School Bounds, Ethnic Jitters

Education has always been a top priority for Patricia Fisher. As the mother of two elementary students in San Juan Accelerated School, Fisher wants her children to achieve what she did in Mexico: a college degree.

“If you don’t do well in school, you end up working in the kitchen or cleaning people’s houses,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with that, but I want them to be better.”

The San Juan Capistrano school that Fisher’s children attend is 96% Latino, making it the most ethnically homogeneous of the 29 elementary schools in the Capistrano Unified School District. A primary focus of the school is to help its students become proficient in English.

But a pending boundary change, to make way for four new elementary schools in the district, could mean transferring half of San Juan’s students and about 150 more from nearby Del Obispo Elementary to the new Kinoshita Elementary. Another option would send some San Juan students to Del Obispo, where a majority of students are white.

The proposed changes--which are always controversial because many parents resist the disruption of having their children change schools--have also prompted allegations of bigotry.

The school board is scheduled to decide on boundaries today.

Fisher, who is Latina, said she and other San Juan parents want the same thing for their children that Del Obispo parents want: a great education. She’s concerned that white parents at the other school don’t give the San Juan students and parents credit for their academic aspirations.

At a school board meeting in January, Fisher said, she was enraged when some Del Obispo parents voiced their opposition to merging students from both schools.

Del Obispo mother Mary Johnson said at the meeting that the school’s own Stanford 9 test scores could be lowered if it were forced to accommodate San Juan students who are not fluent in English.

Fisher believes such comments are about ethnicity, not language skills.

“I never felt discriminated against before,” she said. “It was a shock for me to go to these meetings and listen to what they are saying. The whole thing makes me sick.”

Another San Juan parent agreed.

“It’s been so obvious that [Del Obispo parents] don’t want us near them,” Christina Cira said at a public hearing on the issue last month. “You don’t want us in your community. I really hate you doing this to us.”

At the often contentious hearings, many other San Juan parents have described Del Obispo as a segregated school whose parents resist mixing with Latinos.

But the portrait of a xenophobic school doesn’t fit the image that parents and educators at Del Obispo have of their campus, where a third of the students are Latino and a quarter speak limited English.

“We love the diversity,” Principal John Allen said--so much so that the school will begin offering after-school Spanish classes for students and parents Feb. 28, in response to a request from English-speaking parents to broaden their communication with Spanish-speaking parents.

“I’ve always thought it was very diverse,” said Del Obispo parent Laurie Gatlin.

By contrast, San Juan has little diversity. Its student population is overwhelmingly poor, Latino and not fluent in English. About 95% of the school’s children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

It took six years for fifth-grader Juan Zavala to learn English enough to feel comfortable. His mother and father, both custodians, have limited English skills, so Juan’s brother helps him with his homework.

Schoolwide, the language barrier translated into poor Stanford 9 test scores during the 1998-99 school year. San Juan students scored far below national and district averages in the areas of reading, math, language and spelling.

To boost English skills, the school offers programs to help students improve their reading comprehension and phonetics.

But the school is also severely crowded, with 1,058 students on a campus originally intended for 650.

“There are too many kids here; it’s really crowded when you have to go to the bathroom,” said fifth-grader Alba Hernandez.

Students must be siphoned off to other campuses, and some might end up going to Del Obispo.

Del Obispo also offers programs to help families with English skills. For about a year, the school has been offering eight weekly hours of English instruction for parents who want to learn the language, Principal Allen said. And many of its Latino families feel very comfortable there.

Juanita Tavera, whose son Jose is in third grade at the school, has been taking the English classes.

“I love the school,” Tavera said.

Del Obispo students score about average on standardized tests. Their Stanford 9 test scores from last spring are slightly above the state average. But the school placed in the bottom third of district campuses on both that test and the district’s own CORE exam, which is tailored to Capistrano Unified’s curriculum.

Many Del Obispo parents say they prize the tradition of the school community over the test scores.

The 26-year-old school’s classrooms are large, if old, with well-worn space for activities away from the clusters of desks. Walls are colorfully decorated and, in many classrooms, the space where computers could be is filled by murals, student artwork or books.

Everything about the area is settled and older. Not decrepit, but aging and weathered.

Many of the school’s first teachers and other staffers still work there.

“We don’t weigh heavily on the average test score for the Stanford 9,” parent Lance Wall said. “The average scores tell me that we don’t have a homogeneous school.”

San Juan fifth-grader Claudia Gonzalez said she would have no problems joining Del Obispo students because students from the two schools eventually mix at Marco Forster Middle School.

And Sheila Benecke, president of Capistrano Unified’s Board of Trustees, said having students with different abilities and test scores in the same classroom is a reality today.

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Tale of Two Schools

A proposed boundary change that would merge students from a predominantly Latino school and students from a predominantly white school has come under scrutiny in South County. A comparison of the San Juan Accelerated Elementary School and Del Obispo Elementary School, both in San Juan Capistrano:

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San Juan Del Obispo Number of students 1,058 770

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Location: San Juan Capistrano

Percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches

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San Juan Del Obispo 95% 26%

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Ethnic background

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San Juan Del Obispo Latino 96.2% 29.1% White 3.0% 67.8% Black 0.3% 1.2% Filipino 0.3% 0.6% American Indian/Alaskan National 0.2% 0.5% Pacific Islander 0.1% 0.1% Percent who speak limited English 87.7% 23.0%

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*Stanford 9 test percentile rankings for fifth-graders in 1998-1999.

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San Juan Del Obispo Reading 15 58 Math 17 57 Language 23 52 Spelling 16 49

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Source: Capistrano Unified School District

*Percentile rankings give the percentage of schools that scored lower. For example, a 17 ranking means 17% of schools received lower average scores.

Los Angeles Times