeks, including a fight between Latino and African-American students last week over an after-school basketball game.

Westside school board member Mark Slavkin, who rushed to the scene, said the incident is “an alarm bell warning us to redouble our efforts to defuse racial tensions in a productive way.” He agreed, however, that the incident was not a crisis situation.

“If North Hollywood had not occurred, this would have played out very differently,” Slavkin said. “This was not a riot, it was a fight.”

Students at North Hollywood High School remained uneasy on Tuesday, as four police patrol units circled the streets around the campus with additional reinforcements called in after school to escort students off campus.

Although tensions have been simmering on the campus for months, students said, Monday’s disturbance in part grew out of a clash between black and Latino students over what kind of music was played at the school’s homecoming dance last Friday.

Several black parents, fearful of more fights, initiated a successful telephone campaign urging other black parents to keep their children away from campus. School officials said black students’ attendance was down, but they would not say by how much.

Of the school’s 2,335 students, 69% are Latino and 4.5% are black. White students make up 21% and Asians about 4%. About half of the students stayed home Tuesday.

“We don’t want any more trouble,” said senior Tenisha Reynolds, whose parents are keeping her home until next Monday. “We can’t afford to go up there if, when something happens, we get hurt. We don’t want to be there when the cops leave.”

Reynolds, who serves on the student council and is head of Students for Black Identity at the school, said staying home may not solve problems. She feared that black students who stay away from school will not be able to benefit from special counselors who are coming to talk to students this week.

Ruby Reynolds, Tenisha’s stepmother, said she and her husband are concerned for their child’s safety. “Where she walks to school is all a Hispanic area,” she said.

A group of Latino students said tensions between the two ethnic groups has been building for more than a year. At a dance last spring, said junior Joe Guerrero, the two groups came briefly to blows, and another fight took place earlier this year.

Despite student perceptions, North Hollywood High Principal Catherine Lum downplayed the racial overtones of the melee.

“People make it sound like it’s a racial confrontation when nothing could be further from the truth,” Lum said. “When they talk about underlying tensions, I don’t see it. Is there a climate of fear on this campus? No, there is not. Are there groups of students who have friends of all types on this campus? Yes, there are. We don’t have problems.”

She said that her school had been considered a model in offering students programs to facilitate projects among students of diverse races and that those discussions will continue.

It is significant that students were prompted to fight in part because of music, said Prof. Kenyon Chan, chairman of the Asian-American Studies department at Cal State Northridge and an expert on multicultural education and racism in schools.

“Music has come to represent who we are,” he said, adding that a group’s music promotes cultural pride. When one group insults another’s taste in music, it can be interpreted as an attack on their racial identity.

Times staff writers Lois Timnick, Josh Meyer, Jean Merl and Timothy Williams also contributed to this story.