Peer Mediators Easing Tension After School Melee

With the poise of a much more experienced counselor, 13-year-old Jaunisa Johnson glanced at her clipboard and then at the two squabbling students slumped in their seats in a room next to the principal’s office.

“Were you guys about to get into something physical?” she asked the boys, who were sent to Johnson for peer mediation at Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in Pasadena, where they are all students. The boys had been bickering in class and their parents worried they were going to get into a fight.

“How can we come up with a conclusion to solve this problem, so this doesn’t happen again?” Johnson asked, as Principal Steve Miller listened at his desk.

Johnson is one of 80 Marshall students who recently graduated from a peer mediation program at the Community Non-Violence Resource Center in Pasadena. They volunteered for the conflict-resolution program after six students were arrested in early March in a fight that resulted in a campus lockdown.

Newspaper reports and some community members blamed the brawl on tension between Armenian and African American youths at the school, which enrolls 1,744 students in grades six through 12. Some Armenian parents took their children out of school for a week, citing safety reasons, and some African American parents blamed school staff for not doing enough to protect their children.

Administrators and students said that the fight was an isolated incident involving a small group of students and that the campus was unfairly portrayed as racially divided. Most students, they said, feel safe and comfortable around each other.

Students didn’t want the public to have a negative perception of Marshall, said Ray Ramirez, director of the Community Non-Violence Resource Center, which also helps students in the Los Angeles Unified and Alhambra school districts mediate conflicts.

The center opened nine years ago in response to the 1993 Halloween killing of three Pasadena teenage boys, who were trick-or-treating and mistaken by gang members for rivals. The organization receives funds from Huntington Memorial Hospital and various school districts for programs in character development, anger management, bullying prevention and conflict resolution.

At Marshall in Pasadena, nearly 120 students recently volunteered for 30 hours of training, including some weekend time, in cross-cultural conflict resolution, listening skills and communication.

“These students stepped up,” Ramirez said.

Amber McDonald, 17, an African American, has mediated three conflicts since graduating from the program last month. Two of her sessions involved rivalries between African American and Armenian students that began with such issues as competition for girls and perceived insults, she said.

McDonald acknowledged tension between the two ethnic groups at her school but said it was more along the lines of “personal conflicts that escalate and just both races get involved.”

“It’s not like one race hates the other race,” she said. “A lot of us are friends. But because we like to stick together, people have made it more racial than what it is.”

She said the mediation program “is starting to make a difference. We had a lot of animosity between the both of us, blacks and Armenians,” she said. “But because of different programs, like peer mediation, and our principal, we’re all kind of working together.”

The campus enrollment is 53% Latino, 18% African American and 22% white, including many Armenian students.

Ramirez said he had been alerted at the beginning of the year to problems at Marshall by Pasadena Unified School District Police Chief Mike Trevis after disputes between a handful of African American and Armenian students. His meeting with the students involved “quieted the situation to a point where there weren’t any fights, until the last flare-up,” he said.

That March 5 melee involved some of the same teens. It began when an Armenian and an African American student, who both had been suspended for fighting earlier in the week, got into it again. Their friends jumped in, police said. The six students face police charges of battery or fighting in public and have been suspended from school, awaiting review for expulsion, officials said.

The principal said it was unfortunate that some people thought Marshall was “rife with racial tension,” simply because two cliques did not get along.

“We live in a community that has different ethnic groups,” Miller said. “It’s important to understand that this is not racially motivated; it’s individuals who do not know how to handle confrontation.”

In the last few weeks, students have attended several assemblies with community leaders about cultural differences and peace, and joined the peer mediation training.

“The students themselves have said: ‘No more,’ ” Miller said.

He pointed to the mediation that Johnson recently handled as an example of how students at the school have moved beyond their differences. Johnson is African American, one boy involved is Armenian and the other is Latino, but everyone walked away from the session respecting each other and compromising, he said.

In the end, Johnson persuaded them to ask their teacher to separate their seats in class and come to her or other mediators if a problem arises between them again.

“It’s better than getting hurt or somebody going to the hospital,” said one of the boys after the mediation.

“Instead of getting suspended, we settle it here,” said the other.

In his office, Miller told the three students: “We have conflicts all the time, even as adults, and there’s better ways to solve it. I’m very proud of all you guys.”

After the mediation, Johnson expressed satisfaction that she was contributing to campus harmony. “Fighting is not the answer,” she said.

Sixth-grader Hannah Holland-Moritz volunteered for peer mediation because she, too, wanted to make her a school a safer place.

Holland-Moritz, 12, was returning to campus from a field trip to watch Japanese taiko drumming on the day of the Marshall lockdown last month. Her class had to be led back to their room by an administrator, she said.

She said she hoped the mediation program would quell such encounters, because students “want to make it a good school.”