Being the change: An inner city school builds peace

A school and community reach deep to heal and halt violence.

In 2012, gun violence took the lives of three youth affiliated with Mario Molina High* (MHS), a small public high school serving 260 mostly low-income Latino youth in a large urban district in Northern California. Reeling from the violence and the sting of societal stereotypes that often demonize urban youth and associate them with criminality and deviance, students and staff joined together to reflect and act. Ultimately, they galvanized an ongoing peace-building movement that has flourished, transforming not only students’ lives, but the communities surrounding the school as well.

The seeds of this movement were planted in the fall when the entire student body gathered for the Interrupting Violence Town Hall. Seated with their mixed-grade advisory groups and faculty advisers, students gazed upon a series of panels displaying photos of a young man — posing with a girlfriend, sporting a cap and gown at graduation, and hanging out in his barrio. Alongside these images, a poster read, “Rest in Peace ~ 1992-2011.”  Other decorations included students’ “Root Causes of Violence” tree posters in which terms such as “poverty,” “racism,” “economic inequity,” and “media” appeared on tree roots while branches bore fruit labeled “homicide,” “gangs,” “drugs,” and “crime.” Colorful Mexican serapes, glowing santos or religious candles, ofrenda or memory boxes, as well as written notes of tribute adorned several altars on the stage.

César, a veteran educator at the high school, opened the assembly by telling students that the event was not just a memorial for an alumnus shot and killed a week earlier, but it was also a conscious protest of a society in which the murders of children of color receive virtually no media coverage or public outcry. He said the gathering was a call for those present to interrupt the pernicious cycle of violence and create safe neighborhoods. The event included an array of speakers, including a mayor’s office representative, a city councilman, the principal, a community organizer, the parents of a previously murdered student, several youth development coaches, and students. The audience also heard a Native American healing chant and a rap from Big Dan, a member of brwnbflo, who shared his story of being a former juvenile hall youth turned college graduate.  He performed his original song, “Think About your Future, It Starts Today”:

We have to work for things and do more than pray.

We got to come together and build a bridge.

Let’s do it for each other, especially the kids.

Be the change that you want to see,

You can be anything that you want to be

. . . When you got some time, help somebody else. . . .

Be a leader, don’t follow no nonsense. . . .

It is never too late to make a positive change.

(http://brwnbflo.bandcamp.com/track/12-be-the-change)

As testimony to the power of this gathering, the entire student body and staff remained in the auditorium for an hour past the final bell. Newspaper coverage of this town hall, though, elicited a mean-spirited, online reader to comment that urban youth are “baby killers” merely reaping the rewards of their insanity.

Angered by being labeled ‘baby killers’ and by the loss in January of yet another youth to gun violence (the kindergarten sibling of a current MHS junior), students launched their first Campaign for a Peaceful City — a 74-day crusade in which over 200 people participated in a “fast relay,” where students and adults took turns fasting in consecutive 24-hour shifts and then reflected and blogged on their experiences to draw attention to peace. Students also promoted a Peace Pledge in which they committed to:

• Not bring drama or discrimination into their community;
• Find the beauty in and empathize with everyone;
• Raise awareness about violence and give voice to crime victims;
• Defend those who cannot defend themselves; and
• Build up their beloved community to encourage lasting peace.

The campaign was bookended by two events. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, students joined by the police chief participated in a day of service beautifying their school, and, on César Chavez Day,  over 300 students joined by their families and others marched in the streets arriving at a peace rally where students, the school board president, the city mayor, and César Chavez’s grandson addressed the triumphant throng. Over the summer, a group of students and teachers worked diligently to self-publish a book recounting these activities and highlighting the hardships and beauty of their neighborhood.

In the aftermath of school shootings, a California high school managed to steer students away from victim mentality and hopelessness and instead foster their critical awareness and robust civic engagement.

How did Molina High organize itself to respond and manage tragedy so productively? Moreover, how did MHS staff successfully steer students away from victim mentality and hopelessness and instead foster their critical awareness and robust civic engagement? Three key elements stand out — a compelling mission, deep community involvement that included social networks and made local resources available to the school, and authentic cariño — a holistic commitment to care for and honor the humanity of each child.

Interrupting inequity and injustice

A decade ago, parents and community members mobilized to create MHS as a small, autonomous school where low-income youth of color could receive a rigorous education and become change agents for the community. The developers of the school crafted a mission that explicitly dedicated the school to interrupting inequity and injustice. This critical stance permeates the fabric of the school, informing hiring procedures, curriculum, restorative discipline practices, and extracurricular activities. In classrooms, students regularly explore issues of war, activist movements, police brutality, the Los Angeles riots, environmental degradation, food justice, and poverty. Students investigate these topics by interviewing members of the broader community and tapping a variety of resources, which expose them to a range of perspectives. Often, lessons involve students debating causal links and developing and then enacting strategies to ameliorate injustice and inequity. Through such activity, students come to understand violence not only as direct physical aggression, but also as a range of oppressive, institutionalized phenomena in society that harm individuals and communities, preventing them from achieving full self-realization (Ardizzone, 2007).

