Strike’s Conflicts Leave Student Leader Upset, Confused, Discouraged

As 14-year-old Renee Barrow left Le Conte Junior High School one afternoon this week, she was angered when she saw picket-carrying teachers heckling another instructor who had spent the day in class.

“Why don’t you grow up?” Renee yelled over her shoulder at the strikers.

The incident underscores how Le Conte’s student body president has changed over the last few days. Before the strike, “I always looked up to my teachers,” Renee recalled.

Renee said Friday that she is angry, depressed and “all confused” by the 5-day-old teachers’ strike. And, she said there is a sense on the Hollywood campus--among both supporters and opponents of the striking teachers--that things at Le Conte may never be the same.

The usually bubbly ninth-grader has been unable to reconcile conflicting statements from teachers, parents, friends and television news reports. “I don’t understand,” she said, her ponytail whipping back and forth as she shook her head.

One moment, Renee chastised her teachers as uncaring and accused them of using students as pawns in their battle; the next she said she sympathizes with their cause, but wishes “they would fight this out on their own time.”

Renee’s greatest concern is that the strike will ruin her graduation--a significant rite of passage. She and several of her friends have already bought their dresses and Renee has rented a limousine for the occasion.

Graduation is important, she said, because “it means we’re growing up”--something she anxiously awaits.

Renee, a B-plus student who wears a touch of lipstick and keeps her nails a well-manicured pink, is maturing quickly into a responsible and astute young woman, according to her teachers. She was the first candidate for student body president who bothered to return to the year-round school to campaign during her vacation period. Just last week, the teen-ager--who said she plans to go to college and become a lawyer--served as chairwoman of the school’s advisory council and conducted a meeting that included teachers, parents and administrators. She got high marks from participating adults.

She also boasts friends from around the world. The tendency among students at the ethnically diverse school is to mix primarily with youngsters of their own group. But Renee can usually be seen on campus surrounded by an eclectic group of Armenian, Latino and Asian students.

Despite her apparent maturity, however, Renee still gets bruises and minor scrapes from roughhousing with friends on the gym floor, and she’s not above speaking pig Latin with girlfriends.

Offended by Treatment

Last Monday, when she arrived at the school on the first day of the strike, Renee said she felt overwhelmed by the disorder. She also was offended by the curt, heavy-handed treatment she said she received from the relatively few adults--some of whom she had never seen before--struggling to maintain control.

When she wasn’t allowed to call home to ask her mother to pick her up, “I said, that’s it,” she recalled. She and a handful of friends jumped a chain-link fence behind the school. Her mother, however, persuaded her to return to school and the girls ended up jumping back over the fence later in the afternoon.

“We’ve always thought that teachers were the good guys and parents the bad guys. But now it’s switched around,” Renee said. “It’s our parents who are helping us through this.”

She has continued going to school, she said, because ninth-graders have been warned by school administrators that attendance during the strike may be used to determine who may attend graduation ceremonies. By Friday, less than half of the school’s 1,500 students were still showing up for school.

After one week, the school’s response to the crisis has established its own routine. Renee and her classmates have a regular class schedule, though they still complain that class content ranges from “basic to nothing.”

While Renee is anxious for the strike to end, she isn’t looking forward to the aftermath--”a lot of hard feelings” between teachers and students.

“I don’t think that it will ever be the same,” she said.