EDUCATION
4J STUDENTS FACE RACE-BASED
DISCRIMINATION
Incidents increased post Trump's election
EDITOR'S NOTE: The names of the mothers in this story, Brenda
and Rosa, are pseudonyms to protect their children from retribution.
T
his past September, Brenda went to pick up her
5-year-old son from kindergarten at McCormick
grade school. “The principal said he was at the of-
fice and to come get him,” she says. Brenda fol-
lowed the principal to an office containing her son,
locked in and crying. "She felt like he was going to hurt
her and she said she didn’t know what to do,” Brenda says.
Her son ended up suspended within a week of joining
the kindergarten class and was removed to a one-on-one
program at Fox Hollow Elementary School. He was the
only Hispanic student in the class at McCormick.
Brenda and Rosa are both social workers, both have
kids in the 4J school district, and
both are Latina. They say that 4J has
serious problems with discrimination
against Latino students, and not just
at a peer-to-peer level. Principals,
vice principals and teachers have
all harmed their kids in various
contexts, they say. And under a Trump
administration that has targeted
immigrants, the tension has increased
for their families and those they work
with.
Brenda tells this story about her
14-year-old son: When he was in sixth
grade at Kennedy Middle School,
they had a meeting with the assistant
principal. When her child told the assistant principal that
he hoped to someday become a biologist, he said you need
“a big bank account” to become a biologist.
“The look on his face … I knew he was discouraged,”
Brenda says. “My son is so bright, but he says he feels like
a loser. He feels like he’s not going to make it because of
that comment the assistant principal made.”
Rosa adds that her son, now 19, admitted at a recent
counseling session that he thinks he’s too stupid to be
college material. “All he ever heard from second grade on
was that he was stupid and he would never be anything,”
Rosa says.
Brenda says the only Hispanic teacher her kids ever
had was a Spanish teacher. “They need to start by hiring
more bilingual and bicultural teachers,” she adds.
BY KELLY KENOYER WITH REPORTING BY JESLYN LEMKE
the next 90 days. It also states that the district “does not
collect information on the immigration status of students
or parents” and will not release student records without a
court order, search warrant or subpoena.
Fifteen-year-old Gissel Narvaez, who identifies as
Latina, spoke to a full crowd at the Feb. 15 meeting about
the ongoing venomous and hostile racist comments she and
her peers face at Sheldon High School. Racially motivated
bullying, Narvaez said in a later interview, became a huge
problem at her school in the weeks following Trump’s
nomination.
“One of my friends, he is undocumented. Ever since
the election, he got scared to come to school,” Narvaez
says. “When Trump was finally put into office, the fear got
so high he just dropped out because he was scared.”
Narvaez says Sheldon High School’s
hallways became openly hostile in the
weeks after the Trump nomination, so
much so that school administrators held a
Unity Assembly to remind students about
equality and unity among ethnic groups.
“Ever since we had that, things
have been dying down,” she says. She
noted most of her Latina friends at
school — about 10 in all — come from
undocumented families. She spends
time comforting friends worried they
might come home to an empty house
because ICE has taken their parents.
4J school district is 14.7 percent
Latino/Hispanic and 69.3 percent white
according to statistics from the 2016-17 school year
provided by 4J school district.
“Advocating takes so much work and energy — even
for us parents who work in the field, who know our rights,
who know the language, as opposed to parents who are
trying to stay invisible and earn a living,” Rosa says.
Undocumented status can be a huge barrier for parents
who may want to advocate for their children, she says, so
“They just try not to pass a lot of ruckus.”
Even without such barriers, “it’s overwhelming for us
as parents to deal with the 4J district,” Brenda says.
When it comes to the recent push to make 4J a sanctuary
school district, Rosa says, “It’s a start. I’ll give them that.
But they need to listen to the needs of the community and
not just say that they do.”
Rosa’s kids had a white Spanish language teacher at
South Eugene high who brought her class to Chapala
Mexican Restaurant for a field trip. “Chapala’s is not
where you go to get a cultural experience. It’s actually
offensive,” Rosa says.
Both moms say their kids and the kids they work with
have become more afraid since Trump came into office.
“I know for my kid it really affected his anxiety,” Rosa
says. Both say they’ve had community members say
threatening things to them in public places since the
election. They’ve seen their own kids called slurs like
“beaner” and have heard from other parents that threats
of the wall and “being sent back to where you came from”
are often floated by students at schools in the 4J district,
and the administration does little to prevent it.
‘One of my friends, he is undocumented. Ever since
the election, he got scared to come to school. When
Trump was finally put into office, the fear got so high
he just dropped out because he was scared.’
Gissel Narvaez, 15 SHELDON HIGH SCHOOL
Asked to comment, 4J associate communications
director Kerry Delf writes in an email, "Bullying,
harassment and discrimination are not acceptable behavior
in 4J schools, and reported incidents are taken seriously."
At the urging of many angered and worried Latino
families and their advocates, the 4J school district passed
a resolution on Feb. 15 that affirmed many of the school’s
existing policies about providing information to U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The district’s last two board meetings have seen
dozens of citizens urging the school board to pass more
robust measures to protect the undocumented Latina
families from federal authorities. Though the wording of
the resolution doesn’t contain the term “sanctuary,” it does
require some training for staff and administrators within
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