Less Tolerance for Meanness at School

Kids are forever inventing new ways to torment each other, and adults are forever telling them to mind their manners. Some would say it’s all part of growing up.

Now many Orange County schools are challenging those purported facts of life, unwilling to accept meanness as a schoolyard staple. Instead, they are crafting unusual programs that give students the job of teaching other students how to get along.

Last week, Los Alamitos High School students visited Rossmoor Elementary School to give fourth- and fifth-graders workshops on tolerance--not solely on hot-button racial issues, but focusing on the common jibes against overweight kids, bad athletes, poor dressers.

Educators say such efforts are a response to tensions that have flared on campuses during a period of demographic upheaval. The white student population in Orange County public schools fell below a majority for the first time in the 1992-93 school year, and the percentage is still dropping. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor has widened in many areas.

Of course, there is virtually no data to show that playgrounds are any nastier than they used to be. Still, more schools than ever are turning to human relations experts for help, finding that traditional disciplinary methods are not enough to forestall inflammatory incidents.

This year, 27 schools are paying the Orange County Human Relations Commission to help them develop a more tranquil campus climate. The cost is $6,500 per school, but many are aided by outside grants. The number of schools is up from 18 in 1995-96 and 13 the year before that. The commission’s program, known as “Building Bridges of Understanding,” began in 1988.

“There is less tolerance today for name-calling and putting people down,” said Roger Duthoy, principal at El Rancho Middle School in Anaheim Hills, one of the commission’s new clients. “I know it bothers me more. I’m more sensitive to it.”

Many of Duthoy’s peers are seeking advice informally.

“There’s definitely something going on out there,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “There’s no question that our schools are facing unprecedented challenges in dealing with diversity, and not just with ethnic values. It’s socioeconomic too.”

At Rossmoor Elementary School, Principal Laurel Telfer said teachers a few years ago began to notice a certain unruliness among students that they hadn’t seen before.

“We were needing to do a better job of trying to teach kids what makes a good person,” Telfer said. “We just found that we were talking amongst ourselves more about kids being rude or mean or not being responsible. It just became the time to do something.”

So what’s gotten into kids?

Some of the typical put-downs are hardy perennials. The words “nerd” and “geek,” to name two of the mildest, are still in fashion. Kids tease each other for being fat or skinny or short or tall.

But now educators say kids are paying more attention to the trappings of social and economic class. They harp on kids whose jeans or backpack don’t have the right label, whose shoes come from Payless instead of Doc Martens. And from middle school on, reports of racial, ethnic and homophobic slurs, always a factor in schoolyard banter, are increasing.

Other sharp taunts these days are unspoken. A long stare suffices to point out potentially volatile differences. Kids call it “dogging,” or “mad-dogging.” Translation: “It’s a nasty look that people give,” said Portia Taylor, 13, an eighth-grader at El Rancho Middle School in Anaheim Hills. “It’s something that is a challenge.”

But while it’s true that students will always discover new ways to get under each other’s skin, it’s also true that increasing numbers are speaking out against insults and counseling each other to “stay cool.”

Alex White, 14, an El Rancho student who participated this fall in a tolerance leadership seminar given through the school, said the new efforts have paid off this year.

“It’s safer,” he said. “There’s not as many fights this year. Last year there were. I told all my friends about [the seminar]. They thought it was kind of neat.”

What encourages educators most is that students themselves are in the vanguard.

“Kids are developing a greater social conscience,” said Mark Celestin, a teacher at Los Alamitos High who coordinates a student human relations group. “They’re standing up for things that they would not have before.”

The group at Los Alamitos High, called Griffins With a Mission, after the school mascot, arose after racist fliers were stuffed in student lockers in 1991 and 1992.

In the wake of those campus-shaking incidents, the Human Relations Commission helped the school develop off-campus retreats for selected students to study diversity and tolerance--forming the nucleus of a human relations club now praised as a model countywide.

High schools in Santa Ana Unified, Tustin Unified and Capistrano Unified School districts have developed similar programs, county and school officials say. Westminster High School also has launched a program in which students take charge of mediating student conflicts.

Last Wednesday, about a dozen Los Alamitos High students came to Rossmoor Elementary to spread the tolerance message to younger students. The fifth-graders in one classroom paid close attention during the entire 90-minute session. After all, this lesson on manners wasn’t coming from parents or teachers, but from those ultimate creatures, high schoolers.

The instructors, wearing blue T-shirts emblazoned with the word “RESPECT,” asked the class to stage scenes that show how people hurt each other. In one skit, two boys named G.D. and Sam held a mock foot race in which one called the other a “slowpoke.” Student instructor Joanna Zeigler jumped right in.

“Has that ever happened to you, that some one makes fun of you for running slow?” Zeigler, 15, asked the fifth-graders, who nodded. “I know it has to me.”

This is the first year that Griffins With a Mission has barnstormed elementary schools. It plans to start in middle schools in March.

“The idea of peer tutoring is really powerful,” said Louis Miron, chairman of the department of education at UC Irvine. “It’s powerful because students who are approaching adolescence like to know what those of an age group a little above them are thinking. [The instructors] can cut to the chase. They’re both old enough and young enough to relate.”

If nothing else, Wednesday’s lesson will be one the Rossmoor fifth-graders won’t soon forget.

“I don’t know if this helped,” high school instructor Cori Snyder told the younger children, “but it makes me feel good that we all got together to talk about it.”

Fifth-grader Courtney Herz answered: “Really deep inside, I think it is going to help, if it helps everybody as much as it helped me.”