A lesson in diversity

Before she arrived at middle school, Itanza Lawrence admits, she cleaved to certain racial stereotypes. Asians were quiet and smart. African Americans, her group, were "ghetto" and "not academically competitive."

She doesn't see it that way anymore.

One of the first things she learned at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, one of the city's first magnet schools and, by some standards, its most successful, was that Asian Americans could be loud and rowdy. And they weren't all brainiacs. African Americans? A lot of them turned out to be like her: driven to succeed academically and determined to go to a good college.

Along with getting a top-notch education, Itanza and many of her classmates say, they have learned to appreciate diversity and become comfortable with people of all races and nationalities. That makes LACES, as the Mid-City school is more commonly known, a model for what the Los Angeles Unified School District said it was trying to preserve when it fought a legal battle to retain the ability to assign students to magnet schools by race.

The district won that battle this week when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge rejected a lawsuit by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which claimed that the use of race in magnet assignments violated California's Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by voters in 1996.

Some at LACES, though, wonder how much the district really cares about what its teachers, students and administrators have been able to accomplish at their small, academically charged campus, which spans middle and high school.

Longtime teachers and administrators say they can't remember when an L.A. Unified school superintendent visited the campus, formerly Louis Pasteur Junior High, near Fairfax Avenue and the 10 Freeway. Unless, that is, you count the time when, according to Assistant Principal Marion Wong, former Supt. Roy Romer walked onto the campus "by mistake" while trying to find a then-adjacent elementary school.

Art teacher Honami Uchiyama, who has taught at LACES since 1978, the year after it opened, said she sometimes wonders: "If we're one of the top schools in the nation, which we are, why is our ceiling falling down and why is our plumbing so bad?"

In the next breath, most LACES teachers and administrators will acknowledge that the district has understandably placed its priority on fixing problem schools, rather than coddling schools that work.