Oakland High rallies to fire Principal Mok (cream of the crop at public school alert)

san fransisco bay review ^ | 6.17.03 | JR

[freepatriot32]

Principal let Secret Service interrogate students, put up barbed wire, locked school gates

"We are really pushing for the policy to be changed in the school district, and specifically for Mr. Mok to get fired. He’s (violated) a lot of people’s civil rights, and we want there to be recognition of the laws that he has broken," said Mary Jane, an 11th grader at Oakland High who helped to organize the June 6 rally outside of the gates of Oakland High. One of the students’ demands was to fire the principal of the school, who a few weeks ago was in the news for allowing the Secret Service to interrogate two students without notifying their parents before or after the govern-mental terrorist act.

"During the (March 5) walkouts, Mr. Mok put up barbed wire, he locked the gates (so that the students couldn’t leave) and he told parents when they called, and were upset, that he never locked the gates and never ordered anyone to lock the gates. We were locked in during a fire, and it might not have been serious, but if it would have gotten serious, what would’ve happened? Who has the keys to the locks? What if something happened to the person with the keys? We would’ve been locked in," said the very articulate Mary Jane.

"He threw away flyers I spent my own money (buying). I spent over $260 on flyers and newsletters, and he threw them away. Students were suspended for holding leaflets. Security guards took them from us and then told us that we need to have the war because Saddam Hussein is like Mussolini and Hitler. And whether that is true or not, you are not supposed to impress your opinions upon youth," said Mary Jane. "We’ve had teachers like Mr. Hegen kick people out and say racist things, and Mr. Mok has propagated this kind of stuff. He likes this kind of atmosphere. He wants to keep us down."

It’s ironic that over this week, we will commemorate the student uprising that took place in Soweto, South Africa, on June 16, 1976, where the apartheid government was trying to impose a white settler colonial language on the students. In Oakland, it’s white Ameriklan ideas that the Prison States of Amerikkka is trying to impose psychologically.

"We are trying to get Mr. Mok fired out here because he treats his students like they don’t matter, and we’re tired of it. It’s the end of the school year, we’re out here doing our finals trying to get this over with and he has hassled us the whole year. So the end of the year comes and we’re ready to start over and go into the next year, and we are remembering all of the shit that he did," said Tierra, an Oakland High 10th grader.

"They let the (Secret Service) come up in here and interrogate some students," Tierra added. "I think that it is stupid. They don’t want to come here for nothing else.

"Everybody in Oakland is getting shot and doped out. They don’t want to use the CIA to stop that, but they get a (so called) threat against the president and now it’s something, feel me. That doesn’t make no sense," said Tierra about the contradictions that are staring her in the face, as she lives in Oakland, which is one of the many spots where the CIA is and has been dumping trillions of tons of drugs over the years to fund counter-revolutionary operations all over the world (read "Dark Alliance" by Gary Webb).

The elite rich and powerful people who run Oakland still remember when the Black Panther Party, founded by Defense Minister Huey P. Newton and Chairman Bobby Seale, jumped out of the ghetto ready to organize their way to a life where we are free to not pay taxes to a government that is oppressing us.

This psychological terrorism - suppression of the students’ rights to an education, suppression of the students’ right to free speech, suppression of the students’ right to have parental and legal representation present during an interrogation and suppression of the students’ right to assemble - was brought up during the student-led rally, along with ways that the city’s elites are trying to block and hinder the same kind of youthful revolutionary energy today that started the Black Panther Party in West Oakland on Oct. 15, 1966.

The students were locked in a school that was partially on fire, and the school district and the city, the state and the federal government have yet to respond in a manner that would show that they respect the students’ human rights. That should show you what they truly think about us.

"I got suspended like three times, so (Mr. Mok) was like, ‘If you get suspended, you are up out of here.’ But I was like, ‘I only failed one class.’ He said, ‘So what, you’re out of here.’ So I’ve been up out of (Oakland High) for a couple of months. I’ve been taking independent studies, every Thursday," said James a 15-year-old 10th grader who has been shot to the curb in a city that he lives in and that charges him taxes for everything he buys.

