Racial healing a slow process in Puyallup School District

DIVERSITY TRAINING is a priority and security has been beefed up. But officials say there have been some steps backward as well.

PUYALLUP - "Sensitivity" and "harassment-free classrooms" have become the latest buzzwords around here.

As the Puyallup School District begins to address a class-action lawsuit filed last week by several African-American families, it also prepares to close an investigation of its own - involving a junior-high teacher who allegedly wrote a disparaging poem about his special-education students.

School officials are trying not to lump the situations together, saying the latter is an isolated incident - an alleged case of bad judgment by one teacher.

But the two actions come at a time when the district already is reeling from a number of incidents at Puyallup High in recent months that have fueled racial tension - not just in the schools, but in the entire community.

Among them:

On Sept. 28, a white student posed in blackface for a senior-class portrait. He was expelled, but later allowed to return to school, on the condition his senior project must address racism. School officials later said students had been writing "PHS" and "2000" on their arms and faces, and the boy's paint had gotten smeared. They don't believe there was racial intent in his actions.

On Oct. 11, a white student and a black student were arrested after fighting in a school parking lot.

On Oct. 13, the school district received a phone call from a man who threatened to kill the high school's 47 African-American students. Most of the African-American students stayed out of classes for the rest of the week.

On Oct. 17, scores of racist pamphlets were tossed onto lawns and driveways in several Puyallup neighborhoods.

Add the suicides of two students, two weeks apart, in October, and life was "pretty much a living hell" for students at Puyallup High, said C.J. Blau, 17, a junior.

"This has been the worst school year ever," she said.

At the time of the incidents, most of her teachers didn't assign regular classwork. They talked about racism, cliques, suicide and the way Puyallup was being portrayed in local and national news coverage.

"In my history class, we talked about it for like two weeks straight," Blau said.

But even after talking about it for months, Puyallup still has a lot of healing to do, said junior Jessica Pagoria, 16.

"I don't think it will ever be over because if something minor happens, (the tension) just reoccurs," Pagoria said.

The district has worked hard to restore order on campus by beefing up security, undergoing more diversity training, and reviewing required reading of books that may be offensive to African Americans.

But officials acknowledge the special-education teacher's alleged actions have hurt their efforts in restoring community support for the district.

"The incident at Stahl Junior High takes us back several steps," said Tony Apostle, a district spokesman.

And the lawsuit, filed Jan. 14 by four African-American families, alleges school officials failed to take adequate action to correct a hostile educational environment, violating the civil rights of black students who suffered racial harassment by peers.

School officials deny the allegations.

"Puyallup School District is committed to promoting diversity," said Superintendent Richard Sovde, who will retire in June after five years in the district. "We have policies and practices prohibiting discrimination, and we have acted swiftly to enforce those polices when we are aware of violations."

Derogatory poem

The district plans to wrap up its investigation of the junior-high teacher before tomorrow's School Board meeting.

The teacher, Gary Osborne, 42, has been on paid administrative leave during the district's investigation of parents' claims that he wrote a poem making fun of students in his special-education class.

The poem, a takeoff on " 'Twas the Night before Christmas," describes individual students who defecate, have seizures, fall asleep and take medication in the classroom. One of the verses names a student who complains that "it hurts my privates" while using the bathroom.

Several parents complained about the poem to the School Board last week. And at least one parent has threatened to sue the teacher and school district.

"We're shocked by this incident, and we want to apply the appropriate discipline," Apostle said. "The content of the poem was offensive. The naming of the children in the poem with specific mention of the disability and the characterization of the disability . . . was inappropriate."

Growing district

The Puyallup School District is the second-largest in Pierce County, stretching 55 square miles across farmlands, the historic city of Puyallup and the newly incorporated town of Edgewood (still referred to as "North Hill" by many locals). It also includes South Hill, a rapidly growing community of strip malls and housing developments.

