Diversity Challenges Schools to Preserve Racial Harmony

From Crenshaw to the San Fernando Valley, administrative offices to classrooms, the often-bitter emotions of racial strife plague the Los Angeles Unified School District.

District officials have worked to defuse racial and ethnic tensions with everything from squads of mediators who can travel to troubled campuses to appointments of administrators with an eye toward racial balance--a Latino vice principal, for example, to complement a black principal.

But as countless new ethnic and cultural groups transform urban neighborhoods, they challenge the ability of the schools to promote and preserve racial harmony. Many of the tensions in the schools mirror those in the community at large--battles for jobs, political power and turf among the region’s growing Latino community and other groups, including blacks and Jews, who fear their influence is waning.

“We’re only a microcosm of the city, even the nation,” said L.A. Unified Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

The most recent example unfolded at a San Fernando Valley elementary school where a white principal who had been targeted for ouster by Latino parents reported that he was assaulted. Principal Norman Bernstein had earlier contacted the Anti-Defamation League for help with what he saw as discrimination aimed at him. Anger over the attack intensified when Los Angeles school board President Victoria Castro said she sympathized with parents who have been trying to have the principal replaced by a Spanish-speaking Latino.

But Burton Street Elementary School is far from an isolated case.

Ulysses S. Grant High School, Hollywood High School, Berendo Middle School, South Gate Middle School, Sixty-sixth Street Elementary School and Marvin Avenue Elementary School are only a few of the campuses that have struggled with racial and cultural issues in recent years.

“We’re probably doing more in terms of conflict resolution--public and private--than anyone else in the city,” Zacarias said. “That’s a fact and we’re proud of it.”

But those efforts sometimes seem swamped by the challenge.

“There is a potential for more of these kinds of incidents to be a part of our racial landscape unless there is an attempt by the leaders of this city to stand up and say it’s not tolerable,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, referring to Burton Street.

Castro said that over the past week she has been severely criticized by dozens of angry callers of every ethnic stripe. Even Mayor Richard Riordan suggested that she wash her mouth out with soap.

“I’ve had hate calls, racist calls,” she said during an interview in her office. “One guy yelled, ‘Why don’t you go back to Mexico?’ I told him that I was born here. I wouldn’t know where to go in Mexico.

“Look, I’ve been discriminated against all my life,” she said. “I only want to bring that experience and sensitivity to my job.”

Although many Latino leaders perceive a district in which Latino students and teachers still face discrimination, many blacks and whites voice fears that their needs and concerns are now going to take a back seat in a district where 69% of the students, and many top administrators, are Latino.

“Whites feel uncomfortable talking about it, but we wouldn’t encourage our kids to become teachers in this district, because they wouldn’t be given a fair shot,” said Los Angeles middle school teacher Pam Nelson. “You’re not really welcome. You’re not wanted here.”

Zacarias on Wednesday sought to reassure his diverse constituency.

“Is there an agenda? Is there some kind of quota we’re trying to fill? Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re for all the children, regardless of ethnicity or culture.”

Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who has two children attending Los Angeles public schools, sounds a similar note. “Obviously, we want leaders who understand the issues and priorities of a given community, but to say that the only people who can dothat are from your own group is wrong,” he said.

But some Latino leaders privately insist that Latino children are best served by teachers and principals of their own heritage and by heavy doses of ethnic studies.

Roosevelt High School teacher John Fernandez, a spokesman for the Coalition for Chicano and Chicana Studies, is among the few who publicly calls for a teaching force that reflects the student body. “Educating for diversity is a crock,” Fernandez said.

“Under the guise of diversity comes a disempowerment of the Latino community,” he said. “I don’t see how people unfamiliar with our language and culture and customs can deal with our problems.”

Fernandez, who until a year ago headed the district’s now-defunct Mexican-American Education Commission, has many silent cheerleaders.

“John Fernandez is right!” declared one influential Latino official, asking to remain anonymous.

“Parents have a right to be served. Why is it that when Latinos say that, it’s regarded as racist?” the official asked. “If the district is 70% Latino, it should have 70% Latino principals and teachers.

“But it’s so emotional, people get irrational. . . . When it comes to race, whoever is at the forefront pays a very high price.”

The tensions at Burton largely have pitted white faculty and administrators against some Latino parents--a situation mirrored at other campuses, particularly in the Valley, where many whites have felt displaced by the district’s growing Latino student majority.

An even more incendiary type of confrontation has taken place in neighborhoods that were once heavily African American but have now been transformed by waves of Latino immigration.

There, demands by Latinos for increased representation in the schools run up against black perceptions of a threat to jobs and equality hard won by the civil rights movement.

Some of those past battles were fought over demands that black students have black teachers and principals. Indeed, the roughly 4,500 black teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district are heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of schools that have historically had high black enrollment. Of the district’s 549 regular schools, about 50, nearly all in South-Central, have a majority-black faculty.

But even as blacks were replacing whites in those schools, the demographics were shifting. In kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, Spanish-speakers were starting to fill seats once held by African American children.

Parents Seek Latino Staff

Today, Latinos make up the majority of students in 26 of the schools where half or more of the faculties are black. Five of those schools became majority Latino in just the past five years. In many of those schools, parents are pushing for more Latino staff.