"I check in on 35th Ave. with Mr. G, but now I passed that, so they are trying to get me back in here. But Mr. Mok ain’t trying to feel me. I got my grades up, but he ain’t trying to let me back up in here."

At the rally you heard violation after violation from numerous Oakland High students, and yet Principal Mok is still employed. Maybe a few people higher than he is need to go - better yet, a government that supports and cultivates this kind of activity needs to go.

The Oakland Unified School District is in debt $70 million dollars, and the state of California has now taken over the school district, even though the state is in an even bigger debt crisis. For the purpose, I guess, of easing some of the financial pressure, the Oakland Unified School District has laid off over 330 teachers and counselors for next school year in schools where innercity Black and Brown students already go without books, work on outdated computers and study in classrooms that are already too packed to learn in.

"Some of these teachers in these schools are very good, like my teacher, Ms. Paine. She is a Spanish teacher, she is Black, and she is the funnest Spanish teacher that I ever had," said Tierra.

"I had an F in Spanish, and now I have an A, and they fired her and gave her a pink slip," lamented the young Sista. "A lot of these teachers got pink slips, but not the old ones because they have seniority. They’ve been here. So they are kicking out all of the good ones to save all of the old ones that need to go. Out with the new and in with the old. This is a new generation. (The new teachers) understand our thought process; (the old ones) do not. They’re old-school. They are stuck in the past. It’s different now," spit out Tierra.

This lunch time rally made me feel good to know that there are pockets of resistance springing up everywhere, and more and more people are starting to step up and oppose what is going on in this corporately globalized world. Just like the Panthers, I believe that the youth are the spark of change, and I was appreciative to be among such young souljahs who refuse to let the violation of their rights go unchecked.

In a financially and morally bankrupt school district, Mr. Mok is just one reflection of where this thing that the city of Oakland calls "education" is going. Every high school in Oakland has an armed police officer on campus, but not enough books. What’s the most important? When will we realize that the new policy in this country is not to just put us in jail, but to put the police, an occupying army in our community, in our schools, along with barbed wire fences so that we will be "educated" as to what jail is like? Instead of just taking us to jail, they want to bring the concentration camps home to our communities.

"Standing up for your rights is nothing that you should be afraid of," stated Alisha, a 16-year-old Oakland High student, who was participating in the rally.

Our best defense is exposing to the world what is truly going down so that we can rally up the necessary forces to combat Bush’s homeland security plans, which aim to eliminate any dissent that anybody has nationally against his fascist regime and return a majority of Amerikkka’s Black and Brown people into slavery - just this time they won’t be picking cotton or tobacco on the plantation, they’ll be stitching clothes for Eddie Bauer and Victoria Secret in their cells - unless we stop him.

Email JR at fire@sfbayview.com

[Bodacious]

Would someone translate this article? I read 4 or 5
rambling, nonsensical topics there with no cohesion.

[Bahbah]

JR writes like an inarticulate 14 year old.

[RonF]

Implementing tough discipline and enforcing the concept that a school's primary mission is to educate via the curriculum (as opposed to the politics of the moment) is a good thing. Locking the fire exits without any security nearby to unlock them if necessary is a bad thing. Facts need to be dug out here.

[Mr. Jeeves]

The elite rich and powerful people who run Oakland...

That laugh line undercuts the whole, juvenile screed.

[headsonpikes]

The public schools are the foundation of American Socialism.

What do people really expect to be going down in them?

Platonic debate?

Hardly; the grunting of pigs at a gubmint trough doesn't quite reach that mark.

[sticker]

"It’s ironic that over this week, we will commemorate the student uprising that took place in Soweto, South Africa, on June 16, 1976, where the apartheid government was trying to impose a white settler colonial language on the students. In Oakland, it’s white Ameriklan ideas that the Prison States of Amerikkka is trying to impose psychologically."

That passage says it all. These little marxists want to turn Oakland into a gardenspot just like South Africa has become

[Servant of the Nine]

Would someone translate this article? I read 4 or 5 rambling, nonsensical topics there with no cohesion.

It is as inarticulate as most of the notes teachers send home.
Hard to blame the students when they are taught by idiots.

