A System in Jeopardy : Lennox Schools Say Prop. 187 Imperils Aid Program

When Maria Araujo and her husband, Juan, were out of work last December, their daughter’s school, Whelan Elementary in Lennox, fed the whole family and sent clothes for the children.

“We didn’t have any money, not even to put clothes on their back, and we couldn’t have made it without Whelan,” said Maria in Spanish.

The Araujos and their three children, including the 11-year-old daughter who now attends Lennox Middle School, crossed the U.S-Mexico border illegally four years ago. But in the Lennox School District, where anywhere from a third to a half of the students may be illegal immigrants, it is standard policy not to inquire about citizenship status.

Proposition 187, if it passes Tuesday, would alter that practice, but it would also upset a school system renowned for its success educating immigrants, one of the most difficult populations to reach.

Educators from across the nation drive the gritty streets of Lennox to analyze the spotless school grounds in this unincorporated area south of Inglewood. They find that while 92% of the students speak no English when they enter kindergarten, most are bilingual by the time they leave for high school.

The fourth-graders have some of the lowest test scores in the state, but eighth-grade scores are only about 5% lower than the state average. The district’s boss, Kenneth L. Moffett, was chosen as the national superintendent of the year for 1994.

Helping provide food and health services to destitute families like the Araujos is essential to the schools’ success, say Lennox teachers and officials. Students who need to see a doctor or dentist get directed to free health care. Those who need clothing and food can get it from a school thrift store, for free if they have no money.

Lennox provides a variety of services for children partly out of compassion, but also because the extra help paves the way for better work in the classroom, school workers say. Hungry children, cold children and children with aches and pains do not learn well.

But students have to trust teachers and faculty enough to tell them that their families are hungry or without clothes, and jeopardizing that trust, officials say, threatens the bedrock of the educational process in Lennox.

“Right now our kids see that we care about the whole person and they respond to that,” Moffett said. “Proposition 187 completely undermines that trust we’ve developed.”

The schools stay open into the evening, helping families translate documents and fill out forms for college or medical services. But it took years, say teachers and others, for typically suspicious immigrant families to trust the schools enough to accept help.

Martha, whose son was having behavior problems at Lennox Middle School, credits school officials with salvaging his life. The district helped place the boy in a group home for troubled people, and intervened later when a hospital threatened to have him deported.

“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Martha said. “They’re the reason my son, although he has problems, is not on the streets in gangs or doing drugs.”

It is that kind of relationship that many in the Lennox school community fear Proposition 187 would undercut.

“This is agonizing for us, because we’ve made such an emphasis on educating anyone who came through the door,” Moffett said.

“It’s an immoral kind of position to say you’re not going to educate a kid,” said Larry Kennedy, principal of Lennox Middle School. “If this passes, everybody . . . is going to become distrustful and suspicious of the school--and we’ve worked so hard to overcome that.

Despite his personal opposition to the measure, Moffett said that if Proposition 187 passes he will require teachers to enforce it.

“If it becomes the law, then they’ll have to follow it,” he said. “I know that I’ll have to have some meetings with the teachers and that they’ll have all kinds of names to call me, but they cannot jeopardize their credentials. They have to be able to teach.”

Many teachers, however, said they won’t help enforce the law.

“What I will do is go on doing my job, which is to ask, ‘Do you know your times tables?’ not ‘Are you a citizen?’ ” said math teacher Francisco Gomez.

In Linda Camacho’s eighth-grade social studies class, about 30 students tried to debate the ballot measure recently, but a real argument barely developed, so strongly did everyone want to argue against Proposition 187.

Instead, students said they would be miserable if it passed. If their teachers enforced it, they said, they would never trust them again.

“If teachers told on us, how could we trust (them) anymore?” asked Idania Lopez, 13. “Or if they told on, like, your parents, then you wouldn’t want to come to school.”