EDUCATION / SMART RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND PARENTS : Beating Bias : In San Clemente High Class, to Be Featured in PBS Series, Students Study Intolerance and Confront It in Their Own Lives

When a San Clemente High School senior and several friends severely beat an Asian man they thought was gay, teacher Joe Moros approached his principal. We should do something about this, they agreed.

Then normal life resumed. And nothing came of their pact.

Later that year, in October 1993, racial tensions flared. A white student died in a beach parking lot at the hands of a Latino who launched a stripped paint roller and speared the student’s brain. The dead boy used to sit in the second row in one of Moros’ classes.

The English teacher and the principal met again. This time, they did something.

The result is a unique class on tolerance, patterned after a program established by the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

The class at San Clemente High isn’t English with a dab of multiculturalism thrown in, or history viewed through the prism of ethnic strife. It’s simply tolerance.

“It’s just what it is--a class in prejudice,” Moros explained in a PBS series called “Seeking Solutions.” “It’s a class in discrimination, hatred and violence. . . . [I do it] to stop the hate and violence.”

Now in its fourth year, the Promoting Tolerance Through Understanding class is usually full with 40 students. And Moros has seen its effects in the behavior of one young man, Steve Raines.

Steve’s older brother went to prison for the beating of the Asian man. Steve enrolled in the tolerance class hoping to explain his feelings of white pride to other students. He wound up a changed man--dating a woman of another ethnicity, discarding his racist leanings and aiming to become a teacher.

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For the difference it has made in this beach community, Moros’ class is now featured in the new PBS series. Produced and reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, “Seeking Solutions” highlights how communities across America have developed grass-roots solutions to crime problems--from gang activity to hate crimes. A three-hour block of “Seeking Solutions” airs tonight on KCET-TV and Thursday on KOCE-TV.

A peek at Moros’ class reveals that it isn’t the typical high school lecture.

For one thing, the class doesn’t look like the rest of San Clemente High, a predominantly white school. Moros consciously recruits students for diversity, under the theory that kids will better understand the effects of prejudice if they hear about it from classmates.

On this September day, Moros’ students are just getting to know each other, yet already they’re opening up in this classroom decorated with maps of gang territory and a sticker that reads “Hate Free Zone.”

One student discussed dealing with prejudice because of the way she dresses--black frocks, dyed hair and pierced chin.

Another girl explained the shame she felt in elementary school when kids would mock her full-blooded Indian grandmother.

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Senior Ray Parks, 18, and junior Jessica Clapper, 16, know a little something about experiencing hatred too. In fact, confessed Ray, who is black, he used to feel some distaste toward whites. Then he took the class.

And now he’s dating Jessica, who’s white. The two see the cold looks on the street when they hold hands.

And Ray, who is taking the tolerance class for a second time to learn more, gets a fair ration of razzing from friends about his girlfriend.

“I took the class because I wanted to learn more about prejudice,” Jessica said. “Kids, their moms, old people stare at us. I wanted to learn more about that [prejudice].”

“I used to think white people discriminated more against black people,” Ray said. “Now that I have a white girlfriend, I find that black people discriminate against us.”

He continued: “It makes me sad. I just want to go up to people and say, ‘It’s OK.’ ”

The class covers more than race. Moros leads his students through discussions on immigration, sex discrimination, stereotypes, genocide, depression, human rights and conflict resolution.

Along the way, students hear from people who have experienced discrimination: a woman whose husband battered her for years; a man whose ethnic heritage is Latino, black and Irish; a man who studies hate crimes from the concentration camps of Auschwitz to Bensonhurst, N.Y., where Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old African American, was killed by whites in 1989.

“It’s certainly not a math class,” Moros told his pupils. “We’re gonna be getting down and dirty and mixing it up. . . . That’s OK, so long as you’re respectful.”

For more information on Moros’ class, including sample lesson plans, log on to https://www.teachtolerance.org. More details about the “Seeking Solutions” series can be found at https://www.pbs.org/seekingsolutions.

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For teachers interested in starting a tolerance class of their own, Joe Moros recommends the following:

* In high school, make the class a full-fledged elective rather than a special seminar or retreat. In lower grades, infuse the topic of tolerance into the curriculum weekly or even daily, discussing the topic on a level kids can understand (for example, playground bullying, name calling).

* Focus exclusively on tolerance, prejudice and youth violence. Don’t relegate the topic to a secondary focus in a multiculturalism or history class.

* Make sure the class is taught by a veteran teacher genuinely interested in the topic.

* Even in homogenous schools, strive to recruit students from different races, cultures and sexual orientations. The students will learn from each other.

* Don’t be hindered by school bureaucracy. Explain the need for such a class in today’s fast-changing, multicultural society.