published today by New Clear Vision

 Imagine working in an office where as people enter they hug and kiss all their co-workers every morning. You start the day with about a dozen hugs and kisses and of course more each time you leave and return. Here we might call it sexual harassment. But I loved these gestures of affection and solidarity while I was collaborating with Educar es fiesta, a nonprofit organization in  Cochabamba, Bolivia, serving young people living in difficult circumstances and families in crisis.

 Edson Quezada, known to all as “Queso” — Cheese (from his last name, not because he’s the Big Cheese) founded the organization believing that training in the arts is also training for life, that children have an intrinsic natural  right to joy, and learning must go hand-in-hand with happiness.

Educar es fiesta draws young people into the program by offering theatre and circus arts–trapeze, aerial dance, juggling, unicycle riding, gymnastics, even some tightrope-walking, to develop self-expression, self-confidence, and perseverance. The kids learn that to develop a new skill, they may fail many times till they achieve success. The traditional schoolroom is too often a site of frustration, failure, and disrespect for Quechua-speaking indigenous migrants from the rural zones and for the poor, so Educar es fiesta teaches in environments as different from the classroom as possible — for example, with kids sprawled out on the floor of the circus tent.
The team also offers workshops on health, sexual health, nutrition, nonviolence, rights and responsibilities of citizenship, tutoring, and more. And as children arrive for their workshops, every child gets a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

By contrast, when I worked with kids in Los Angeles, I had to sign a document agreeing I wouldn’t allow any game — even tag, that required touch. If a child asked to be hugged, I was to acquiesce, squat down and allow the child to hold my side.

Of course I am cognizant of the realities of sexual abuse. In Bolivia, the children who are hugged also receive training in the campaign “My body is my territory: no one touches it without my permission.”  But touch is primary to human beings. The baby knows touch before it can interpret visual signals or understand words. If children aren’t hugged and held in healthy ways by
responsible adults, surely that makes them prime targets for predators who will exploit their need. For children who’ve been abused or abandoned, hugs can heal.

Back in Los Angeles, I watch the local news and see that a prohibition against touching would not have prevented the abuse that recently came to light of an elementary school teacher allegedly feeding his bodily fluids to children in his class.

In the Andean nations, educators like Queso now talk about what Peruvian Alejandro Cussiánovich has termed La pedagogía de la ternura – the Pedagogy of Tenderness.  In Peru and Bolivia, with past histories of military dictatorship and violent repression, and Colombia with its elected civilian government and an ongoing armed conflict, the idea is that school needs to be a place of nurture,
not discipline, for people who’ve been silenced, hardened and traumatized by years of violence. Tenderness does not mean sheltering kids or being overprotective: the point of this education is not to indoctrinate, but to nurture children so they can become the protagonists of their own lives.

 Tenderness. It’s what I wish for American children who are growing up in some of our inner-city neighborhoods where due to crime and gang violence kids show a higher rate of PTSD than their counterparts in Baghdad during the worst days of war there.

The Educar es fiesta staff also offers workshops to public school teachers to share the techniques of “buen trato” — techniques of classroom management based on mutual respect rather than the more military model of discipline and punishment. This reminded me of a friend here in California who was so disgusted with her teaching job in an inner-city elementary school, she talked about
quitting. But when I visited the school a couple of years ago, the children seemed happy, bright, and eager to learn.

 “Oh yes,” said my friend. “We have a new principal and she’s turned everything around.”  What did the miracle-worker do? “She called a meeting and told the teachers they could no longer yell at the children or insult them.”
Buen trato, no?

The children of Educar es fiesta know what it is to be disrespected. In its first year, a little more than ten years ago, Queso reached out to the kids who waited at the cemetery for mourners who might give them a tip for cleaning windshields. The children were often abused by the cemetery guards. It was a great joke to take a little boy and throw him into a newly dug grave from which he would not be able to climb out. But when these same kids performed their plays in public, they were greeted with applause and cheers. Their status changed, not only in their own eyes, but in the eyes of the larger community.

 But in many neighborhoods, community is broken by poverty. Families disintegrate as parents migrate in search of work to Argentina, Chile, Spain, and — most recently, Japan. The kids get left behind.

There’s Laura. She lives with her grandmother who can put a roof over the girl’s head but has little to offer in the way of food or affection.Laura goes to school in the morning. Then she goes to “work” — standing outside a modest restaurant where she’ll guard cars for people as they eat in exchange for tips. Few people arrive in cars. Without tips, she goes hungry. While we in the US
worry about “boundaries,” in Cochabamba, if Jimena Ari, teacher and facilitator with Educar es fiesta, is going home for lunch, she takes Laura along for a meal with her family — and to take chess lessons from niece Ceci who’s already obsessed with the game.

 In the afternoon, Laura’s at the circus tent, eager to learn.

When the other kids have left, Laura hangs around the office. Until it’s time to lock the doors, no one chases her away. If there’s a project that can use an extra pair of willing hands, she helps out. Otherwise, she experiments with the computer. Maybe she’ll get a glass of milk and some bread. She’ll definitely be hugged. And someone will tell her how intelligent she is, and how beautiful, and
that she is loved.

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Congratulations to the Community Rights Campaign of the Labor/Community Strategy Center for playing a leading role in getting the Los Angeles school police to reform policy and stop criminalizing kids for being late to school!
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Los Angeles: Epicenter of High School Dropouts — Or Are They Pushed?