There are many who don't believe racism is a problem at Puyallup High or in the surrounding community, including Sheila Chaput, who has lived three blocks from the high school for 23 years.

"It's a few people blowing things out of proportion," she said. "I've had problems with the school district, but you have to go talk to them. You are your child's only advocate."

School Board President Karen Pickett thinks racial tensions are a result of tremendous growing pains.

"We are growing so rapidly that this community is facing diversity issues that it probably hasn't had to face in the past," Pickett said.

The 19,000-student district is scheduled to open its third comprehensive high school next fall. During the past decade, much of the area's farmlands and wooded areas have become suburbia.

"Some people consider Puyallup a small rural community," said Apostle. "We're no longer that."

The four African-American families who filed the class-action suit on Jan. 14 also filed a $5 million discrimination complaint against the district last summer. About 10 more families are expected to join the suit in March, when a 60-day waiting period is over, said attorney Thaddeus Martin.

"This lawsuit is necessary because the Puyallup School District has failed to follow through on correcting racial harassment and disparate treatment of students based on race," he said.

Along with its claims that the district failed to correct a hostile educational environment, the suit claims that the district promotes racially offensive curricula and that teachers and staff members take part in racial stereotyping.

"We have in place the remedies the plaintiffs request in their suit, from curriculum that promotes diversity to complaint processes for parents and students. The remedy we have not provided is payment of financial damages," Sovde, the superintendent, said.

The lawsuit also lists numerous accounts of students being assaulted, harassed and called derogatory names. Some incidents date back to November 1997, when a parent, frustrated by the way district officials handled her complaints, contacted the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights for assistance.

In June 1998, the Office of Civil Rights ended its investigation after the district agreed to resolve the complaints by revising its harassment policy, developing a grievance procedure for complaints and providing diversity training for students and staff.

School officials say they've made the necessary changes, but the lawsuit contends that revised policies are not being enforced and that African-American students are still targets of racism.

In an interview last October, Odell Thomas - one of the parents bringing the lawsuit - said his three daughters transferred to Tacoma schools because the entire Puyallup district has a racially hostile environment.

"They would come home and say, `Dad, I can't take it. I just can't go (to school),' " he said.

His son, Kevin, stayed at Puyallup High, where he was almost strangled last year during football practice, Thomas said. The family believes the attack was racially motivated.

"I'm sad that my son had to go through this stuff in this day and time," Thomas said. "I'm kind of dumbfounded that people act this way. . . . They have a problem with minority people."

Sovde said the lawsuit raises more questions than answers because it doesn't say specifically when incidents occurred or whom they involved. He said the lawsuit includes incidents that have never been reported to the district.

"We can't solve problems we don't know about," Sovde said. "We have taken swift and appropriate disciplinary actions when problems are reported."

Peace rally

Shortly after the October incidents at Puyallup High, school and community leaders held a peace rally, promising to work together to heal their town.

The rally - which drew more than 300 people - was a way for the community to say that racism won't be tolerated there, said state Rep. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, one of the event's co-organizers.

He thinks it was a success.

"I think the attitude in Puyallup has really kind of rebounded to a positive," he said. "Things have calmed down at Puyallup High School. I think this is a great issue to direct us to where we're going in the future. It was a struggle in our community, but I think that we're getting back into the positive."

Teams from City Year, a national civic organization, have also been meeting with Puyallup High students two or three times a month to work on diversity-related activities.

City Year helped students paint murals for the school. One of the murals depicts a powerful viking - the century-old school's mascot - crashing through a wall of words, such as stereotype, racism and hate.

The mural is the students' way of saying they're going to restore pride in their school and overcome those barriers, said Amina Ghaddar, a City Year spokeswoman.

It's also a reminder that the issue hasn't disappeared.

"There's a real rawness at the school," she said. "There's tension - but it's a good thing. They're acknowledging (problems) and trying to work it all out."

Lisa Pemberton-Butler's phone-message number is 253-946-3977. Her e-mail address is lpemberton@seattletimes.com