Police Are Seeking Source of Racist Flyers at 2 Schools : Bias: About 500 handbills denigrating Latinos and urging their deportation are found in lockers at Costa Mesa and Corona del Mar highs.

Police are trying to learn who tucked several hundred racist flyers into student lockers at two local high schools, officials said Tuesday.

About 500 flyers that denigrated Latinos and called for their deportation were found at Costa Mesa and Corona del Mar high schools Monday morning.

Cloyde McKinley (Mac) Bernd, superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, said he suspects outsiders were responsible. The flyers list a phone number in the 818 area code.

A recording at the number gives a post office box in Covina for WAR, or White Aryan Resistance.

Describing the flyers as “just the worst kind of derogatory, inflammatory rhetoric,” Bernd promised that once the distributors are found, they will be punished--with expulsion if they are Newport-Mesa students and with criminal prosecution if possible. Bernd said it would have been fairly easy for non-students to stuff the flyers into the lockers, which are located outside on the village-style campuses.

The flyers, Bernd said, are “disgusting hate propaganda that nobody around here has the slightest bit of interest in.”

“Obviously if you’re an Hispanic student or a student who is new to this country and you’re confronted with something like this, I think you become very confused and you wonder how anyone could put out this filth,” Bernd said.

Newport Beach Police Sgt. Andy Gonis said the flyers were “basically a lot of sick stuff.” His department is working with Costa Mesa police and the school district to investigate the incident.

Roy Alvarado, a counselor who works with gang members and youths at risk of joining gangs, said several students brought copies of the flyer into his counseling session at Costa Mesa High on Monday and discussed the matter animatedly.

“They just ran the gamut from angry and confused to scared and upset,” Alvarado said. “I think mostly they were confused. So I gave them an opportunity to vent--you make them angry and let them get rid of that anger, before they go back into the classroom.”

Edward H. Decker, Newport-Mesa school board president, said Tuesday, “If you are Latino, that is a relatively disturbing thing to find in your locker on a Monday morning.”

Latinos make up about 29% of the students attending schools in the district, according to the Orange County Department of Education.

Corona del Mar Principal Tom Jacobson said his school holds assemblies and activities to promote good ethnic and racial relations. A local group that fosters racial understanding has approached Jacobson about the possibility of posting flyers at the school to encourage appreciation of diversity, to combat the message of Monday’s flyers.

Rusty Kennedy, director of the county’s Human Relations Commission, said people find hate literature on various local school campuses several times each year. Flyers like those distributed in Costa Mesa and Corona del Mar this week were discovered at Laguna Beach High School and a San Juan Capistrano middle school last month, Kennedy said.

“It’s pretty hostile anti-Hispanic stuff,” Kennedy said. “We’ve seen the same kinds of blatant hate literature in high schools and middle schools around the county in the past--and not just here but all around the state.”

Students at high schools in Agoura Hills, San Fernando and Santa Clarita in northern Los Angeles County have also found flyers in their lockers in the last few months.