School Board Unveils Reforms to Address Charges of Racial Profiling

By Oliver Lukacs

August 9 -- Responding to charges by a group of mothers that the School District engages in racial profiling to unjustly discipline minority students, the School Board Thursday night took its first step to address the issue with a series of proposed reforms.

In a report to the board, School District Superintendent John Deasy proposed a form-based tracking system that would document in detail every instance of police presence on school property involving any act of discipline.

Once enacted, principals would be required to notify the school district within 24 hours of police intervention by faxing a form documenting everything from the nature of the questioning to how and when the parents of the child were contacted.

"What it is designed to do is to make really clear to us as a district patterns of activity," said Deasy, "just like we report graduation, just like we report non-graduates, just like we report test-scores."

In addition to charging that their children were unfairly targeted, the group of parents calling themselves Mothers For Justice -- who stormed a school board meeting in June to protest the alleged racial discrimination -- complained that parents were contacted only after the police were called.

The group will be meeting with Deasy and the newly created Race and Discipline Task Force on Monday to hammer out a protocol for contacting parents concerning acts of discipline, a process that is currently non-existent, according to Laurel Schmidt, the district's director of pupil services.

"We don't have a procedure in place," said Schmidt. "But we want that to be a standard practice."

The task force -- composed of the mothers and other community members, school district officials and members of Police Department -- was created by Deasy to investigate the claims submitted in a report compiled by the group of more than 60 mothers who gave emotional testimony at the June meeting.

The report cites statistical evidence from a SMMUSD study documenting the disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of black and Latino students at Lincoln and John Adams middle schools and Santa Monica High School.

"Black students made up 11 percent of the total student population, but they comprised 21 percent of all suspensions," the report found. "Latinos made up 32 percent of the total student population but constituted 47 percent of all school suspensions, in Santa Monica High."

"One of the things that we learned in the initial work of the task force is that we don't have all the information," Deasy said. "And that it's most appropriate that we track these issues, and that we track these issues by age, gender, socio-economic background, race, ethnicity, etc. so that we can make a complete determination of behavior, and not necessarily out of assumption."

Deasy also proposed a "non-option" sensitivity training program for all campus and security personnel that would cultivate an "understanding of how bias plays a role in our perceptions of behavior, our perceptions of investigation, our perception of reporting… so that we don't repeat the mistakes that have been made."

The group of predominantly Latino and black mothers from the Pico Neighborhood were present to acknowledge the progress, but they continued to push forth their agenda.

"We feel the superintendent and the district has taken initial concrete steps in addressing these issues," said Terri Archuletta, a mother of four. "However this is only the beginning. In order to make lasting change the culture of punishment that exists in our schools must change.

"Our children cannot learn in schools if the schools are a gateway to prison," she said.

According Margarita Zepeda, whose 14-year-old son is in jail awaiting sentencing that could send him to prison for five years stemming from charges filed by school officials, the majority of children involved live in the low-income Pico Neighborhood, where most of the Santa Monica's Latino and black residents live.

The report states that high crime rates, coupled with the 26 homicides documented since 1989 in the Pico neighborhood, are the direct cause of the ongoing cycle of institutional racism within the schools.

Zepeda fought back tears as she pleaded for speedier reform.

"There are serious issues here, and an urgency in need of addressing them, because it has destroyed families and it has taken away the hope and future of our children," Zepeda said.