School Needs Cooperation

Burton Elementary School in Panorama City is at a crossroads.

Los Angeles school officials are considering whether to scrap the school’s year-round calendar, the focus of parental protests and a threatened boycott. But Burton has deeper, more complex problems than the controversial calendar. The juncture now before the school is whether Burton parents, teachers and administrators will scrap a just-signed mediation agreement--or give it time to help solve the school’s underlying problems.

The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission brought mediators to the campus in February after the school’s principal, Norman Bernstein, was beaten, allegedly by anti-white assailants. Police called the still-unsolved beating a hate crime.

A group of parents at the 760-pupil, mostly Latino campus had called for Bernstein’s replacement because, among other reasons, he didn’t speak Spanish. But they denied having anything to do with the beating and lamented that the ensuing uproar--and the suspicion it cast on them--detracted attention from their concerns.

Tensions have been building since the school was hit by two major changes in the past year--the shift to a year-round calendar and the implementation of the anti-bilingual education law, state Proposition 227.

Year-round schools have sparked dissent just about everywhere they’ve been introduced. Parents, teachers and students alike mourn the loss of traditional summer vacations and the disruption of family schedules. But the controversy at Burton is more complicated than that. Parents fear that their children’s education is being shortchanged by the new 163-day calendar, which has longer but fewer days than the traditional 180-day calendar. Moreover, this fear is layered by issues of race and ethnicity and accompanied by distrust. Some parents don’t believe administrators when they say the calendar is needed to relieve overcrowding. They don’t believe the school did all it could to gain waivers that would allow children to remain in bilingual classes. They accuse some teachers of dismissing them as “illegals” and say they will only be satisfied with a Latino principal.

The mediation agreement tries to get to these deeper issues. A group of parents, teachers and administrators met with Human Relations Commission Executive Director Joe Hicks and outside, professional mediators to outline ways to improve communication and work together. They signed an agreement July 8.

Hicks warns that the agreement is fragile. “Any one thing in the next week or two, any indication that people are not acting in good faith, could blow this thing to smithereens,” he told The Times. “It’s going to take the mediation agreement and some time, with people working together and gaining trust in each other.”

In a climate so charged with distrust, it is difficult to trust any agreement, especially one that will take some time to show results. And true enough, the very day after the agreement was signed, parents picketed the school again, demanding an end to the year-round schedule.

But trust is both the means and the goal of the process. Regardless of what the school district decides about the calendar, parents, teachers and administrators need to show a commitment to resolving the underlying issues. The mediation agreement is a road map for the long haul--and the best route at this juncture in the school’s troubled history.