Report Blames School Staffers for Walkouts by Students : Centinela: Trustees hired an investigator to determine whether students were responsible for the spring protests. Board critics say the claims in his report are unsubstantiated.

A report released this week concludes that student demonstrations this spring at Hawthorne and Leuzinger high schools were organized by teachers, administrators and security officers who were trying to prevent the newly elected school board from taking an active role in district business.

Although the report was hailed by Trustee Pam Sturgeon and the board’s supporters as a first step toward getting to the bottom of what happened during the demonstrations, it came under immediate fire by board critics who said its allegations are unsubstantiated and that it unfairly targets blacks.

Nancy McKee, who has two daughters in the district, said she believes the report “is going to start the healing process” by rooting out those people who were responsible for the walkouts. “I think it’s positive because they’re going to be able to clean out the bad seeds.”

But board critic Adrain Briggs disagreed.

“It was a waste of time and money, and all of it was focused on trying to find black folks in violation of something,” said Briggs, a spokesman for the Committee for Racial Free Education, a group of black parents and other community activists who have been critical of the predominantly Latino school board. “It doesn’t have any validity whatsoever, and those charges wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.”

However, Sturgeon said the report is preliminary and that she is confident the investigator who wrote it has evidence to back up his findings. She said the board will take no action on the report until the investigation is complete.

William Burnett, the private investigator who wrote the report, was hired by Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees to look into suspicions that students were not responsible for organizing the March 5-6 walkouts.

At the time of the demonstrations, several students said they decided to walk out of class to protest a spate of racially motivated incidents that had plagued the district and to show their support for Kenneth Crowe, the principal of Hawthorne High. Crowe was reassigned to a teaching position earlier this month.

But some teachers and others said most of the students joined the demonstrations simply to get out of class and that few students at Leuzinger High, where the protest marches began, even knew the name of the principal at Hawthorne, the rival high school.

As part of the investigation, Burnett set up a toll-free phone number to allow people with information about the walkouts to call in anonymously. Although Burnett provided the trustees with the names of the district employees who allegedly organized the walkouts, those names were not included in the four-page report that was made public.

The report also did not identify the sources of the allegations nor the documents that reportedly backed them up. Nor did it indicate the number of people who called in anonymously or the number of those who agreed to be interviewed in person.

Burnett said in his report that interviews he conducted and documents he obtained during the inquiry led him to conclude that “the students did not act independently” in walking out of school and that they were instead “used by some employees of the school district to focus attention on the position of the principal of Hawthorne High School, and upon allegations of racism that had been raised during the previous election of the board of trustees.”

The investigator also said he found evidence that “confidential school records were released to outside interests and that school district equipment was used to produce inflammatory material that was passed out during the demonstrations.”

Burnett cited 12 “reported incidents” that he said supported his conclusion that district employees planned the student walkouts.

Among them are reports that two teachers tried to recruit other teachers to help organize the walkouts, that teachers helped distribute pamphlets that were handed out during the demonstrations, that the handwriting on one leaflet appeared to match that of a teacher, and that a student had been observed taking pamphlets out of the trunk of a car belonging to a faculty member.

In addition, he reported statements by security officers that they had been told that a district administrator had approved the walkouts.

The report also said several security officers were observed passing out handouts and that on the morning of the demonstrations they were told that “they were to encourage students to participate” in the walkouts.

Hawthorne High Security Officer Cynthia Henderson, who said she was falsely accused of passing out pamphlets by two other officers after the walkouts, called the allegations lies and said the only pamphlets she ever saw were the ones brought into the morning meeting by one of her accusers.

The report also alleges that a four-page handout passed out during the demonstration contained facts that were unavailable to students and “could only be found in the School District Administrative Offices.”

The pamphlet, which was titled “A Failure to Stop the Lynching,” contained several examples of alleged racist incidents against black employees and students. Board critic Briggs, who said he and other members of his organization wrote the pamphlet, denied that district employees in any way provided them with information for the pamphlet. The information, he said, came from newspaper reports and parents who “know a lot more than you think they know.”

The report also says that a district official had given a speech to students a few days before the walkouts that was “racially inflammatory and was intended to incite the students.”

Although the report does not name the official, former Supt. McKinley Nash, who was fired from his post last week, said in an interview Wednesday that the allegation refers to a comment he made during an assembly on Black History Month. The Rev. Chet Gean, who is white, had spoken about racial integration in the South. At the end of the assembly, a student asked Gean how he would feel if his daughter dated a black man. Another student then questioned whether racism existed anymore, Nash said.

“I came forward and told the youngsters it was unfair to attack anybody because of their place of birth or their race and that racism exists everywhere in America and among all groups, regardless of their race,” Nash said.

Social studies teacher Arnold Tena, who was present during the assembly and who is a strong critic of Nash, said he disagreed with some of his colleagues that Nash’s comments were inflammatory. But he said that he still believed Nash played a role in the walkouts, an allegation Nash denies.

Nash, who said his attorney is preparing a written response to the report, said Burnett never answered his requests for an interview and that “some of the facts he alleges are incorrect.”

He said he sent Burnett information concerning about 20 incidents in which students contended that they had been harassed by teachers and staff members before, during and after the walkouts. He said the documents might have shown a motivation for the students to walk out, but they were sent back to him accompanied by a letter by Trustee Ruth Morales telling him that Burnett would not investigate those incidents.

Sturgeon said Burnett was hired solely to investigate the walkout, and there are district procedures for handling harassment complaints.

Nash said the report troubled him because individuals “could be falsely accused and not be given the right for redress and to defend themselves.”

“I am concerned about any report that does not name people and does not give people the ability to react, and for that reason that is frightening to me.”

In a statement attached to the report, the trustees said they planned to use the report to determine whether they will pursue “criminal or other disciplinary action” against any employee found to have been involved.

U.S. Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton) said in an interview Wednesday that the report “is not supported by the facts or any due process” and that he had warned the trustees last month that they could be opening themselves up to lawsuits if they use the report’s findings to dismiss any employees from the district.

An assessment of the district’s racial tensions is due to be released soon by the state Department of Education’s Office of Intergroup Relations. In addition, the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating allegations of racial harassment in the district.