School Cliques to Sign Peace Pact

According to Grant High School’s clique etiquette, Andy, Hala, Edgar and Erik should not be socializing.

Andy Jassick, a white 16-year-old with shaggy hair and an oversized “South Park” T-shirt, hangs with a crowd known as the wrestlers. Hala Shamas, 16, of Syrian descent, wears a blue DKNY shirt and butterfly clips in her hair and belongs to “the Versace crowd.”

Edgar Keroglyan, 16, has a tattoo on his finger and “kicks it” with his fellow Armenian friends on the north end of campus. Erik Gonzalez, an 18-year-old Latino, wears silver rings on eight fingers and studs in his nose and ears, and shaves his head.

Not only do they talk, laugh and joke with each other, but today they will sign a peace treaty with teachers, classmates, administrators and politicians, signifying an easing of tensions at the 3,400-student campus. With more than 25 ethnic cultures represented among the students, it is one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s most diverse high schools.

Last October, a long-standing feud between Latino and Armenian students erupted into a lunchtime brawl with more than 200 teenagers shoving, screaming and throwing bottles and trash cans.

Fifteen police officers wearing helmets arrested five students, detained another 40 and ordered everyone else to return to class. At least 10 students, some teachers and a maintenance worker were injured slightly.

“What it comes down to is a tradition” of fighting between the largest ethnic groups on the campus, said Joe Walker, Grant’s principal since September.

Through the years, fights have escalated into stabbings, shootings and the Oct. 21 melee.

Students signing the peace treaty will agree to respect and promote an understanding of different cultures and to end violence. By all accounts, however, it will not end ethnic conflicts.

“We don’t want to be too grand or too sweeping,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, one of several agencies that have worked with Grant’s students and faculty since the melee.

“There’s no silver bullet for transforming the school into a totally peaceful and harmonious place,” he said. “But this is a positive step.”

In the long term, Hicks, Walker and others want to work with neighboring campuses in the San Fernando Valley, particularly middle schools, to develop a program in which older students curtail ethnic misunderstandings among younger students.

Hicks and mediation experts from the county, the school district and the U.S. Department of Justice are training teachers and students to prevent and defuse conflicts. They are meeting with parents and community members because friction between Latino and Armenian adults is a citywide problem, particularly in the east Valley, Hicks said.

At Grant, Walker and other administrators attribute the tension, in part, to long-forgotten disputes over earthquake relief drives in the 1980s after quakes struck Mexico and Armenia.

During lunch and nutrition breaks, Andy, Hala, Edgar, Erik and other students from the first-period peer mediation class patrol the campus, ready to stave off fights with calming words.

The four hope to set an example by mingling with all ethnic and social groups, including Latinos, Asians, surfers, skaters and jocks. But, they said, students sometimes look at them “weird.”

“I’ll go over to the Armenian area to say, ‘What’s up,’ and some people are cool,” Erik said. “But a lot of people think I’m going over there to start a fight because I’m Mexican. They’re surprised when I don’t.”