Given the school’s deep enactment of its mission, it was well positioned to help students deconstruct tragic violence when it befell them. In the advisory sessions preceding the Interrupting Violence Town Hall, students cogently discussed the root causes of violence because they were already accustomed to analyzing complex social problems and deliberating strategically about remedies. In the midst of crisis, students and staff relied on their pre-existing habit of “critical civic praxis,” which is critical reflection coupled with action intended to deepen their critical consciousness and pursue efforts to overcome the oppressive realities of gun violence (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007).

Full-service community school

As a school with deep roots in its community, MHS has evolved into what it calls a full-service community school offering comprehensive and well-coordinated academic, social, and health services for students and their families. The school’s emphasis on tapping community resources and supporting public health is profoundly important given the chronic stress associated with living in violence-riddled neighborhoods (Achinstein et al., 2013). The school partners with a nearby psychology college, which sends interns into the school to offer counseling and ongoing group therapy. The interns play a vital role in the aftermath of tragedies, offering students a place to share their grief and vent their anger whenever the need arises during the school day. Additionally, a campus health clinic provides a range of health services, including dentistry, gynecology, and psychology.

Other active and integrated community partners include a youth development organization that operates a thriving extended-day program and a college advocacy group that guides students through the process of applying for college and scholarships. The result is a robust network of social capital that students and staff can harness, especially in trying times. The intensity and vibrancy of this network surfaced powerfully when the school confronted the loss of its third student, Ernesto, in the final weeks of the school year. Within 24 hours of the shooting, the school doors were opened on a Saturday afternoon and over a hundred people, including the victim’s family, congregated for an impromptu memorial. Taking the lead at this gathering were youth development coaches from the extended-day program who created a healing space and ceremony for youth and others to process the atrocity.

Of critical importance is the fact that several teachers and many players from the school’s community partner organizations share backgrounds similar to the barrio youth they serve. These adults act as multicultural navigators (Carter, 2005), providing bridges between the dominant mainstream American culture (as represented by school) and students’ heritage home cultures. Such adults joined youth to cocreate the altars and other culturally relevant symbols for the Interrupting Violence Town Hall. During this event, Luz, a Latina youth coach, delivered a rousing speech, where she pressed students to reject the “bling, bling of the gangster.” She also urged students to pursue college so that one day they could be in the mayor’s office or the health and police departments and use their authority to prioritize campaigns to remedy gun violence and the severe hardships underlying such brutality. After Ernesto’s killing, Luz also shared how she helped students take over the school’s conference room for several days in order to provide a space for the whole community to congregate and mourn with the comfort of home-cooked Mexican food provided by students’ families. “This is how we Latinos mourn; we eat food together and tell stories,” she said.  Individuals like Luz and César show students how to navigate such institutions as the school district, city hall, and the media without compromising one’s identity. They act as role models of how to draw upon sacred cultural values, rituals, and symbols to strengthen and sustain the spirit in the midst of struggle. For MHS students, the presence of so many committed adults working to ensure a healthy and supportive community within and beyond the school provided a crucial safety net to catch and embrace them as they grappled with unfathomable loss.

Authentic cariño

MHS offers multiple safe and nurturing spaces where youth experience and benefit from authentic cariño. Authentic cariño is a phrase popularized by Angela Valenzuela (1990), whose ethnography of Mexican-American students in a Texas high school uncovered two types of caring — authentic and aesthetic. She describes how typical “schools are structured around aesthetic caring whose essence lies in an attention to things and ideas . . . rather than centering students’ learning around a moral ethic of caring that nurtures and values relationships” (p. 22). She argues that many Mexican descent youth experience school as “impersonal, irrelevant, and lifeless” and long for genuine connection to teachers who care about them (p.22). Fortunately, MHS students experience authentic cariño in many spaces.

Cariño surfaces perhaps most prominently in advisories, a structure that brings together a cross-grade cohort of students with an advisory teacher on a daily basis. Advisories participate in team building, collective reflection, silent reading, and study halls. Over their four years, students develop impressive bonds with one another as well as with their faculty advisers — adults who come to know them well, follow their academic progress, and develop relationships over time with their families. “When students leave us, they always cite advisory as, ‘my family [where] everybody knew me’,” said one teacher.

