THE GRADUATES’ VIEWPOINTS : Sizing Up the Schools

PALISADES HIGH SCHOOL

Ilya Monroe, 18, says that the quality of public education is unequal and that there are not enough minorities in honors classes. She is enrolled at Antioch College in Ohio for the fall.

Dan Skootsky, 18, contends that educators should focus on academics, not racial issues. He will study next year at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

*

ILYA MONROE: The bulk of the African American students stay in the cafeteria, a lot of the Hispanic students stay in the back of the cafeteria, a lot of the white students are on the quad. It’s like different neighborhoods in the same school.

Students gravitate toward people they believe to be on their same academic level. People mentioned it a lot that there are very few African American and Hispanic students in honors classes, which are predominantly white. The more remedial classes are predominantly black and Hispanic.

I think if education is more focused and stronger for African American and Hispanic students at a younger age, there would be less division in high school. I really don’t think that integration can be attained at a high school level because the stereotypes have already been implanted.

I think that strenuous teaching needs to begin at a younger age and more strongly focus on math and science.

African American and Hispanic kids need to be made aware of what is available to them if they take the harder courses. But if they spend their whole high school career taking ceramics electives, that is not a future.

In high school, I think there is tracking. You have regular classes and honors classes. It doesn’t necessarily bother me that there are different levels of classes, but it bothers me that most of the honors classes are taken up by a certain race. I’ve accepted it as a fact, but I don’t appreciate it, I don’t support it.

There needs to be some kind of encouragement, nourishment, something to help the kids who are not in the honors classes. Kids need to be instilled with confidence that they can perform to their abilities.

I think the better teachers should be teaching more of the non-honors classes. I think that would add some sort of balance. If they are strong enough teachers they should be able to enthrall all students and make them want to learn what they have to teach.

*

DAN SKOOTSKY: No one is barred from taking a certain class because of their race. If they have the motivation, if they have the determination to stick through that class, they are going to make it.

We need to start focusing more on the individual student. Educators can start by providing more personal counseling that would follow through a student’s school career.

We change counselors all the time. Basically, the job of the counselor now is to take care of your scheduling problems. They say you can talk to them about your future, your problems, but the environment is not conducive to that.

Another thing schools need to focus more on is science and technology. I think if we look at our nation as a whole, we are falling behind in that area. We focus on social issues a lot. Classes on racial issues, that’s good, I’m all for that. But as a foundation, we need more on the basics like science and math.

Our schools need equipment; everything is antiquated. I would have greatly appreciated having up-to-date lab equipment, electronic equipment and computers. There is no real class for computers. There is a computer programming class, but we work on 10-year-old Apple computers. Let me give you an example of something that is working here.

It’s the media center, a new program at school. We’ve had students of all races involved. The theme is uniting through communication. It started basically as a project to develop a radio station at Pali, but pretty soon we started getting into video and produced the Video Timeline, a cable television version of our school paper.

We are not doing this for a grade, but the value of experience is our lesson.

You can’t survive in this program without being able to communicate well with people. You have to depend on others and others depend on you. If you don’t do your work, it’s not like you get a bad grade. If you don’t do it, the newspaper doesn’t come out or somebody else had to do the work for you, then what are they going to think of you?