Parents Patrol High School Campus After Racial Brawl : Intervention: Some take time off work to help defuse ethnic tensions among students. ‘We take back this school or these kids are not going to make it,’ one parent says.

In the wake of a racially charged brawl last week between Latino and African American students, more than 100 parents flocked to Pomona High School for meetings aimed at cooling the ethnic tensions simmering on campus.

Two dozen parents also took time off from work this week to help police officers, teachers and vice principals shepherd the school’s 1,750 students to and from their classes every time the bell rang.

“I was standing around by a P.E. class and this boy comes over to me. He looks up at me and says, ‘Are you going to make my school good again? I want to graduate from high school, not get killed.’ What can you say to that?” asked Angela Robinson, whose two sons attend Pomona High.

Robinson, 37, a church secretary, vowed that her family will eat red beans and rice before she gives up on bringing racial harmony to the school and goes back to work. “We take back this school or these kids are not going to make it,” she said.

Robinson and scores of other concerned parents met with campus administrators after the brawl last Friday. They offered to patrol campus and get involved in school activities.

More than 100 students were thrown off campus when a lunchtime dance supporting a canned-food drive deteriorated into fistfights, sparked when several students were hit with milk cartons lobbed into the crowd.

Latino students came to the aid of other Latinos and African American students defended other African Americans. The fighting escalated until 29 Pomona police officers ordered battling students and bystanders off campus. Latinos were moved three blocks east of the school and the African Americans four blocks to the west.

The 10 students arrested Friday have been suspended, and district officials said they will push for expulsion of any who encouraged the fighting.

“We have a whole squad of officers up there to deal with any problems today,” Lt. Greg Hamill said Wednesday.

Police and school officials said that although gang signs were flashed before the fighting broke out, the brawl involved a broad spectrum of students and was not a gang fight.

“We normally don’t have these sorts of problems,” Principal Norm Fujimoto said. “Nothing like this has happened in the three years I’ve been here.”

Records of violence on district campuses were not available, but the brawl was one of two incidents in the district in four days. On Monday, a 14-year-old youth stabbed a 12-year-old rival tagger four times with a paring knife at John C. Fremont Jr. High.

Racially motivated fights also have been reported this year at high schools in nearby Claremont, Chino and Alta Loma.

“Race is an issue for every school district in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Jose Calderon, a sociology and Chicano studies professor at Pitzer College who is working with the Alhambra school district to lower tensions after racially charged confrontations between Asians and Latinos boiled into fistfights last year.

Calderon noted that Pomona has experienced dramatic demographic changes in the past 10 years, and now minorities are the majority at many schools. District officials said Pomona High’s student body is 60% Latino, 26% African American, 8% white and 6% Asian.

“Students need to learn about ethnic conflict and models to overcome it,” Calderon said. “The question is if the schools are moving fast enough with changing curricula to meet the demographic transformations.”

The 25 parents who came to Pomona High on Monday at Fujimoto’s invitation helped the school’s staff keep a damper on any more fighting, he said. The school only has one campus police officer.

State budget cuts of more than $10 million over the past 2 1/2 years have squeezed the district, and one of Pomona’s seven part-time hall monitor positions was eliminated by the school board to help fund hiring of nine more officers.

Fujimoto met with about 100 parents Sunday afternoon to discuss campus safety. Another 60 showed up for a Parent-Teacher-Student Assn. meeting in the school library Monday night.

Parents criticized officials for forcing the fighting students into the streets and blame was bounced around for an hour until Robinson blew the whistle around her neck and Nailah (Pat) Hardy raised her voice and called for solutions.

“We have got to stop pointing fingers at Mr. Fujimoto and start pointing them at ourselves,” said Hardy, a 40-year-old counselor at Park West High in Pomona whose son Macheo is a Pomona freshman.

Cassandra George, Pomona’s assistant superintendent for secondary schools, agreed, saying the riot underscored the need for more multicultural programs.

“We need to concentrate on dealing with the diversity of our students that make up our district and are the wealth of our district,” she said.

George said she will lobby the school board for more campus security and money for diversity programs and urged parents to do the same.

Guy Abbott, a supervisor at Pomona’s Yorba Elementary School, was moved to tears that so many parents showed up for the meeting. He said their presence on campus is the surest way to stop trouble.

“You say to them, ‘I know your mama, and I know your daddy, and I know where you sleep at night’ when you see them in the halls and they’ll come around,” the 42-year-old Abbott said. He has a son, Andrew, at Pomona.

Abbott coaches youth soccer and baseball and said he has buried three players because of gang violence, including 18-year-old Ernie Hernandez of Pomona High, who was shot just three weeks from graduation in May, 1991.

Student Body President Johnny Perez said most students are ready to work for a safer campus. “A lot of the kids involved in the fighting were the younger kids, the freshmen and sophomores who don’t know any better,” he said during the meeting. “I asked a lot of kids why they were fighting and all of them shrugged and said ‘I don’t know.’ Education is the answer.”