Inquiry Finds No Race Bias at Middle School : Education: Parents of Latino, African American students had cited 14 incidents. Capistrano district pledges more sensitivity.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  School officials here announced Tuesday that they cannot substantiate charges of discrimination against minority students at Aliso Viejo Middle School, but they pledged to improve racial harmony.

“I have determined that there is no evidence of racism or discriminatory treatment at the school,” Capistrano Unified School District Supt. James A. Fleming said in a prepared statement.

However, he added, the district “recognizes the need for the school staff, as well as employees throughout the school district, to improve communication and enhance their sensitivity and treatment of minority children.”

Fleming said he based his conclusions on a district panel’s two-month investigation into charges leveled by African American and Latino parents at a meeting of district trustees Dec. 13.

The parents complained that minority students at Aliso Viejo Middle School had been harassed, falsely accused of being gang members and ridiculed in front of classmates by school administrators and teachers.

The charges tarnished the image of the new school, heralded as a forward-looking educational facility with a state-of-the-art information system and computer lab when it opened in October in a quiet valley in the planned community of Aliso Viejo.

Of the school’s 800 students, 87% are white, 6% are Latino, 4% are Asian and 3% are black.

Before making his findings public, Fleming met with some of the concerned parents for about an hour Tuesday morning. In an interview afterward, Fleming described the meeting as “productive.”

“I did not perceive any animosity,” he said.

Attending the closed-door meeting were district administrators and seven members of the African American Parents and Concerned Citizens of South Orange County, who organized the effort to make the complaints public. Four of the seven from the African American group were either parents or grandparents of Aliso Viejo Middle School students, Fleming said.

Pam Lathan, the organization’s education coordinator and spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the group would “not comment at this time” on the district’s report or the meeting with Fleming.

Fleming said in an interview that district administrators began a prompt investigation, calling parents of African American and Latino students the day after the charges were aired.

In those conversations, the 27 African American and 72 Latino parents reported 14 incidents involving their children that they felt resulted from racial insensitivity or bias. The cases were evenly divided between the ethnic groups.

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The district’s panel investigated 21 specific charges, some of them taken from newspaper reports based on the parents’ complaints. None of the charges constituted acts of racism or discrimination, Fleming said.

Still, Fleming said some of the situations could have been avoided.

“In looking at those 21 cases, we did find some instances in which the misunderstanding might not have occurred if there were better communications at the time,” Fleming said. “We also found some situations that might have been seen as insensitive. . . . We’re learning.”

Distrust and miscommunication resulted from a number of factors at the school, Fleming said.

The school was not ready for occupancy until October, so its students and teachers, who came from other schools and were not familiar with each other, were thrown together for the first two months of the school year in cramped conditions at Niguel Middle School in Laguna Niguel.

At the same time, teachers and administrators were being directed to carry out new, stricter discipline and dress-code policies that the district had adopted to quell the glorification of gangs.

“You had a combination of juxtapositions coming together” when the school was “without that past knowledge, that trust factor and the relationships that develop over time,” Fleming said. “Once (the suspicion of discrimination) started, then it spread like wildfire and everything that happened after that was misperceived.”

As an example, Fleming said one complaint that was investigated dealt with a white student and an African American student who cut into a lunch line. A staff member pointed the white student to the end of the line but sent the African American student to serve detention.

To some students who witnessed the situation it appeared discriminatory, Fleming said. But the reality, he said, was that the African American student had been caught committing such an offense twice before and was being punished more strongly.

Fleming said the district’s report has been forwarded to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in San Francisco for review.

The district also plans to hire a mediator to bring the school’s principal, staff and teachers together with concerned parents to discuss their differences.

“There are strong and strident feelings on both sides,” he said.

Fleming said he has asked the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, the Asian Pacific Legal Center, the Orange County Commission on Human Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union to advise the district on how to improve race relations.

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Aliso Viejo’s principal, Cheryl Lampe, who had been the focus of many of the parents’ complaints, said she welcomed the report’s findings.

“I’m really pleased that the investigation is over and that we can get back to the business of educating students,” said Lampe, who was a teacher and principal in the racially diverse Hawthorne School District before being hired to head Aliso Viejo last year.

Said Dave Chamberlain, one of the school’s 35 teachers:

“Hopefully, this ends any actions by students or parents who feel that there are things that are going on that aren’t. We don’t treat people differently based on their race. We treat people differently based on their behaviors.”

Since the complaints were aired, Lampe and the school’s Parent Teacher Student Assn. have scheduled several workshops, meetings, assemblies and classes dealing with cultural diversity and racial prejudice. Counselors from the YMCA and Los Angeles County’s Community Service Program have been brought in to hold weekly sessions with groups of students who want to discuss racial concerns.

Next Wednesday, in an exchange program coordinated with Lampe’s former school, Aliso Viejo’s students will meet those from the racially diverse Hawthorne Intermediate School.

“We’ve been moving forward very proactively and I have a sense that people are feeling better about the situation,” Lampe said. “We’re just looking forward.”