South Bay / Cover Story : Student Body Politic : Prop. 187 battle has spurred teen-agers to activism. They have staged marches, walkouts : and forums, and the momentum is still going.

In the days following the passage of Proposition 187, school officials around the South Bay tried to reassure students that nothing had really changed.

In schools from Lennox and Inglewood to San Pedro, the official message is that, for now, everything will be just as if the measure had not passed.

But everything isn’t the same, because many of the kids are different. Now they are political.

Before Proposition 187, which denies non-emergency medical care and education to people who are not legal residents, it was enough to study, hang out with friends, primp for boys or posture for girls. But propositions and petitions, the U.S Constitution and elections became major concerns for many students in the days before the Nov. 8 vote.

Students have marched into city halls, walked out of school or stayed past dismissal time, and organized political forums and discussions. Now some are trying to keep the new activism alive, and they are working on citizenship drives and pressuring local politicians to fight the initiative in court.

School officials, meanwhile, continue to stress that neither students nor their parents have anything to fear--yet.

“We in the Inglewood Unified School District would like to assure you that even with the passage of this proposition, all children will continue to be enrolled,” reads a letter from Supt. McKinley Nash and board President Lois Hill-Hale. “We do not report the legal status of any student or families to government agencies.”

Lennox Supt. Kenneth L. Moffett wrote a similar letter to parents, sent on the eve of the election: “All of our procedures and activities will go on as usual. Nothing will change in Lennox tomorrow, or in the next few weeks, if at all.”

At Inglewood High School, Principal Kenneth Crowe said he made the rounds to classes with heavy Latino enrollment to assure them that “we love them and that they are wanted and welcome here. They know that they’re my kids.”

The reassurances seem to have quelled the fear that many Latino students and parents felt on Election Day. But for students, Proposition 187’s passage has left in its wake a powerful awareness of the political process.

In Lennox, a district that prides itself on meeting all of the education needs of its primarily Latino population, faculty are using the election results to teach lessons on political activism.

On the Tuesday after the election, Lennox Middle School students held a “stay-in,” hoping to counter the impression made by student walkouts. Students remained in school for half an hour after the bell for dismissal, doing homework or talking about Proposition 187 with teachers. That night, students attended the school board meeting to ask school officials to give financial support to lawsuits against the measure.

Many teachers and some students in Lennox wore black the Thursday after the election, and counselor Pam Rector purchased black bows for colleagues and students to tape to their clothes. They met in the school library during lunch period to discuss their feelings about the passage of Proposition 187. The cardboard casket left over from a Halloween dance was propped up in front with “Our Hope Will Resurrect” on the front.

Why, Rector asked them, did they think people were wearing black? Answers included “Because justice died” and “Because the spirit of little Mexican kids died.”

The answers reflected the shock many students felt. They simply did not believe the initiative would pass because nobody they knew was for it.

“Part of it is they live in Lennox, so they don’t see anything but people like them,” Rector said.

“I felt bad and kind of scared when it passed,” said sixth-grader Michael Galindo.. “I figured that maybe California people wanted their own place, with all the space for themselves, without Mexican people or Japanese or others.”

Lennox, an unincorporated community of about two square miles located north of Hawthorne, has about 20,000 residents, most of whom are Latino, with the rest divided among Pacific Islanders, blacks and whites. Lennox voted against Proposition 187, with 53% rejecting the measure and 47% supporting it, but only about 1,000 people--half of those eligible--voted Nov. 8.

By contrast, when Lennox Middle School held elections Nov. 8, virtually the entire student population voted; 800 students were against Proposition 187 and 64 were for it.

The 90 students who participated in the library forum after elections were unanimously against the initiative. Attendance was voluntary and the first few minutes were devoted to discussion about students’ fears and hurt feelings. But the talk did not linger for long on bad feelings. Soon faculty were asking the students what they wanted to do in response to the election.

Marie Smith stood up in front of her classmates and exhorted them to hold the stay-in. “People will say, ‘Wow, those kids must really want their education,’ ” said Smith, 13. “But whatever it is, you’ve got to be committed to what you’re going to do.”

About 600 students ultimately participated in the stay-in, remaining in school half an hour past dismissal time.

After Smith rallied her classmates, social studies teacher Wayne Fugate congratulated the students on their political activism. “But one thing that’s important is to respect it if your friends or other people don’t agree with you,” he said.

Counselor Jim Keese, who walked precincts in Lennox the weekends before the election, told the students how sad he was that Proposition 187 had passed, but that their desire to express themselves politically gave him hope.

“My hope is that you are learning to stand up for what you are entitled to,” Keese said.

The air of activism in Lennox is not unanimous, and not all students took part in the discussions or protests against Proposition 187. But if they wanted to, their teachers helped them.

