Principal's Beating Highlights L.A. Tensions

Mia Regalado just wants her 9-year-old son Steven to learn how to read.

But she doubts her boy will make much progress while educators and parents are consumed with trying to ease the tensions emerging from the recent beating of white Principal Norman Bernstein outside Burton Street Elementary School, which is 90 percent Latino.

The Feb. 1 attack, which police consider a hate crime, has brought to the surface a clash of cultures between immigrants who increasingly populate urban Los Angeles — and other U.S. cities — and the institutions designed to serve them.

And nowhere is that cultural divide more fraught with emotion than in the classrooms of the nation’s second largest school district, where thousands of immigrant parents place fervent hopes for their children’s future.

“Our communities are changing quickly,” said Lee Wallach, executive director of Days of Dialogue, a nonprofit conflict resolution group that has led mediation talks at Burton Street since the attack.

“L.A. is such a melting pot . . . and these communities are changing — really monthly,” Wallach said. “When that happens and no one’s talking to each other, it creates a lot of hostility.”

Wallach said such tensions are simmering at many Los Angeles schools but boil to the surface only when there’s an act of violence such as the beating of Bernstein.

“If the principal had never been violently accosted, this school would be just like any other,” Wallach said.

Bernstein told police that at least one of the two men who attacked him was Latino, and one said to him: “We don’t want you here anymore, principal. Do you understand that, white principal?”

The men hit him with their fists, the 65-year-old principal said, pushing him to the ground. They pressed a sharp object to his neck before he passed out. Police have not made any arrests.

The attack on the 40-year district veteran ignited a war of words among teachers, parents and administrators, who blame each other for creating a volatile atmosphere at Burton, which is in suburban Panorama City.

Some parents had been pushing for Bernstein’s replacement for the past year because they wanted a Spanish-speaking principal. They complained he was insensitive to their concerns regarding Proposition 227, the state law banning bilingual education. They also accused him of trying to thwart their efforts to obtain waivers allowing their children to remain in bilingual classes.

“We just want justice for our kids,” parent Lorena Aguilar said. “There are students who tell their parents they don’t want to come to school. What will happen when they get to junior high or high school?”

Bernstein has not returned to work and could not be reached for comment.

As it turns out, the school granted bilingual waivers to half of its 400 students with limited English skills, more than any other elementary campus in the area.

The unrest had become so volatile in the weeks leading up to the beating that Bernstein, who is Jewish, had asked the Anti-Defamation League for help in dealing with discrimination.

The question of whether mainly ethnic schools should have principals and administrators who speak the same language is at the heart of much of the Los Angeles school district’s tension.

District leaders, as well as Mayor Richard Riordan, strongly believe that principals and administrators should be chosen on the basis of ability and merit, not cultural background.

But some school board members disagree, siding with a growing number of ethnic parents who feel their children are best served by administrators with the same cultural background.

Riordan says such talk only serves to further divide a balkanized city. When a school board member publicly suggested in the wake of the Bernstein beating that Burton parents had a right to want a Spanish-speaking principal, an angered Riordan responded by saying the board member should “wash her mouth out with soap.”

“I think there are some parents who feel that the concerns they raised are being connected with this senseless and intolerable act,” said John Leichty, assistant superintendent of instruction for area schools.

“Schools are like families. There are problems that pop up that you have to come to grips with. What we have to do is create a functional family.”

Yet some parents believe all the attention put on ethnic relations, acts of violence and cultural differences would be better spent on educating children.

Said Regalado, whose son is repeating second grade because of his inability to read: “I’m not so much concerned about race as I am about a teacher’s ability to teach.”



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