“The situation has gone full circle,” said Celes King III, president of the Congress for Racial Equality, who in the late 1960s led street demonstrations against a white principal at Manual Arts High School. “The Hispanics are using the same thoughts and practices we used 30 years ago.”

“There’s a sense among many African American principals and teachers that the powers that be feel they have become expendable,” he added. “We need to organize and maintain our positions in education because we worked so hard for them. But we also recognize that we must work more with others and make concessions.”

There is no doubt that the proportion of Latino teachers is much smaller than that of Latino students. Although some 69% of the district’s 697,000 students are Latino, only 24% of its teachers are Latino. Fifty percent of teachers are white and 15% are black.

More often than not, Latinos are taught by whites. There are 176 schools where the majority of students are Latino and the faculties at least half white. The number of such schools has grown steadily across the district, with heavy concentrations not only in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside but also from Hollywood to Northeast Los Angeles and the South Bay. In some schools, the Latino population has grown because of changing neighborhoods; in others because of the busing of children across the city to relieve overcrowding in heavily Latino neighborhoods near downtown.

In many instances, the district has appointed administrators to strike racial balances.

Virginia Road Elementary School in the Crenshaw district got its first Latino associate principal only a few months ago. Martin Leon said his new duties include building cooperation between the black staff and Latino families.

“I came here because of ethnic problems. Latino parents wanted representation. I’m it,” said Leon, an energetic former teacher who wears a silver whistle attached to a strap emblazoned with the words: I Love Mexico. “Seven of our 15 teachers’ assistants are Latino. I’d like to hire at least five more.”

For Virginia Road parent Rosa Ramirez, the decision to hire Leon was merely a start. Waiting for her preschooler just outside the school’s main entrance, she lamented, “I wish there were more Latinos in the office. There are still so many in there who don’t speak Spanish.”

It’s not just Latinos who want to see themselves reflected in the front office. Hollywood High School, a predominantly Latino campus, appointed its first Armenian assistant principal after Armenian parents pushed to get officials to keep non-Armenians away from their daughters.

Assistant Principal Norik Simonian--who speaks Armenian--encourages Latinos and Armenians to mix, on and off campus.

It hasn’t been easy. Three times over the past year, Armenian residents have blocked the school’s main entrances and demanded that officials turn over individual students they believed had maligned one of their own. Each time, school police cleared the streets by wading into the crowds and writing tickets for every infraction.

“In the old country, if someone slaps you, he gets slugged back--it’s over,” Simonian said. “I tell people that although we respect cultures, this is the United States. We don’t do revenge here.”

School mediators have made one of their most intense efforts at South Gate Middle School, where three African American teachers and the family of a 13-year-old former student filed a lawsuit alleging that the district failed to halt chronic discrimination against them in an overwhelmingly Latino school.

During an interview, the youngster, Michael Collins, recalled his first day at South Gate.

“As soon as my mother and I walked through the gate someone yelled, ‘What’s this nigger doing on our campus?’ ” he said. “It gave me chills.”

Over the next several months, Collins allegedly was called “Snickers” and “Hershey Bar.” He had erasers and paper clips thrown at him, and chocolate milk dumped on his head, according to the lawsuit. When he fought back, he was written up and sent home. Eventually, he was placed on a half-day schedule.

At various times outside school, Latino youths allegedly took turns kicking him in the back, poking him in the backside with a rusty nail and spraying his face with black paint.

Castro, whose district includes South Gate, said she is relieved that the case soon will be heard in court.

“The mediators we were sending out there weren’t changing things,” Castro said. “Whatever the court does, the boy’s experiences will never be erased.”

In the churning cultural mix that is L.A. Unified, racial disputes can be ignited by something as mundane as the foods people eat.

In the downtown IBM building--home of the district’s vast accounting divisions--African Americans complained that the fish lunches their Filipino colleagues were zapping in the office microwave oven smelled horribly.

In what has come to be called “the battle of separate but equal microwaves,” district mediators are still trying to mend hurt feelings. So far, about the only thing both sides have agreed on is to no longer cook fish in the office.

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

* NEW APPROACH: Inglewood High won’t observe Black History Month or Cinco de Mayo, focusing on a yearlong multicultural approach.B1

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Racial Disparity

One source of tension in LAUSD is the racial mismatch between students and teachers. A computer analysis of teaching assignments shows that the rapid growth of Latino enrollment is wiping out a tradition of matching students with teachers of their own ethnicity. The schools listed below represent 22 campuses where enrollment has become majority Latino during the past five years while the faculties remain predominately white or black.

1. Acclrt Charter School

2. Burbank Elementary

3. Chandler Elementary

4. Danube Elementary

5. Eagle Rock Elementary

6. Glendhill Elementary

7. Haskell Elementary

8. Leland Elementary

9. Lemay Elementary

10. Melrose Elementary

11. Melvin Elementary

12. Normandie Elementary

13. 107th Street Elementary

14. 112th Street Elementary

15. Plainview Elementary

16. Rio Vista Elementary

17. Saticoy Elementary

18. Stagg Elementary

19. Stonehurst Elementary

20. Winnetka Elementary

21. Holmes Middle School

22. Locke School

*

Teaching staff at least 50% white

Teaching staff at least 50% black

*

Teachers (1998)

White: 50%

Latino: 24%

Black: 15%

Asian: 8%

Other: 3%

*

Students (1998)

Latino: 69%

Black: 14%

White: 11%

Asian: 4%

Other: 3%