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Reading, Writing and Race in San Diego Schools

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County schools superintendent Castruita says hope is the issue for today’s students. Given the daunting list of problems and conditions that our local schools face, is there equal access to hope for our kids?

“The key thing that has to happen is that teachers and parents have to have high expectations, especially of minority youngsters, and sometimes those high expectations don’t exist,” says Ed Fletcher, retired administrator of the city school district’s integration program.

“The most insidious part is when we give up,” says Mary Catherine Swanson, founder of AVID (Achievement Via Individual Determination), which she started 20 years ago at Clairemont High School to help underachieving students prepare for college. The program has been extended to 1,000 schools nationally and has an extraordinarily high success rate.

Swanson, a teacher for 30 years, says educational research shows that “the single most important thing we can do for our kids and school systems is [to provide] very difficult coursework.” Not surprisingly, she is an outspoken critic of a proposal by the University of California to lower admission standards. “Excuse me, but that’s inexcusable,” she says. “We need to have access to rigorous coursework and support structures while [students] are still in secondary schools.”

Swanson says her successful AVID students tell her that the most valuable support system they had was “a significant adult

in the school setting who was their advocate.” She adds, “They come from difficult communities. These are difficult homes where the provider is often so busy and perhaps is not a part of the American educational system and doesn’t know how to provide support. So all of the parental programs are really important, but we have to pick up support structures within the schools.”

One of San Diego’s most famous names is also one of the city school district’s most ambitious and generous private donors. Sol Price, founder of the Price Club, is fervent about revitalizing City Heights, where he grew up. His commitment of nearly $70 million to various projects in this cash-strapped urban zone has been used to improve public schools, build new housing, construct a large office complex for nonprofit agencies and provide a host of other community services. But he is disappointed by what he sees as public schools’ overemphasis on pre-college curriculum.

“Do you really want to build a society where every kid who goes to school is told—or made to feel—that if he doesn’t go to college, then he is a failure?” Price asks. It may be a truism that not every child is college material, but it’s also a point Price believes does not garner enough respect from today’s educators. He is equally blunt and direct about another aspect of hope.

“You have to clearly realize that there are really two K-12 systems,” Price says. “There’s a system that’s the La Jolla–Point Loma system, and that’s totally different from the one in the inner-city schools.

“Basically, schools get a bum rap. You’re getting very difficult ‘merchandise’ in the inner-city schools to deal with,” he says. “Kids don’t get the right medical attention. They don’t hear well. They don’t get the glasses they need. They come to school hungry, and you expect the school to worry about all that, and the school can’t. You’re not paying the teachers enough money, and you don’t have enough support help. ... You’re not going to get parent involvement when you’ve got maybe one single parent—one who was maybe only 16 when the child was born and who doesn’t speak English herself. And where you’ve got dysfunctional families.”

Adds Price, “Everyone says education is at fault. Education is really not at fault. Society is at fault.”

A lot of young people would agree with that. They also may be living proof that many of the efforts to erase racism actually may be working. Despite sporadic and sometimes vicious aberrations, race just isn’t a big deal for many adolescents. They say, in effect, “Get over it and move on.”

Ask the students of San Diego High School. At lunchtime, you won’t find them forming social cliques defined solely by race. At this school, African-Americans, whites, Latinos, Asians and students of other ethnic groups seem to get along. They chat as they hang out in a large center courtyard known as the ASB lawn.

“Here, you see more of an integration,” says 17-year-old Paul Romanenko, who’s enrolled in San Diego High’s International Baccalaureate program. “You have whites talking to blacks, blacks talking with Latinos. What you see here are students willing to open themselves up to other races.”

The student body at San Diego High is 65 percent Latino, 17 percent white, 13 percent African-American and 5 percent Asian. (For an in-depth look at an even more racially diverse San Diego school, see Jonathan Freedman’s “Global High,” page 86.)

“What’s great about this school is we still have a good mixture,” says auto-shop instructor Jon Karanopoulos, a 1973 San Diego High alumnus who’s taught at the school since 1986. “And one of the great things that I received from my education is rubbing elbows with people of different races. We have kids who’ve transferred here from all over the county. And their parents—once they understand that it’s not a threatening place—they really love it.”

The school has few problems with vandalism and is remarkably litter-free—which Karanopoulos sees as indicative that the kids care about their education and appreciate their school. “If you make something that they can be proud of, they’ll take care of it,” he says. “If you make it where they’re not proud of it, they’ll wreck it. And that’s just how it works.”

His ties to the school run deeper than just teaching and reminiscing about his youth. One of his sons is among the 1,900 students enrolled at the school for the 2000-2001 academic year. “I don’t live in this district,” Karanopoulos explains. “I live over by SDSU. But I wanted my son to go here because of the quality of education in this program. And I don’t want him to be segregated.”

Counselor and varsity basketball coach Dennis Kane says more than 48 teachers have enrolled their own children at the school. “To me,” he comments, “that’s the biggest testament you can give a school.”

Both Kane and Karanopoulos attribute the school’s positive outlook to multiple factors, ranging from the administrative efforts of principal Tony Alforo to the arrival of the International Baccalaureate classes during the mid-1980s. Part of the desegregation effort, the course is one of three magnet programs at San Diego High, which also includes the Writing Academy and Language Immersion, where students take a rigorous two-year, pre-university curriculum.

