Offending studem publication deserved censure, not concealment
May 29, 1994

    Sunshine is the best disinfectant for noxious growths like the "Portola Propaganda.'' That's the name of an extremely offensive underground newsletter circulated among ninth-grade students in the highly gifted magnet program at Gaspar de Portola Middle School in Tarzana.
    But administrators were reluctant to apply that remedy when the first issue of the Propaganda surfaced at the end of March. They identified one student, Howard Chong, as the editor, suspended him, and then opportunity-transferred him to another school.
    An "opportunity transfer" is the Los Angeles Unified School District's euphemism for moving problems around instead of facing them. It happens so often that it has become a verb.
    But it doesn't really do any good, and it didn't at Portola. Chong's friends thought he had been unjustly punished, while the students who were attacked by name in the newsletter felt abandoned.
    You need to know why a First-Amendment absolutist like me finds a student publication so troubling But there's a lot of it I can't quote here, because the Daily News' standards for objectionable langnage are far more restrictive than the ordinary conversation of young teens. Looking past the obscenities, though, I am appalled by the viciousness.
    What do "the whiny little girls that go to this f--ing school" have in common? the newsletter asked, naming several of them. "They should all throw away their twoway dildoes and grow up," it offered among the possible answers, and "they'll never get laid by anyone besides a relative.''
    "We need to think of something good and humiliating torturous, and demeaning'' it said.
    The victims were not only girls, or students. One anecdote, accompanied by a crude drawing, described a boy masturbating in class. A teacher was cruelly parodied in a word balloon reading "I make the norteamericanos say 'He is not of Espain! He needs to be of U.S.!' And this is my made promise that joo be epleased with my translation of much fluentness."
    The school held a meeting for the ninthgraders to discuss the newsletter, at which some students shouted "Free Howard," and held up protest signs. More sessions were planned, but school officials put them off because they didn't want to disrupt after-school extra-curricular activities.
    In the first week of May, three of them published a second issue, even worse than the first. They too were OTed.
     Can't be worse, you're thinking? Wrong
     A selection titled "8th Grade Faggot" reads, "(Child's name) has no friends except for his gay lover ... he is the 8th grader who most deserves to get jumped. Anyone can beat him up. Go egg his house or crank call him."
     And it gives his address and phone number. There is also an extensive list of more generalized techniques of vandalism and mayhem.
     On May 10, finally, the school brought in some talking heads from LAUSD for a workshop on sexual harassment. I know sexual harassment is the offense du jour, but this is something both older and more serious. It's bullying, and holding workshops for the victims is not an effective response.
     Where were the parents all this time? Mostly out of the loop. Not until May 11 did the principal of the Middle School, Richard Cord, send home a notice describing the newsletters and inviting parents to an evening meeting on Wednesday, May 25.
     "The articles in the newsletter were inflammatory," Cord told parents, "showed little respect for many of our students, showed a !ack of respect for the rights and dignity of our students, and overstepped the line of good taste."
    Tree, but it scarcely does justice to the situation. It sounds like the kind of thing politically correct educators are always saying My first reaction to Cord's letter, when it was sent to the Daily News by the mother of one of the three students who wrote the second issue, was to leap to defend their First Amendment rights.
     Technically I'm wrong about that. California laws guaranteeing free speech to high school and college students don't apply at the middle school level. If the authors were 10th graders instead, the school could not have punished them for publishing a newsletter just because it was reprehensible.
    But the principle is right. If students were distributing or reading hate literature that they didn't write, from the White Aryan Resistance, say, searching lockers and interrogating anyone found in possession of offensive material would not solve anything.
    Anyway, the problem is not so much that someone at Portola wrote the newsletter as that it was intended as a joke, and that more students than just the authors perceived it that way.
    "In junior high, people talk about stuff like this all the time. I just put it in writing'' Chong said last week.
    That's no excuse for cruelty. But one of the girls in the class, who spoke at the parents' meeting, agrees that it is an accurate description. She asked that her name not be used, so I'll call her Jane Doe.
    "It's not just the ones who were transferred," Doe said. "The newsletter is public, but what happens in private is worse."
    The one good thing about the newsletter, she said, was that it had finally brought into the open social problems that had been festering for a long time.
    "At other schools," Doe said, "girls have guy friends, lots of them. Here it's like it's against the law."
    Did no one notice? Apparently not. But given the district's tendency to sweep problems under the rug -- somebody else's rug, if possible -- perhaps no one wanted to notice. And very clearly, no one wanted to call attention to the problem.
    Suppose that after the first newsletter, Cord had swallowed hard and sent copies of the newsletter home to every parent. It's like announcing an epidemic of head lice, unpleasant but a necessity. Maybe there wouldn't have been a second issue if the whole issue had been thoroughly aired.
    Defining this matter solely as a matter of sexual harassment may suit the political times, but it is likely to exacerbate the tensions. The rift is not really between boys and girls; as Doe said, many of the boys are kind and rather sweet. In effect blaming them as males for the misconduct of a few makes it harder for them to stick up for the victims.
    Donna Cassyd, director of LAUSD's Commission on sex equity, blamed the whole thing on gender imbalance. Only about 15 of 55 students in the magnet program are female. It seems that Cassyd is using this unpleasant episode to advance her own agenda, which is to pressure the school district into female quotas for the magnet programs. How will that eliminate the racial intolerance, or bigotry against gay and lesbian students?
    The chief effect of the hasty transfers was to put off dealing with the problem until high school, when it will be even more intractable. Parents are especially concerned that the same students will be back together next year, because the magnet program is so small.
    Disinfectant may be painful, but the slow corruption of the body is ultimately more deadly.