 October 15, 2010
Over a million US students who start high school this year won’t finish. In Los Angeles, only about half of entering students graduate, earning the city the designation by Education Week  as a “dropout epicenter.” But the National Dignity in Schools Campaign reframes the issue: most kids who don’t finish haven’t “dropped out.” They’ve been “pushed out” by a culture of zero-tolerance, punishment, and removal that disproportionately affects children of color.

In Los Angeles, African American students are two to three times more likely to be suspended than students of other ethnicities. School police in low-income neighborhoods hand out truancy and tardiness tickets–something most middle class parents have never heard of — that carry exorbitant fines mounting into the hundreds of dollars. If unpaid, these turn into arrest warrants and divert young people out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

From October 11 through the 17th, as part of the Dignity in Schools National Week of Action, events in 16 cities throughout the US are calling attention to the crisis and promoting alternatives to suspensions, expulsions, and the criminalization of youth. Here in Los Angeles on Tuesday, October 12, a coalition of community organizations held a day-long information session in front of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board on Beaudry Avenue. Young people, mostly from the Labor/Community Strategy Center , decorated the chain link fence across the street with art and posters while parents, students, former students, and their advocates offered personal testimony and called for full implementation of School-wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) — the new approach to discipline that the LAUSD  Board itself mandated back in March 2007.

Districts around the country that have fully implemented this model have seen up to a 60% reduction in disciplinary problems and suspensions. The LAUSD schools that have put it into practice have seen transformation in the school environment. But District 7, in South Los Angeles, arguably the district where youth are most in need of positive behavior support, has lagged far behind according to “Redefining Dignity in Our Schools,” the recently released report based on research by the grassroots organization Community Asset Development Re-defining Education  (CADRE), in collaboration with Mental Health Advocacy Services, Inc., and Public Counsel Law Center . Markham Middle School, for example, entirely failed to implement the policy and also had the highest rate of suspensions. South LA schools continue to have more police, detectives, probation officers, and canine patrols than counselors. (To download the full report or executive summary on-line, please go here )

“Campuses are transformed into hostile territory,” said Claudia Gomez of the Youth Justice Coalition . “The school day is an extension of the violence going on in our communities.” In a six-month period, Gomez attended three different high schools, bringing her ongoing problems with her and getting herself kicked out of each due to fist fights and once for marijuana possession.

It’s a pattern only too familiar to Judy Arriaza, social worker with Public Counsel: “suspension after suspension, transfer after transfer, grades suffer along with attitudes toward school and nowhere do we see any positive intervention” while a kid in trouble for “fighting or doing something wrong that could have been handled by school administration is instead turned over to the police.”

When kids are pulled out of class again and again, they fall further and further behind making them even less able to function properly in class. And where do they go when suspended? With parents working and the school doors closed, kids end up getting into trouble. No doubt LAUSD has faced a daunting challenge when students bring violent or disruptive behavior to class but the district has relied for years on a form of triage — labeling some kids as hopeless cases and throwing them away. “They kicked me out,” Henry Sandoval recalled. “They told me don’t come back.”

SWPBS relies, instead, on the consistent teaching, modeling, reinforcement of appropriate behavior and discourages the reliance on punitive discipline. Intervention is preferred to exclusion. And parents are brought in and welcomed as collaborators.

Gomez landed at last at the Youth Justice Coalition’s charter school, Free LA High School, where gang intervention workers and counselors set her on the road to success. Sandoval, calling himself “a victim of the school to jail track,” also eventually found his way to Free LA High where, he says, “They never gave up on me, even when I gave up on myself. We need motivation, not punishment.”

Arriaza has seen what previously stigmatized youth can do. “We see them pull their grades up and graduate. But we can’t keep putting out fires. There aren’t enough advocates. Change has to come from above.”

We should all care about this, said Laura Faer, attorney with Public Counsel. The status quo “costs all of us a fortune in futures lost” while the alternative — SWPBS — “makes teachers happier and makes schools safer.”

A key component of SWPBS is parent involvement and Roslyn Broadnax is a deeply involved parent who, as a student back in 1979, found herself “pushed out” of Fremont High. Earning Ds in class, never bringing a report card home, she was nonetheless passed from grade to grade while unable to keep up with the work. “I became a young mother and when I had my child, I began looking back at the school system. I didn’t want my child going through what I went through.” Broadnax began volunteering at Fremont. Though she says she was made to feel unwelcome, she was determined to see that her children were treated fairly. “I don’t call my kids graduates. I call them survivors of the system.” She joined CADRE in the fight to win respect, dignity, and a quality education “not just for my child, but to stand up and be there when other parents can’t.”

After public events on Tuesday, the campaigners brought their testimony to the LAUSD Board and requested a meeting to discuss full implementation of SWPBS. Board member Yolie Flores — but not the full board — agreed to meet.

(LAUSD, take note: The Office of Civil Rights for the US Department of Education is now looking at school districts which have failed to reduce disproportionate exclusionary discipline rates. But let’s not reform our system because we’re afraid of legal consequences, i.e., punishment. Why not model for our kids this behavior: do the right thing.)

“Kid face closed doors wherever they look,” said Gomez. “School should be the one place where kids feel welcome.”

And where they are fully seen and respected. Anger mixed with disbelief still breaks through her voice when Broadnax recalls the counselor who told her she could feel proud of her son for being one of only three African American boys who was not classified as special ed. She is indeed proud of him. The young man is now attending law school.

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