50 Years After Brown, Broken Bathrooms and Protests
by Daisy Hernández
The truth of the matter was in the photographs.
Bay Area students, many of them Black and Latino, filled the entrance to Richmond High School on May 17, ushering in the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision with a protest against unequal school funding that correlates to the racial make-ups of the schools. The students swiftly turned the school’s concrete steps into a makeshift courtroom, where they put the state of California through a mock trial.
Somber-faced, they held up—what they called—key pieces of evidence: photographs enlarged to show the difference between a brand-new drinking fountain at the well-off Piedmont High, where 71 percent of the students are white, and a rusty, broken one found at Kennedy High, where over 68 percent of the students are children of color.
“I never use the bathroom,” at school, said Marisol Melendrez, a sophomore at Far West High in Oakland. “I go before I leave for school, during lunch when we go out, and then when I get home.”
Behind her were students holding photographs of different school toilets that stay filled with excrement for days. Sitting along another wall of the school was a group of mostly teachers who have been on a hunger strike since May 9 to protest the dire school conditions.
The mock trial in Richmond was one of six protests around the state Monday organized by the statewide grassroots organization Californians for Justice. Protests were also held in Los Angeles, Watsonville, San Diego, Fresno and San Jose. The protests came days after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger brokered private agreements with city governments and the state’s university system in which he promised future budget support in exchange for concessions this coming year.
“This is not the time for compromise,” said John Rogers, Associate Director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.
The institute’s recent research report, “Separate and Unequal 50 Years After Brown: California’s Racial Opportunity Gap,” Rogers said, shows that in the Bay Area, nonwhite schools are eight times more likely than white schools to have problems with teacher turnover, poor quality textbooks, vermin, and overcrowding.
“Race structures our school experiences,” Rogers said. That the problems have arisen over time allows people to live with the inequities, he added. But the “insensitivity to racial injustice” is also part of why it continues, he said.
In Richmond, students, many of them mobilized through the community-based group, Youth Together, demanded that the governor sign proposed legislation that would document a school’s resources not just its test scores and that he settle a lawsuit, Williams v. California, which charges the state with “appalling conditions” at public schools including vermin and crowded classrooms. The lawsuit, initiated in 2000 by American Civil Liberties Union and Public Advocates, is currently in settlement talks.
Richmond High School, along with other schools in the West Contra County school district, has been slated for cuts that would eliminate custodians, librarians, and counselors in the fall. (Athletic programs that were scheduled to be cut have been restored through private donations.)
Standing behind ironing boards that served as desks, two students played the role of prosecutor and defense and argued their cases before a student judge and an audience that quickly found the state of California guilty for “allowing unfair and unequal conditions to exist in the public schools.”
The dreary conditions described by students ranged from being unable to use bathrooms to no help planning for their futures.
“We don’t have janitors,” said Fabiola Casiaono, a junior at Fremont High. “We have one counselor for 400 students. Teachers have to clean each classroom. “There is a month-long wait for to see the school counselor, she said.
D’Andre Johnson, a student at Skyline High in Oakland, said he’d recently gone to a conference in Texas where student leaders shared stories of overcrowding and cutbacks. “From here to New York, all our problems are the same,” he said.
Marisol said her school had already lost its counselor and relied on a representative from Mills College, who comes to her high school once a week. And when it comes to certain classes like biology and French, where, she said, substitute teachers have made the rounds for months, “we haven’t learned anything.”
The students called on the governor to sign into legislation the Opportunities for Teaching and Learning Index, which would measure schools by their resources rather than test scores.
It “would show there are widely disparate resources in our schools,” said Emily Hobson, a spokeswoman for Californians for Justice. “Some [students] go to schools with rodents, rats, textbooks. Others go to facilities with AP French.”
Taking the mike and facing the crowd, Fabiola pointed to the picture of the modern drinking fountain at Piedmont High School.
“I’m not saying that Piedmont High is a bad school but it’s a public school and Richmond is a public school too,” she said. She urged her fellow students to call the governor.
Off the mike, Fabiola, who came from Mexico nine years ago, suggests that unequal funding for schools has only solidified her parents’ worst fears.
”They don’t think a Mexican can have an office job,” said Fabiola. “But I don’t believe it. I’ve seen that you can. I’ve seen students of color that have gone to college.”
She hangs her bit of hope on an application to Laney College that she filled out with help from Puente and AVID, two college-access programs that, she says, were cut at her school three months ago. The governor has promised to restore about $33 million to these programs.
Daisy Hernández is a senior writing and editing fellow with ColorLines
magazine.
Word count: 928
© 2006 Applied Research Center
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