“I think a really important thing here is that I feel I can walk up to anyone and talk to them and not be worried about whether they’re in the ‘wrong’ group,” says student Summer Cagle, 17. “There’s a lot of sharing encouraged at San Diego High. You have the MEChA [Chicano] club, the African-American Student Union and a lot of different clubs. We also have a yearly world culture fair on Cinco de Mayo. So I think that helps—that climate of sharing and acceptance.”

Where San Diego High presents a diverse racial picture, Torrey Pines High School, east of Del Mar, is almost monochromatic. The student body at Torrey Pines, in the San Dieguito Unified School District, is 78 percent white, 12 percent Asian, 8 percent Latino and 1 percent African-American.

Despite the lopsided numbers, the mostly white student body is taking things into its own hands to improve race relations and promote diversity. The primary responsibility for building on-campus awareness rests with the student-run Human Relations Council. During the mid-January meeting, members of the council gathered around assistant principal Joe Eldred to work out the details of the school’s CommUnity Day, scheduled for February.

The hope is that “they get to know and understand each other better—staff and students,” says Eldred. “We know that once you know somebody and know their background—and where they’re coming from—you’ll have more respect for them, rather than just looking at them and saying, ‘I don’t like you.’ Teenagers are really good at that. But on the other hand, teenagers are really good when they really understand something.”

Human Relations Council member Carlos Baerra says the target audience of CommUnity Day is the part of the student body that doesn’t interact well. “We want to change their views,” he says, “and make [understand] that we need to respect each other, and that we are all people.”

Baerra remembers when the Human Relations Council was only a handful of students. Now a junior, he’s been involved with the group since he was a freshman. Today, the Human Relations Council has 30 members. “In the beginning, we were just a group wanting to learn about diversity,” Baerra says. “Now, we are preaching diversity.”

Additionally, some students are affiliated with a group known as Having a Voice, which offers class presentations about fighting prejudice and increasing tolerance, among other issues. “Having a Voice is almost exclusively Latino students,” says counselor Linda Grensted. “They go through a rigorous summer-school training. We work on their leadership skills: If they feel that they are discriminated against on campus, how do they approach that, other than with graffiti, dropping out of school and making trouble?”

The club efforts are, in part, to counter the formation of racial cliques on the campus. Baerra says he can see groups of kids gathering by race during lunch period on Torrey Pines High’s food court. “You have the Latinos in one area, the Persians in one area and the Asians in one area,” he says. “It’s segregated, somewhat, but you wouldn’t notice it unless someone pointed it out to you.”

The same goes for Mount Carmel High School, according to student Mimi Mahrous. “There are a lot of different races, but they kind of hang with each other,” Mahrous says of her Poway District high school. “They don’t really interact unless they’re in classes where they have to.”

But Mahrous says she doesn’t let race define her choice of friends. Her background could hardly be more different than those of her two best friends. One, classmate Layne Hastings, is an Anglo. Friend Wendy Sepponen is Scandinavian and Ecuadoran. Mahrous has an Egyptian father and a white American mother.

“No one can really tell what I am,” says Mahrous. “They’ve never really seen an Egyptian before, because I’m the only one

at this school, other than my brother. So usually they come up to me and they’re like, ‘Are you Hispanic?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ ‘Are you African-American?’ ‘No.’ ‘What are you?’ ‘I’m Egyptian.’ They’re like, ‘Oh.’ And they walk on.”

Despite its efforts, Mount Carmel High made headlines it didn’t want last summer when eight boys, some of them Mount Carmel students, were arrested and charged with the beating of a group of elderly Mexican migrant workers. Racism, according to police, was central to the attack. Assistant principal Doug Kamon scrambled to update the human relations course he’d been teaching on campus since 1996. He mobilized his students to directly respond to what had happened.

“By the time school opened in August, our human relations kids were ready to go into different classrooms and do presentations on hate behavior, and how we deal with it and solve it,” Kamon says. “It really eased the tension on our campus. That’s what this class is all about: working on the issues that the kids are actually facing.”

Another incident Mahrous’ human relations class discussed involved a student who’s an alleged skinhead. When a Japanese-American teacher asked the student what he would do if he were president, “he said he would like to bomb Hiroshima again,” Mahrous says. “So there was this big controversy about that. The teacher just let him sit there, and she cried.” Mahrous’ human relations class was instructed to write a one-page essay about their thoughts on the situation.

Mahrous and her friends have made the leap that more and more kids have made: Race doesn’t matter when it comes to forming lasting friendships. After all, they say, it’s hard enough just being a teenager—regardless of one’s racial and cultural makeup.

“It seems like adults take the whole race thing more seriously than teenagers,” Mahrous says. “Teenagers don’t see it as much as adults do. So it’s not as big a problem. So when they’re like, ‘Do you address the problem?’ we’re like, ‘We don’t see the problem.’”

It’s a problem, however, that may be waiting for them when they graduate to the real world.

Next month: Economics and opportunity are the focus of the third and final installment of Diversity & Division. Many minorities say the chance to making a living as they choose—with equal opportunity—is where the real success or failure of race and ethnic relations lies as San Diego moves into the 21st century.

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