A compelling mission, deep community involvement, and authentic cariño — a holistic commitment to care for and honor the humanity of each child — enabled the school to cope with its loss and move forward.

Advisories offered an important space where students could discuss the violence of their community and cohere around the Peaceful City movement. For example, in one session students sat in a circle sharing with one another how violence had touched their lives, discussing the peace pledge, and then reading blogs written by peers participating in the fast relay. For students who lost their fellow advisees to violence, the circle of support was especially tight. In these cases, faculty advisers called advisees over the weekend and those who were inclined convened immediately.

In addition to advisories, MHS also had ample other spaces where authentic cariño prevailed. The community-based organization running the extended-day program offered young men and young women’s empowerment groups. The men’s circle, led by César, gathered on Thursdays to share lunch in a classroom made sacred with purifying sage. In that forum, young men explored their dreams, shared their fears, and contemplated eight points of unity, which they had conceived together in the course of their collaboration:

• I’m respectful of all things equally.
• I will honor my environment.
• I’m not indifferent.
• I will treat women with respect.
• I am honest and will follow through.
• I have self-control.
• I’ll become organized and take care of business.
• I will achieve.

These commitments engendered caring young people who later devoted countless hours to the Peaceful City campaign. Postsession — actually the final two weeks of school, during which students may earn a full semester of either art or physical education credit — allowed students and teachers to play together in something akin to summer camp, thus affording another notable opportunity for relationship building.   During the sophomore class postsession, students along with five teachers and their principal climbed a mountain in Yosemite, dedicating their climb to a recently slain schoolmate and erecting a granite stone tribute at the summit to memorialize their lost friend. After a moment of silence together, the principal in an emotional voice shared his promise with students. “Forever to me, this will be a sacred spot. It commemorates Ernesto’s life. As long as I take kids up here, we will always come up here and pay respect to Ernesto,” he said. Against this backdrop, students posed for a group photo defiantly holding their fists in the air to signal their solidarity and commitment to peace. Similarly, a teacher in Ernesto’s postsession shared how, “In the classroom, together, we wept. We wrote poetry for him, posted poems on his altar. We held space for silence and tears. Standing in a circle touching shoulders to close the day, we felt wholly connected. One of us was gone, yet his absence sealed our bond.”

In the days that followed, this group toured murals in the city, pondering together which ones their friend would have liked most. Many were captivated by a mural examining youth violence that carried the words, “No matter what, no matter why, the kid didn’t have to die. But what we really want to know is, will his death be justified?” At the end of their time together, students created a memorial art installation with petals, shells, and paint.

Across all of these settings, students came to enjoy close, trusting, reciprocal, and positive relationships with teachers and other adults in their community. Structures like advisory, gender empowerment groups, and postsession convey how the school as a whole cared deeply and holistically for students’ healthy development. Surrounded by an ethos of authentic cariño, students felt comfortable in the aftermath of violence bearing their hearts and joining with adults to heal and to wrestle openly about the painful complexities of their urban lives.

Being the change

In its relentless pursuit of its mission, its intense and dynamic partnerships with the community, and its insistence on embracing youth with authentic cariño, MHS models for students what participation in a safe, healthy, socially just environment feels like. In short, MHS has become the change it seeks to sow in the world. MHS’s response to violence provides an image of the possible, illustrating how educators, community members, and youth working together in solidarity can not only heal each other, but can also generate the hope necessary to anchor transformation, activism, and social change.

Despite its successes, MHS educators recognize that they have not reached all their students and that their work to interrupt inequity and injustice is by necessity a protracted, arduous, and often exhausting struggle. They take inspiration, though, from their students who have become peace activists and from signs that their hard work is paying off. At this year’s Peaceful City town hall, the principal shared a crime map of the city, which depicted an expanding circle of safety radiating out from the school into surrounding neighborhoods. MHS’s journey toward interrupting violence and building peace underscores how the capacity to respond to the unthinkable is best accomplished by proactively cultivating an array of supports and structures before tragedy happens.

* Mario Molina High School (MHS) is a pseudonym for the California high school in this article.

References

Achinstein, B., Athanases, S.Z., Curry, M.W., Ogawa, R.T., & de Oliveira, L.C. (2013, May/June). These doors are open: Community wealth and health as resources in strengthening education for lower-income Latina/o youth. Leadership, 42 (5), 30-34.

Ardizzone, L. (2007). Gettin’ my word out: Voices of urban youth activists. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Carter, P.L. (2005). Keepin’ it real: School success beyond black and white. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ginwright, S. & Cammarota, J. (2007). Youth activism in the urban community: Learning critical civil praxis within community organizing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20 (6), 693-710.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

CITATION: Curry, M.W. (2013). Being the change: An inner city school builds peace. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (4), 23-27.