Posted on 10/31/2003 10:05:47 AM PST by BeAllYouCanBe
More racism accusations arise
By Sandhya Somashekhar STAFF WRITER
Friday, October 31, 2003 - FREMONT -- Racial tensions in the school district flared again this week when a second Kennedy High School teacher came under investigation for making offensive remarks against an ethnic group, and two elementary school principals were accused of "racial profiling."
On Tuesday, a Kennedy teacher allegedly complained out loud that the Mexican students in her Spanish class were disruptive, Principal Vivienne Paratore said.
Meanwhile, an e-mail conflagration erupted after principals at Mission San Jose and Warm Springs elementary schools sent notes about some thefts at their schools last year -- committed, they said, by black visitors to their campuses, e-mails obtained by The Argus show.
The incidents come a few weeks after another Kennedy teacher was put on unpaid leave for reciting in class a poem that includes a racial epithet against blacks.
The recent episodes have been "disappointing," district Superintendent John Rieckewald said Thursday, add-ing that he recently met with Muslim parents who said they felt unwelcome in Fremont schools.
"There are a lot of issues out there that we need to deal with as a community," he said. "When comments like this are made by staff, it makes it very apparent we still have a long way to go."
The district is organizing a new set of sensitivity training sessions, and Kennedy will be the first stop, Rieckewald said.
An investigation is under way in the most recent Kennedy incident, and the teacher, Olivia Lange, still is teaching at the school.
The e-mail scuffle arose after a secretary at Azevada Elementary School sent a note to the district's "everyone" e-mail list -- which includes all staff members -- saying some items had been stolen from the campus recently.
Two principals -- Barbara Lowe of Mission San Jose Elementary and Robin Riley of Warm Springs Elementary -- replied that their schools, too, were targeted last year.
"When we were hit at MSJE last year, we saw that they were 2 African American women -- one older than the other," Lowe wrote.
The women were seen exiting a kindergarten classroom by the classroom teacher, Lowe explained Thursday.
The teacher escorted them to the office to sign in, she said. They asked if there were openings in the third grade, used the restroom and left, driving away in a silver car, she said.
A purse later was discovered to have been stolen from the classroom.
Riley's e-mail followed Lowe's.
"Warm Springs was hit last year also," she wrote. "Before the missing credit cards were discovered, I had talked with a tall African American woman about 35 years of age and a man in his mid-20s. ... I saw them get out of an older, beat up, silver Toyota."
The e-mails elicited a deluge of angry accusations of racial profiling from teachers and administrators, some of whom are black. One teacher called the e-mails "blatantly racist." Another said one of the notes had "cut like a knife."
Among the respondents was Doug Gephart, assistant superintendent of personnel, who wrote that it was "inappropriate and eminently unfair to characterize any problem based on racial profile," and said the e-mails violated school board policy.
Both Lowe and Riley have apologized, saying they were trying to help and not to racially profile.
"I unfortunately made a huge mistake," a tearful Riley said Thursday, noting that she recently invited a cultural sensitivity specialist to speak at her school. "I've spent my whole life trying to fight this injustice, and very unintentionally I ended up propagating it."
Riley said that the description she conveyed came from the police. She said she recalled the visitors only after police spotted the couple on a mall surveillance tape trying to use her staff member's credit card.
Rieckewald said officials will discuss the incidents with the individual staff members involved.
The district must treat this problem as institutional, not by simply punishing individual employees, said Marta Dragos, executive director for the Fremont Unified District Teachers Association.
"I think this is just the very, very tip of the iceberg," Dragos said. "We need to work together to go to the deeper level, and find out what are the underlying concerns here in the community."
That means engaging in real dialogue and confronting the community's deepest problems, not skimming the surface with training sessions in which "we have potlucks and hold hands and sing Kumbaya," said Fred Turner, the district's director of pupil services.
"I think this is a wonderful opportunity for Fremont to seize the moment and provide the kind of training that needs to happen, and send a message to our community that everyone is welcome," Turner said.
Staff writer Sandhya Somashekhar covers education for The Argus.
Well, were they?
Maybe I'm missing the point here. Racial profiling is about identifying groups of people likely to commit a crime before a crime happens. It sounds like these teachers were identifying actual people on the premises who weren't supposed to be there. That is not racial profiling, it is reporting what was seen happening.
-PJ
--Boris
When those judgements are based on nothing but one's own perceptions. When those judgements are based on statistical facts, such as drug trafficers on the NJ highway, or terrorists at airports, then it is something else. One can argue that the stastistics of drug runners in New Jersey is skewed because police don't hunt for the white drug runners as aggressively as the black ones, but you'd have to prove that with statistics, too.
-PJ
She may have. You didn't.
When the local news describe a suspect as a 5'-10", 180#, male wearing a red shirt and white shorts, you know that you have entered the twilight zone.
If the suspect is white, the light-brown hair, blue eyes, and skin tone can be included in the perp's description. Otherwise, you may only describe his clothes.
???
Perhaps it would be more benefit to Mexican students to take English classes rather than Spanish classes.
If the Mexican students in the Spanish class are being disruptive, then that is the problem. The teacher who identified the Mexican students as being the problem is not the problem.
Meanwhile, an e-mail conflagration erupted after principals at Mission San Jose and Warm Springs elementary schools sent notes about some thefts at their schools last year -- committed, they said, by black visitors to their campuses, e-mails obtained by The Argus show.
If black visitors to the campuses of the two elementary schools are committing thefts, then that is the problem. The two principals who discussed black visitors to their schools as being the problem is not the problem.
"There are a lot of issues out there that we need to deal with as a community," he (district Superintendent John Rieckewald) said. "When comments like this are made by staff, it makes it very apparent we still have a long way to go."
When comments like this are made by a school district Superintendent, it makes it very apparent we still have a long way to go before we can talk openly and truthfully about race without fear of being branded a racist.
This woman has been successfully "re-educated" to believe that telling the truth is "racist"
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