Faces Get a Name--and Compassion : Relations: A Newport Beach school is being transformed from a racially tense campus into one where the pupils know each other by name instead of skin color.

One day last spring the seventh-graders of Ensign Intermediate School were summoned to the gymnasium for an announcement by the principal. The 428 students filed in and took seats on the bleachers--about 90 Latino, Asian and black students clustered at one end; 330 Anglo students at the other.

“I stood in front of them, pointed my finger at them and said: ‘Knock it off!’ ” Principal Scott Paulsen recalled.

That marked the beginning of Ensign’s transformation from a racially tense and sometimes volatile campus into one where the pupils know each other by name instead of skin color.

“Students had complained to me of fights and intimidation going on in hallways along racial lines,” Paulsen said, explaining why he summoned the pupils to the gym. “We were dealing with extreme social issues that were interfering with school and the students’ ability to concentrate.”

Since then, Ensign Intermediate, with 858 seventh- and eighth-graders, has undertaken a series of steps to reduce racial tension in its diverse student body, which is drawn from a district that includes affluent Newport Beach and poor neighborhoods in Costa Mesa.

At the start of the 1992-93 school year, Paulsen recruited 12 students to explore problems typically associated with race, including the perpetuation of stereotypes, racial slurs and violence.

Chosen for the Student Ethnic Forum were Anglo, Latino, Asian and black students with different backgrounds. Some were good academically, while others were familiar with local street gangs. All of them, Paulsen said, had the respect of their peers.

The forum’s unofficial motto: “It is a lot harder to use a racial slur on somebody if you know their real name.”

Before the effort began, pupils of one ethnicity would not to sit on the school bus next to a classmate of another ethnicity, students said. During lunch, interracial fighting often erupted with the slightest provocation.

Parents with children attending the school knew it as a place where “your kid would go . . . and come home with two black eyes,” said Debbie Boyer, founder of a parent group that coordinates many of the student activities at Ensign.

“People used to be intimidated by Mexicans,” said Christine Vu, a 13-year-old Vietnamese student who is a regular participant in forum discussions. “People used to be scared of them because they didn’t know them.”

Paulsen said he has seen worse than black eyes, and recently demanded that a student blot out swastikas he had scrawled on a notebook. “This is the kind of baloney that has to stop,” he said.

To help remedy the situation, the ethnic forum has tried ways to help students get to know each other better. Forum members began by choosing 60 of their friends as “ambassadors” to relay their ideas to the general student population. A second group of 60 ambassadors recently volunteered to expand the effort.

In time, classroom seating charts were shuffled so that students did not bunch up by race. A bilingual honor society was created last year. Students invented two games called “People Hunt” and “Mystery Student” as a fun method to emphasize individual student traits.

Later this month, a fashion show complete with students acting as models and photographers will feature appropriate clothing for graduation ceremonies this spring.

“We are talking to each other now,” said Francisco Ruelas, an eighth-grader and a member of the ethnic forum.

“Well, there are still some fights,” said Sandra Campos, an eighth-grader.

” . . . But they are not racially based anymore,” interrupted her classmate, Emily Barker.

Emily, sitting at a table between forum members Beatriz Ibarra and Christine, admitted that she was once afraid of Latino students because they seemed different. “I never used to talk to Beatriz or anyone Hispanic,” she said. “Now we are friends. Now I realize that we are all the same.”

“It was hard to do it (at) first, but now it is easy,” Beatriz added.

On March 23, Paulsen spent 30 minutes detailing the racial progress at Ensign for the Newport-Mesa Unified District Board of Education. Since then, his calendar has been filled with requests from community organizations that want to learn more about the school’s programs.

“Some are still threatened by our schools moving from white to dark brown,” said Stanley Corey, Newport-Mesa’s interim superintendent. “And what you are seeing is leadership. Mr. Paulsen has the guts to guide us into these uncertain areas.”

The four elementary schools that feed into Ensign Intermediate have created similar programs to help improve race relations among students, Paulsen said. Ensign’s ethnic forum students said they hope to start a similar group at Newport Harbor High next year.

“We just don’t give these kids a lot of time to just talk about issues,” Paulsen said. “As educators we don’t have the time. But we must realize that kids love the opportunity to talk and listen to other views.”