ORANGE : Students Teaching Unity Lesson

Student members of a multicultural group at Orange High School have a message for fellow students this year: “Unity Is Our Strength.”

The message, which the students hope will help promote peace on campus, appeared last week in a mural created by SCAT, Orange High’s Student Crosscultural Action Team, an ethnically diverse, 25-member group founded in 1989 to promote unity and help solve racial, gang, and other conflicts on campus.

At a school where 27 languages are spoken and the minority population has doubled to 50% in seven years, there are bound to be tensions, Orange High officials and students said.

Part of the group’s goal, said SCAT member Grady Stevens, is “to bring out the hidden parts of Orange High, the people who are left out.”

“We had a big problem with all the groups on campus,” said Stevens, a 16-year-old senior. “Now we try to go back out and spread this positive stuff to our own groups.”

The student group has acted in both advisory and active roles to head off potentially volatile situations, such as the time an anti-Semitic flyer from a white-supremacist group was found on campus.

Principal Shirley Fox was prepared to raise the issue to the entire student body and suspend any troublemakers, but SCAT members persuaded her to wait. They told her that only a few flyers were discovered and that if she overreacted, she could polarize groups on campus unnecessarily.

Heeding the group’s advice, Fox waited. The issue died.

SCAT is “a group that can be proactive and can get to problems before they develop into anything big,” Fox said. “They’re very much in touch with what’s going on out there.”

One of the reasons SCAT works, officials said, is that the group truly represents the ethnic, academic and economic diversity of the school.

“We look for people for SCAT who know what’s going on in that ethnic group, and that’s not always the A student,” said Sheila Thompson, assistant principal and co-founder of SCAT.

And that means SCAT is made up of both student leaders and “some kids that are always on the hot spot,” said Viola Kuka, a bilingual resource teacher and the group’s other founder. That includes some students “who aren’t necessarily full gang members, but who have affiliations,” she said.

Member Alex Mancia, 19, said the group also tries to stop trouble on campus before it starts.

“I tell (students), you know, if there’s a problem you come to me,” Mancia said.

So far, the SCAT message has been a little slow to reach all students. In fact, the students who painted the SCAT mural, seniors Robert Galvan and Pedro Gallardo and junior Victor Diaz, said they hadn’t even heard of the group before SCAT recruited them for the job.

What do they think now?

“I think it’s a pretty good idea,” Gallardo said. “It’s for peace, right? So why not? It’s worth a try.”