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

As a former student at Locke High, I got to witness the new pig-pen. Now the New pig-pen is as big as music room, students could learn valuable stuff in that classroom. The first week of school, on friday the 7, police stop me and four other of my friends as we were leaving my friend house. The police gave us a trasspasing and truancy ticket. It was only 8:15 a.m when we were walking out of my friend house, the police detained us till 8:45 a.m and decided to give us a truancy ticket, when we told them they could do that, because when they stoped us it was'nt later then 8:30 a.m, so when we said that they decided to add that we were trasspassing.Thats when I noticed the new pig-pen, there was about nine police officers there. They were all just chillin, one officer was playing a video game, as an other cop was eating. Now I have transfered out to another school, because I cant learned under this type of enviorment.