Youths Protest Removal of Creative Counselor

Richard Selby’s room was the haven where Garfield High School students with severe personal problems trickled in for unusual group counseling sessions with one another and the school psychologist.

They were the young women who were raped, the young men and women with scars on their wrists, the gay teenagers with no one to tell their secret to.

But now the counseling sessions called Focus, admired by some psychologists in the school district as a unique way to deal with students’ problems, have ended.

And Selby--a popular staffer among students and the faculty--is no longer at the school either. Selby is an outspoken critic of the district’s psychological services, which focus primarily on special education testing.

After 17 years at Garfield, on Oct. 9 he was reassigned to an elementary school.

The job change occurred against the backdrop of student protests in August, when Focus’ funding was being threatened. This month, a few dozen students held another protest. They wore T-shirts that included a slogan insulting the principal--earning three of them a day in the dean’s office. On Monday, they wore green ribbons.

They plan to wear white T-shirts each Wednesday and orchestrate other shows of support for Selby in the week leading up to the “East L.A. Classic” football game between Garfield and Roosevelt High.

“I really feel that I would not be alive today if it wasn’t for Mr. Selby and his Focus groups,” said senior Mary Ellen Ceballos, 17, a protest organizer who was kept in the dean’s office after the T-shirt incident.

But administrators--emphasizing the privacy of personnel matters--deny that Selby’s outspokenness or the students’ protests played a role in his reassignment.

“We try to make personnel adjustments based on the needs of the students and based on the district’s needs,” said Jesse Flores, coordinator of psychological services for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Local District H.

But some among Garfield’s faculty find Selby’s reassignment suspicious--agitating an already adversarial relationship between a portion of the staff and Principal Norma Danyo, as well as administrators in District H.

“Whoever said, ‘This guy is leaving Garfield,’ is an enemy of the Garfield community,” said John Benson, Garfield’s dean of discipline. “I’ve been at Garfield 37 years. . . . Those are my children--and they got robbed.”

Selby conceived Focus soon after he arrived at Garfield, when he noticed that students who were not doing well academically frequently had severe personal problems. Each of the Focus sessions, held three days a week, drew as many as a couple dozen students--some referred by teachers.

A unique element of Focus entailed students “counseling” one another by acting as listeners and friends to newcomers.

Student Wendy Sepulveda, 18, recalls a girl who came to the group after she was raped.

“Sometimes it seemed like she was going to commit suicide,” Sepulveda said. “She would slit her wrists. We talked to her a lot.”

But in June, Danyo cut funding for Focus from the school’s general budget. In August, new funding was pledged by the Shared Decision Making Council--a panel of teachers, parents and Danyo that administers an alternative budget made up of public funds.

The funding was dependent on District H officials sending out another psychologist two times a week to perform Selby’s regular duties while Selby ran the Focus sessions.

But as it turned out, Flores said there was no psychologist available to send.

In one of his efforts to restore the program, Selby--who remains in contact with students as they plan their events--organized a community rally Oct. 3 at Belvedere Park.

A petition started circulating, and some people wrote letters to district officials.

On Oct. 8, Flores called Selby to District H offices. Selby was asked to hand over the keys to his room, return to Garfield after 4 p.m. and gather his belongings within an hour.

After economics and government teacher Jacqui Heiland heard what happened, she was “absolutely beyond appalled.” She has taught at Garfield for 45 years. “After 17 years at Garfield, they tell you that you may go back for an hour and no more?”

Flores said the procedure was normal.

“Whenever we make a reassignment, we do that in any case,” he said. “The issue is that this is not his assignment anymore.”

Psychological services in general were not cut as a result of Selby’s reassignment, Flores said.

He said there are 20 other counselors, a handful of social-worker interns from Cal State Los Angeles and three mental health clinics in the neighborhood to which students can be referred.

“The students’ needs are still being met,” he said.

Some among Garfield’s faculty disagree.

They say the school’s counselors are overburdened by their primary work of testing special education students--those with learning problems resulting from mental and physical disabilities.

Some say Selby’s work was “creative” in addressing the problems of the general student population.

“If the district knew what he was doing, it would have him mentor some of the rest of us to learn some of the techniques and approaches that he uses,” said Geri Kenyon, a psychologist at Venice High School and longtime representative of district psychologists in the teachers union.

Some say the program was targeted because district officials don’t encourage creativity.

“I believe that his miraculous successes with the Focus groups . . . were a threat to the established psychology programs endorsed by the district policymakers,” Benson said.

Flores, who called Selby a “dedicated” psychologist, said he doesn’t have an opinion about Selby’s program.

“We had needs in the district,” he said. “If we didn’t have those needs, I would not move him.”