Readers React: LAUSD needs to encourage promising black students

To the editor: Notwithstanding her over-the-top rhetoric against the Los Angeles Unified School District, Sikivu Hutchinson makes a valid point: Black students have been seriously neglected in the district. (“LAUSD needs to reverse its neglect of black students,” Opinion, Feb. 16)

Over the last few years, I have served as interim principal at many high schools and middle schools, and frankly, I have been appalled at the marginalization of black students.

At one inner-city high school in which black kids made up 16% of the student body, 1% or fewer of the participants in the debate, robotics or business programs were black. At another school, in an awards assembly for more than 250 seniors, only four black graduates were recognized.

Regrettably, when a group of students are so disdainfully and obviously ignored, its members do become belligerent and disrespectful. There are many capable black students; we must encourage them.

Stu Bernstein, Santa Monica

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To the editor: After reading Hutchinson’s very long list of grievances about LAUSD’s treatment of black students, I experienced a kind of shell shock.

The list includes everything from police and military recruiters on campus, to kids of color being arrested disproportionally on campus, to not enough kids of color being designated as gifted, and on and on. But there was not a single word about the communities these kids grow up in having anything to do with their success or failure in school.

For an op-ed article like this to be taken seriously, it has to address this issue.

Robert Newman, West Hills

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