Many Lennox teachers say that opposing Proposition 187 and reassuring their students that they are safe and welcome in school are one and the same. But even some teachers who are adamant opponents of the measure say they worry about whether their zeal is always appropriate.

“It’s a close line that we’re walking,” Fugate said after the library forum. “I know some parents and teachers have asked that we be sure to present the other side of Proposition 187--not just our opposition to it. That’s why I urged them to respect everyone’s opinion.”

Rector also wrestles with how much activism is appropriate. After floating the idea of the stay-in, she backed off and let the students organize it themselves, she said. “I decided that I’d really done enough and that if they really wanted to do it, that they would go ahead and do it themselves.”

In Inglewood, adults at Morningside High School were not guiding the students in political activism, mainly because the high school students had taken the lead.

“This has forced us to be politically aware in a way that we never were before,” said Carlos Barragan, a senior who is president of the Morningside chapter of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a student organization known as MEChA, focusing on Mexican and Mexican American issues that has chapters on high school and college campuses, mainly in the West. “Our group was really cultural, but now we see that we’re going to have to be political too.”

Before the election, Principal Liza Daniels allowed MEChA to have lunchtime forums and pass out literature against the proposition. MEChA took a leading role in organizing students, informing them about the specifics of the proposition and persuading them not to join walkouts.

“We told the other kids that the school is on our side,” Barragan said. “There’s no reason to walk out of it.”

Daniels had spent the days before the election making announcements over the intercom to students. After Proposition 187 passed, she met with teachers to discuss how to direct students’ feelings about the initiative into classroom activities.

“I sense a silent positivism here,” Daniels said. “I think our students know that they’re cared about.”

Barragan and MEChA member Nora Cisneros agreed. “The school has done all it can to make us feel secure,” Cisneros said. “They explained over the intercom how we all have the right to be here.”

But in spite of the school’s efforts, Barragan said he believes Latino students in general have a sense of being on the margins of society.

“People stereotype us as Latinos and as teen-agers, saying we don’t care about this country, but teen-agers care,” Barragan said. “It’s just that this country doesn’t take us how we are. We don’t learn about our contributions to America and so we don’t feel like we’re really in.”

That sense of not fitting into American society increased exponentially for Barragan after the election, he said, partly because he misread the mood of the state.

“I really didn’t think it would pass,” Barragan said. “I thought it was inhuman.”

Voters in Inglewood supported Proposition 187 by a margin of 53% to 47%.

In spite of the initiative passing, Latino students benefited from their efforts to defeat it, both Barragan and Cisneros said.

“What was good was that young people got together, and it was people our own age who told other kids what was happening,” Cisneros said. “Adults didn’t do it. We did.”

The Morningside MEChA chapter holds holiday food drives and works with the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) on citizenship projects. Those efforts will see new vigor because of Proposition 187, Cisneros said.

“Now what we need to do is to tell people to go to school, go to adult school if necessary, learn English and learn how to have a voice and vote,” Cisneros said.

Students at San Pedro High School were also responsible for rallying their peers against the initiative before Election Day, and while life is back to normal on campus, the activism remains.

Unlike students at Morningside, many at San Pedro High walked out of school before Election Day to protest the proposition. Five students were the primary organizers, meeting during lunch periods to plan the marches. Carrying homemade signs and Mexican flags under the watchful eye of police and at times school administrators, the students made their point by walking more than 25 miles over two days, marching from San Pedro High to Banning High School in Wilmington and on to Carson High School.

After the second march, Principal Rey Mayoral asked the protest leaders to return to class. They complied, and the campus has not seen disturbances since the proposition passed Nov. 8, but they are planning post-election forums to keep the issue alive.

One of the student leaders, senior Daniel Velasquez, said that although the protests did not help defeat the measure, the efforts were successful in other ways.

“A lot of people now understand what was going on,” he said. “It brought out the best in the Latinos on campus.”

Velasquez said he understands now that carrying Mexican flags did not accomplish the political ends that students desired.

“If we were unsuccessful, it was our own fault,” he said, referring to the group’s failure to include American flags in the marches.

The new student activism undoubtedly will recede for some but not for others. And in places like Lennox, teachers say their students have no plans to let it die down.

Lennox students have formed a political action committee, which will encourage the community to attend a citizenship fair Jan. 28 at the school, to take the first steps toward becoming citizens.

“Our kids have found that they’ve been empowered to act,” Lennox’s Rector said.

She said that also means that school officials should be ready to have students question their decisions.

“Because if the school implements something that they think isn’t right,” Rector said, “we’ve already taught them some strategies so they can be heard.”

Times correspondent Jon Garcia contributed to this story.