Race Wars In Westchester??? Dear David,Enough Is Enough!
My phone has rung numerous times this summer with individuals expressing that our group (POWWOW) and the other community groups in the Westchester area are divided and at odds based on the racial composition of our perspective groups. Please allow me to personally shed some light on this matter and PLEASE feel free to QUOTE me.
Thank you so very much,
I have to admit, I was a little floored by the title and the first two sentences of a POWWOW email I received this morning. The email was sent out to subscribers (parents, teachers, admins) affiliated with Westchester High School, Orville or people participating in the local reform movement.
A little hyperbole? Yep. It’s important to not use a few instances of some event (phone calls) and try to apply it to a scale the size of a community. A few gang banger wannabes might catch wind of the email, believe it, and try to finish a war that never was.
It was not long ago when former LAUSD Boardmember David Tokofsky did something similar when he characterized Westchester as being “one of the few towns in LA where the American Nazi Party or the KKK found fertile grounds.”
Fertile ground? I questioned him later and he told me that when he was a kid he visited the airport (70′s?) and saw Klan references scrawled on some walls. Gee.. that’s real evidence. Perhaps what he really saw were the scrawls painted on a few of the boarded up and soon to be demolished 4,400 homes that LAX condemned in it’s unrelenting quest for more real estate.
One way to stop ongoing school reform in its tracks is to characterize its motives in a racial context instead of what’s best for our kids.
This lead me to wonder about an email that followed where a WHS teacher was asked at a UTLA conference about “the racial split” between parents organizations (POWWOW and WPEF) in Westchester. The teacher also heard a couple of other comments from -UTLA- West Area chapter chairs who confirmed this ugly rumor.”
What? Are these questions and rumors being floated in an attempt to create a racial divide out of whole cloth in order to stop reform efforts? I’d have to question their motive in asking questions not grounded by any facts.
There IS NO racial split in our diverse community. There IS a split between the community and our education policymakers (WHS principal Anita Barnes, Beaudry, School board, local district, UTLA, local school administrators) as to what constitutes good schools. So far, our school policymakers have had zero success in 110,000 tries at bat and because of that, I think this split will continue indefinitely or as long as the district refuses to allow communities to govern their own local schools.
The Email
The email by Crissina Johnson of POWWOW seemed to express what I thought might be frustration on her part by receiving phone calls repeatingly asking her to explain a perception that POWWOW and WPEF are engaged in a race war. They are NOT.
POWWOW is attempting organize current WHS parents so that they will participate at the school in order to raise their children’s academic performance and reduce dropouts. That’s not an easy job when you have a significant number of open enrollment parents who live in distant communities.
I don’t believe they are trying to protect or increase the level of open enrollments seats. I wouldn’t support the organization if that were one of the organizations goals. You cannot describe a school as a neighborhood school if twenty percent or more of the seats are occupied by open enrollment kids. That is simply evidence that the district is continuing to flounder.
WPEF has a different mission, that being to support Westchester K-12 schools, increase local participation and reform Westchester high school.
Their missions are not at odds with each other. Both are trying to wring success out of a school system that damages more children than it prepares.
Posted on August 27th, 2007 by westchester dad
Tags: GENERAL, ORVILLE WRIGHT MS, WESTCHESTER HS
1 Comment »
One has to ask why the university didn’t place this recycling facility next to their student dorms on the west side of the campus? Instead they set it only a few feet from the back yards of a half dozen residents on the east side.
universities “recycling center” is not a suitable operation in a residential area. The center is a manufacturing facility that stores, sorts, crushes, and packages discarded glass, plastic and aluminum materials using heavy equipment and this is NOT a quiet process.
“Los Angeles needs to change course and conserve water to steer clear of this perfect storm” – Mayor Villaraigosa, June 2007