So9

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP, I think

[sdk7x7]

Nice piece of objective reporting. Lol, wonder what really happened, this sounds interesting.

[Restorer]

dumping trillions of tons of drugs over the years to fund counter-revolutionary operations all over the world.

All I could handle.

Trillions of tons of drugs?

No wonder Oakland is such a mess!

[Restorer]

If every person on the planet consumed one ton of drugs per year, it would take well over 150 years to consume the first trillion tons.

Innumerate as well as illiterate and incoherent.

[Sergio]

Just so you know a little about the environment at public schools not too long ago.

In 1998 I worked in the information technology department for a small school district in California. In this capacity, I was sent to elementary, middle, and high schools through out the district to repair PCs and network infrastructure. Here is a little of what I saw and heard.

At the elementary schools, boys and girls swearing like sailors with terets syndrome. In middle school, boys and girls talking about who they had sex with!

The high school, which had only opened the year before, was a zoo. I asked some of maintenance guys about the conditions of the restrooms and was told that the kids had broken the mirrors in the bathrooms, so the glass ones were taken out and replaced with polished stainless steel ones. These were scratched to the point that they were unusable so now there is just a tile wall in front of the sinks.

Well, at least the kids can read the grafiti.

There are no paper towel dispensers on the walls because the kids had torn down a few sets of them. The air blowers used as hand driers had to have the heating elements taken out of them because the kids had taken to stuffing toilet paper in the air exaust to cause a fire.

The doors to the toilet stalls had to be removed because the kids kept popping the doors of the hinges. Interestingly enough, no one messed the toilet paper dispensers. I guess there are some things you just don't mess with.

I found that the best and brightest our nation has to offer like to put chewing gum in the network card and modem card jacks and in any empty network jacks on the walls. The kids also like straightening paperclips and sliding them into computers via the holes in the back of the PC that are used for cooling. They do this in the hopes that the paperclip will cause a short circuit.

Sounds like the kids in Oakland are of the same type.

And people wonder why I send my kid to private school.

Best Regards

Sergio

[roadcat]

"and return a majority of Amerikkka’s Black and Brown people into slavery - just this time they won’t be picking cotton or tobacco on the plantation, they’ll be stitching clothes for Eddie Bauer and Victoria Secret in their cells"

Whine, whine, whine. How much work is that? Have you seen those skimpy Victoria Secret garments?

[Gritty]

Every high school in Oakland has an armed police officer on campus, but not enough books. What’s the most important?

When I went to school, we didn't require an armed policeman. We also used and reused the books from year to year. We tried to take care of them as we knew the school couldn't afford new ones every year.

Also, we didn't stand around bitching how the President is giving us a dirty deal by lining us up for prison sweatshops and complaining the CIA shipped trillions of tons of drugs into the neighborhood either, so I guess things have changed.

Life is not going to treat these kids kindly when (if) they grow up. Living in the same country with these cretins, it is not going to be easy for us, either!

[BeAllYouCanBe]

"people wonder why I send my kid to private school"

My wife is a teacher and everything you say is correct. My wife teaches high school and tries to reduce the foul language in her class -- but it is very difficult -- many teachers encourage the sewer talk. Kids don't know how to behave and parents don't get involved with the educational process.

The typical new teacher is so left-winged that I hesitate to call them Marxists but want to label them as neo-World International Socialist/Anarchists.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Ideological nonsense. Socialism was here before public education and has nothing to do with it.

I suppose you'll be claiming it causes cancer next.

[headsonpikes]

"I suppose you'll be claiming it causes cancer next."

Which? Public schools or socialism.

Of course, imo public schools are just one aspect of socialism, namely the transmission belt for socialist ideas to unsuspecting children.

In any event, I believe socialism and public education cause mental disorders, not physical ones, such as cancer, although there are links between stress and various somatic diseases.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Public schools have nothing to do with socialism by necessity. Nor do they cause any problems in an of themselves. Just ask the 95% public schooled soldiers who just kicked Saddam's rear about how socialist they are.

[Navy Patriot]

I "feel me" that this is in Ebonics and can't get Babelfish to translate. That aside fire exits should never be secured so that they cannot be opened from the inside in a panic, NEVER.