Students in Southeast LA / Watts face brutal criminalization on campus, including illegal searches where police frisk them, open backpacks and seize cell phones, pagers and cd players. One teacher refuses to allow searches in her classroom and is fired. Lawsuits have been filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District and Locke High.
errorAmi Motevalli, 32, doesn’t consider herself an organizer or a radical. She’s an artist. When she became an educator at Locke High School 2 years ago, she was eager to take on the challenge of being the first permanent art teacher there in ten years, bringing creativity to the classroom and getting various artistic programs up and running. But, she soon discovered that instead of getting an education, the students at Locke were facing heavy repression. So, she accepted when her students asked her to be an advisor for the Locke Student Union, a group formed to protest the verbal and physical abuse they face from administration and police, and the illegal searches for weapons, in which police frisk students with metal detectors, open backpacks and seize cell phones, pagers and cd players. These searches, which serve to create a climate of control on campus, happen everyday at Locke, inside and outside of classes, violating the students’ right to privacy, which is theoretically protected under the Fourth Amendment.
Ms. Motevalli, refusing to be another brick in the wall, educated her students on their rights. She didn’t allow the search teams into her classroom and became very vocal, along with her students, in speaking out against the searches. As a result, she received an unsatisfactory evaluation, a suspension and finally, was fired.
However, Ami, like her students, is still fighting back. At the end of June, six students along with the ACLU filed a suit in the federal courts against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Locke High, citing the searches as unlawful. Ami filed her own suit shortly afterward, which echoes civil liberties concerns and also demands her job back. Recently, I caught up with Ami to find out more about the repression and resistance at Locke.
Locke High School is located in Southeast Los Angeles on the border of Watts. A high chain-link fence surrounds the light blue building. It looks like a small prison. For students, it feels like one too. There’s a police interrogation room on-site, known as the pig-pen. The third floor of the school is under constant surveillance by 27 cameras, and more cameras will be installed on other floors soon. The youth here are terrorized for being who and what they are - young people of color from this part of town.
Everyday Locke students face the tense reality of encounters with administration, security, school police and - although illegal for them to patrol the campus - the LAPD and sheriffs. This is gang turf, so, while the threat of violence from other students is real, the worst violence comes from the authorities. It’s even in the yearbook. On the page of “Good Things and Bad Things at Locke” there’s a picture of a kid face down on the asphalt getting handcuffed. People get maced by police often. Female students are verbally and physically harassed by male officers. “It happens all the time.” Ami tells me. “A kid will be walking down the hall, a cop will grab them, throw them up against the wall, handcuff them. Everyday there’s a student bloody at school. Everyday there’s a young person handcuffed. Many. Even students that say ‘it’s for our own good’ won’t deny that this is happening.”
The LAUSD has an eight year old policy of randomly searching students for weapons on middle and high school campuses, although the Chief of School Police and other school officials admit that these searches have never produced a single weapon. Statistics show, and LAUSD officials admit, that very few students bring guns to school. Although that small number is steadily diminishing, the district has no intention of stopping the searches, especially in Southeast LA, with its high population of Black and Latino students. At a recent school board meeting some Locke students stood up and brought a “fired-up, can’t take no more” attitude to the sullen boardroom.
“The methods used at my school are doing more harm than good. I feel like a criminal rather than a safe student.” Crystal, a senior, declared. “A dean and a cop come into our classes and say ‘Now your class will be randomly searched.’ Then they point to students and say ‘You, you, you, and you!’ We’re chosen according to how we look. They target certain students. AP [honors] classes don’t get searched. They don’t call our parents to get permission [which, legally, they must do.] I feel like a prisoner or a criminal.”
Starlett, 17, a solid young black woman, determinedly laid it down. “My school erupts in violence everyday, not because of the students, or the neighborhood, but because the school tries to control us rather than educate us.”
In March, the Locke Student Union called a meeting at the Watts Labor Community Action Center, where they announced a list of 10 demands, and told the truth of their own experiences. They wanted qualified teachers for every classroom, who would stay awake and wouldn’t talk on cell phones during classes - who would actually engage them as students. They asked for books, supplies and materials for all classes, especially those that aren’t AP honors classes. They called for an end to racist standardized testing. And they demanded “an immediate end to brutality towards students, including illegal searches and seizures, unlawful arrests, constant surveillance and excessive use of force.”
Ami tells me that school officials tried to discredit the students by saying they were her puppets. “After the community meeting staff members were saying things like, ‘We know our students couldn’t come up with these demands.’ As if they weren’t capable of expressing themselves at all. And if a school is viewing its students that way, you can imagine how its treating [them].”
None of the students’ demands were met. The attacks on Ami increased. She tells me about the event that she believes led the principal to terminate her contract, the last time she refused to allow a search in her classroom. Her body language shifts, she becomes more introspective. Her words carry greater caution, yet, new determination. I sense that she’s revisited this scene many times. It’s the one where the search team comes in and tries to get her to back down. Where the dean insists that they must search her students. But there’s no way she’ll let them do it, especially in this class that she hand picked, where two-thirds of the students are on probation. It violates probation to refuse a search and she’s not about to see her students arrested.
The dean threatens to call the principal. Ami holds her ground. The principal arrives sweating profusely, top lip quivering. She looks at Ami with hate, with that “this time, you have gone too far” look. She orders Ami to go down to her office. Ami refuses. After being ordered again she gets her things together and as she walks out the door she says to her students, “You know what to do.” - Stay on task, get to work, stay calm.
Instead, her students righteously rebel. Half the class runs out with shouts of “You ain’t gonna search us!” The other half demands that the administration call their parents and get permission to do the search. It’s the scene where everyone of her students stands up. “Every one,” she repeats slowly, consciously. It’s the scene she would do over and over for her students if she had to, if she could, even if it cost her job.
And it did. But she has this to say about it, “The school needs to keep its order. I was like the beginning of a cancer and they saw that. [They hoped to] get the cancer out. But I’m not the only one. It’s not going to stop. This is the community that produced some of the greatest organizers in SNCC and the Black Panthers. Something’s going on there. There’s something’s fertile in Watts and Southeast LA that you can’t stop, no matter how hard you try,” Ami asserts with a smile.
Today, in the overall climate of criminalization of young people, these resisters at Locke High offer us a model of what we need to do. We must continue to send a message that no matter how badly they try to control our bodies, our hopes, our futures, we won’t take it. We must continue to stand up for the youth. We must continue to resist, fight back, and unite, everyday in greater numbers. As Mumia Abu Jamal says, “People say they don’t care about politics. They think they are not involved, but they are. When you don’t oppose a system, your silence is approval...Many people say it’s insane to resist the system, but, actually, it’s insane not to.”
Please send letters of encouragement to :Mark Rosenbaum, Dan Takagi, Christopher Tan and Ramona Ripston, ACLU, 1616 Beverly Blvd., LA, CA, 90026. Send letters demanding justice to Board Members: Roy Romer- LAUSD Superintendent, Caprice Young -President, School Board, Mike Lansing- District I Board Representative, Genethia Hayes - (Sympathetic) Board Member, at: 450 N. Grand Ave., LA, CA 90051. Also to: Sylvia Rousseau, District I Superintendent, 611 W. Sixth St., LA, CA 90017.
Call the Locke Student Union Hotline at: (323) 878-5656