Chipping Away at Campus Cliques

St. Genevieve High senior Bilal Ruknuddeen remembers the loneliness of his freshman year at the San Fernando Valley school.

“I spent the year eating alone,” he recalls. “I was new to the school--I had just come to this country--and I sat by myself at the lunch table every day.”

Some of his classmates have similar recollections of freshman year . . . of feeling isolated and insecure, and of being ignored or, worse, taunted, bullied and belittled by the 12th-graders who ran the school.

“They were like dictators,” recalls senior Edward Fuentes. “There was a lot of energy spent making us feel bad.”

This year, that senior energy will fuel efforts to make ninth-graders feel not like outsiders, but like “little brothers and sisters” at St. Genevieve.

It is a campaign born of concern over last spring’s school shootings in Colorado, and launched by an energetic new principal full of high-minded ideals.

But it is powered by the efforts of a dozen 12th-graders who gave up their final weeks of vacation to return to school, and paint greeting signs, learn friendship songs and pen letters of welcome for the 80 freshmen who will join their ranks when classes begin this week.

“We know what it feels like to be them,” Bilal explains. “To help somebody avoid the pain . . . that’s the biggest incentive for us.”

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It is a generations-old high school tradition, this hazing of kids who are new or different.

But the deadly rampage at Columbine High last spring--when the misfits struck out to even the score--raised the stakes and turned a national spotlight on the sometimes-brutal relations among campus cliques.

During the weeks after the shootings, there was plenty of soul-searching at St. Genevieve, even though the small Catholic school--which shares its campus with the parish church and elementary school--is about as different from Columbine as a high school could be.

In an urban, working-class Panorama City neighborhood at the edge of the Valley, it has a student body of about 340 mostly Latino and Asian American kids, rigid discipline standards and a strict dress code.

It is a place where teachers pride themselves on knowing every student by name. Still, after the shooting, “we began asking ourselves, ‘Have I done anything to hurt someone? Have I said anything cruel?’ ” said Alma Mercado, who has taught Spanish there for six years.

“It made us start thinking about how we talk to the kids and how they treat each other, and whether we really know what’s on their minds.”

That kind of dialogue has been a fixture among educators across the country this summer, reflecting a national obsession with safety. And as students begin returning to campuses this fall, they are being greeted by millions of dollars’ worth of security gear--surveillance cameras, computerized ID tags, metal detectors, armed guards--aimed at keeping them safe.

But while some schools have beefed up security, others have opted to fortify students rather than buildings, focusing on programs that promote tolerance and aim to foster better relations among students and teachers.

St. Genevieve’s new principal, Dan Horn, falls squarely in that camp.

“One thing this taught us is we cannot continue with business as usual,” Horn said. “We are perpetuating student predators.”

He took the reins of the school in July and immediately launched a campaign to remake the culture into one that values every student.

He reached out first to the football players--”since they had been singled out at Columbine as being hard on the other kids”--then enlisted the help of student government leaders.

There was resistance at first from these tough-looking kids, with their summertime costumes of spiky hair, multiple piercings, and baggy pants.

“Nobody wanted to paint the signs,” Horn said. “But then they got here and spent 10 hours on them. Then I asked them to learn a song to greet [the freshmen], they told me ‘Oh no, no way’ . . . but they wound up later saying, ‘You know, so-and-so plays the guitar, maybe we can get a little band to play with us.’ ”

While it may have begun as a half-hearted effort to appease a new principal, it wound up as a labor of love.

“The news spread by word of mouth and more kids started showing up,” Horn said. “And they remembered how when they were freshmen, they were booed on the first day, and they wished somebody had given them this gift.”

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The seniors’ school year began Monday, the juniors return today, the sophomores Wednesday. And when the freshmen come to campus Thursday, they will be greeted by those who have come before.

“We’re the class of 2000 and we want to set a tone that will last into the next century,” explains senior class President Alvaro Garcia. “When we come back to visit 10 years from now, we want to see that it’s lasted, that we contributed, that we left a legacy.”

That would be a good feeling, he said . . . better, even, than making a freshman carry your books or empty your lunch tray.

Sandy Banks can be reached by e-mail at sandy.banks@latimes.com.