School Still Doing Things Right

Two high school graduation ceremonies separated by a quarter of a century suggest there is a reason to hope that our public education system can serve the complex needs of our increasingly contentious American society.

On a warm June evening in 1971, my wife and I watched with justifiable pride when our son, Robert, spoke as valedictorian and president of the student body at the Grant High School graduation in Van Nuys. Grant was then one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s newest high schools, an elite academic Valley campus serving an enrollment composed almost exclusively of students from white, affluent middle-class families. It was taken for granted that many of Grant’s graduates would go on to the best colleges and universities, and they did.

But by Robert’s years at Grant, times were starting to change. The assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy jarred the protected world of high school. Robert became concerned about the racial and ethnic divide already opening wide in this country and sought ways to act on his growing commitment to be a socially responsible human being.

There were a few interracial bridges to build within the confines of the Grant campus, which was home to few minority students. So Robert reached many miles across the LAUSD to Roosevelt High School on the Los Angeles Eastside, then predominantly Latino, and organized a series of inter-campus exchanges among student body leaders, and other activities bringing students from both schools together.

But Robert never lived to realize his full potential. As the passing years brought more changes to American society and to the racial and ethnic mix of Grant High School students, they also marked the premature end of Robert’s life. He was killed by a drunk driver a scant 10 years after that June graduation night.

During the ensuing few years, Grant became a different school. Hundreds of Latino students were bused in from the inner city to relieve severe overcrowding at Belmont High School, near downtown, which became known as the Ellis Island of Los Angeles, the port of entry for Central American immigrants seeking refuge from wars and persecution and hoping for the chance for a better life. A 1993 survey by the school revealed that Grant students came from more than 70 different countries.

More recently, Grant High School achieved unfortunate notoriety for two violent racial clashes involving small groups of Latino and Armenian students during the past two years. A young man named Armen Kamyshyan stepped forward to try to do something. Armen was president of the campus Armenian Club, an honor student and an Ephebian (a select school society of outstanding campus leaders).

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Armen was motivated to act after one of his best friends was stabbed in autumn 1994, when those racial tensions exploded in violence. Armen organized activities and opened dialogue involving the school’s many ethnic groups and cultural clubs and worked one-on-one with troubled students. His college counselor described his efforts to heal the wounds of racial rivalries as outstanding.

For taking this responsibility Armen Kamyshyan was chosen the 1996 winner of the Robert Halpert Memorial Scholarship our family and friends established five years ago to honor our son’s commitment to promoting multicultural understanding. One year, a Latina immigrant from Central America (via the Belmont bus) won the award. Another year, a Jewish student from Sherman Oaks.

Grant’s 1996 commencement program listed nearly 50 major U.S. universities where its graduates will enroll in the fall. Among them, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, MIT, and the universities of Wisconsin, Chicago and Michigan. Many of those students will undoubtedly come from Grant’s U.N.-like roster of foreign-sounding names. Armen Kamyshyan will attend UC Irvine, where he plans to study sociology and criminology. Confronting challenges undreamed of 25 years ago, hard-working teachers, administrators and staff at Grant High School must be doing something right.