School Story Got Off to a Bad Start

* As a parent of a school-age child in the Oxnard School District, as well as an employee of the same district, I gasped in disbelief at the opening sentence of the article “Schools Demonstrate Internet Progress” March 30. Obviously, your reporter was able to see “kids with guns” outnumbering “kids with computers” in an environment so positive and constructive that anything but downright pride and satisfaction in our children would be totally out of touch with reality.

Let me tell you what I saw. At Fremont Intermediate School, I saw kids at computers, kids reading and writing to other children in other places; kids smiling and explaining to the adults who wandered among them what they were doing and how they were doing it; kids teaching those adults how to do what they were doing. Kids proud of themselves and proud of their school.

For too long, I have been a “victim of the press” in reading about our children and our schools. I, too, bought into the nasty assertion that children of our community are primarily gang members with weapons. I forgot that in a school district of almost 14,000 children, the vast majority of them are not gang members; the vast majority are not carrying guns, or weapons of any kind.

The vast majority are good, decent kids struggling to build a life and a future. I say “struggling” because your reporter was right about one thing in the article: This community is primarily made up of lower socioeconomic families. But since when did “lower socioeconomic” come to mean “gangsters?”

Thanks to your reporter for bothering to attend. I’m just sorry he didn’t bother to look and listen while he was there. He might have enjoyed himself. He might have looked into the faces of happy, adorable, bright and eager children--from whom we have nothing to fear, but from whom we have everything to expect and of whom we can be extraordinarily proud.

JAN RICHMAN

Oxnard