Mothers' Meeting Tackles Discrimination, Sends Mixed Signals

By Constance Tillotson

August 5 -- Using statistics, visual aids and role-playing, a group of mothers from the Pico Neighborhood on Saturday highlighted the prejudice they feel Latino and African American children currently face in local schools.

The afternoon meeting of Mothers for Justice at Virginia Avenue Park was meant to bolster the three-month-old group's claims that the school district selectively targets Latino and African American students and enforces unfair disciplinary actions against them. It also was meant to inform parents and students of their rights.

But the meeting, also seemed to raise questions about how widespread the stories of bigotry that sparked the group really were, while the role playing exercises seemed to portray students by engaging in the very stereotyping the group is fighting.

Guest speaker Tony Collatos, a teacher at Santa Monica High School and a research assistant with the UCLA-based group IDEA -- which seeks to "involve youth and make them more outspoken, critical thinkers." -- shared the results of his research on the performance of minorities at Samohi.

"Do we believe students are capable of a high level of learning given the right opportunity?" said Collatos. "It's important that we make sure teachers and administrators can answer this question yes."

But Collatos declined to directly answer if he had personally witnessed discrimination as a teacher at Samohi.

"I would say there is a different, skewed viewpoint," he said. "I believe often times decisions are influenced by that viewpoint. The myth is Santa Monica (High School) is a great school. It will be interesting how it plays out."

Collatos stated that "almost 50 percent" of all Latino and African-American students graduate from Samohi with a GPA below 2.0, which would disqualify them from entering a four-year college.

"We need to find out what's happening in between with the students when they arrive (at Samohi) and when they leave," said Collatos. "We do not have a system that believes all students should go to college."

(Collatos, however, did not release the grade point averages from other high schools where the majority of the students are Latino and African American.)

Paramount to a student's success is that the parents understand how the educational system works and that they become involved, Callatos and the parents said.

Irma Carranza, a founding member of the group and co-chair of the task force, claimed that Samohi was selectively enforcing disciplinary measures based on race.

"When a child gets in trouble, the parents are called on the Anglo child and the police, not the parents, are called on the Mexican child," said Carranza, who noted that the group "came together by recognizing patterns in families in cases of suspensions and expulsions."

When asked by a reporter if any Anglo children had also had the police called, instead of the parents, Carranza replied: "I don't know of that. But I know a lot of people of Caucasian descent, and I've yet to hear they have gone through this."

Carranza said that the group had not conducted research on disciplinary action against non-minorities, adding that, "If there is (discrimination), we'd like to know about it."

The group then staged a skit to show the "different examples of experiences" minority students had undergone. In the skit, the players, who spoke unaccented English when not role playing, suddenly fell into heavy "homie" accents.

In the skit, a Latino boy is sleeping in class. When the teacher wakes him and asks for his homework, he tells her that he doesn't have it. The angry teacher yells at him that she is "tired of him not doing his homework" and sends him to the principal's office.

On the way, the student is harassed in the hallway by a guard for not having a pass. At the principal's office, he meets a Latino girl who also is in trouble for pushing a student who has made a racist remark. She tells the boy that her nemeses has "hired a white lawyer and now I'm suspended."

The principal, who is searching for suspects in a graffiti incident, then searches the boy's backpack. "Behave, if you know how, which I doubt," he tells the boy. The boy offers no explanation for sleeping in class and failing to complete his homework. "Man, I just want to learn," he says.

The girl who played the suspended student was Cynthia Santiago, Samohi's student body president and an honor student. Being the first Latino to hold the office, Santiago said that she had not been the victim of discrimination at the school, though she "felt certain perceptions made in the beginning."