Gangs in the schools?
I'm working on an article about school dress codes that ban gang colors. My daughter's SFUSD middle school, Aptos, now bans red and blue. It's a ban that was technically in place in the previous years, when my son was at Aptos, but wasn't really universally enforced.
Announcement of the ban alarmed a lot of parents, predictably. "You mean Aptos has a gang problem?"
Here's what I learned from my reporting. Low-income Latino communities are permeated — dominated — by the Sureño and the Norteño gangs. They are a far more significant presence than the other powerful institution, the Catholic Church. (Which makes me wonder where the Church IS on this issue &mdash pretty much 100% of those violent gangbangers are baptized Catholics.)
So any school with a population from that community includes kids who live with that presence in their lives. The practical goal is to make the schools a safe haven, a place assumed and understood to be free of gang influence, presence and activity. Police and school administrators feel that the color ban is an effective part of that. Many schools simply require uniforms, of course.
Aptos, by the way, has no dominant ethnicity. Latinos are the largest single group, at 26 percent of the school population (2004-’05 figures). The school is also 21 percent Chinese, 19 percent African-American, 13 percent white and the rest an array of other backgrounds.
Other ethnicities have gangs, but the color signal seems to be a Sureño and Norteño hallmark. It's an issue nationwide, in every community with a low-income Latino presence, from the rural Midwest to New England to the Pacific Northwest to the South. The private sector should envy the ubiquity and effectiveness of the "branding" these gangs have achieved with their colors.
For the record, the Norteños show red, and consist largely of Americanized, higher-income kids. The Sureños are mostly the kids of overwhelmed immigrants struggling to cope with poverty and assimilation. Police and school administrators tell me that the parents are unaware, absent, in denial or sometimes gangbangers themselves -- and some, of course, are in the know but are unable to get their kids to stop, as with many parents and their teens' acts of rebellion.
Crime coverage in today's Chronicle adds some dubious PR spin to the gang story.
(Emphasis on "group" mine.) If it's a violent organization of low-income and/or public-school thugs, it's a gang &mdash if it's based at parochial school, it's a group? I've e-mailed the reporter and the Chron's reader rep about this and will add their response, if any.
udpate: formating fixes by KC
Announcement of the ban alarmed a lot of parents, predictably. "You mean Aptos has a gang problem?"
Here's what I learned from my reporting. Low-income Latino communities are permeated — dominated — by the Sureño and the Norteño gangs. They are a far more significant presence than the other powerful institution, the Catholic Church. (Which makes me wonder where the Church IS on this issue &mdash pretty much 100% of those violent gangbangers are baptized Catholics.)
So any school with a population from that community includes kids who live with that presence in their lives. The practical goal is to make the schools a safe haven, a place assumed and understood to be free of gang influence, presence and activity. Police and school administrators feel that the color ban is an effective part of that. Many schools simply require uniforms, of course.
Aptos, by the way, has no dominant ethnicity. Latinos are the largest single group, at 26 percent of the school population (2004-’05 figures). The school is also 21 percent Chinese, 19 percent African-American, 13 percent white and the rest an array of other backgrounds.
Other ethnicities have gangs, but the color signal seems to be a Sureño and Norteño hallmark. It's an issue nationwide, in every community with a low-income Latino presence, from the rural Midwest to New England to the Pacific Northwest to the South. The private sector should envy the ubiquity and effectiveness of the "branding" these gangs have achieved with their colors.
For the record, the Norteños show red, and consist largely of Americanized, higher-income kids. The Sureños are mostly the kids of overwhelmed immigrants struggling to cope with poverty and assimilation. Police and school administrators tell me that the parents are unaware, absent, in denial or sometimes gangbangers themselves -- and some, of course, are in the know but are unable to get their kids to stop, as with many parents and their teens' acts of rebellion.
Crime coverage in today's Chronicle adds some dubious PR spin to the gang story.
[Convicted murderer] Sands and [victim] Ramirez had known each other from St. Cecilia's parochial grammar school, and both were later in a group made up mainly of Sacred Heart students that called itself Sunset District Inc., or "the Bros."
(Emphasis on "group" mine.) If it's a violent organization of low-income and/or public-school thugs, it's a gang &mdash if it's based at parochial school, it's a group? I've e-mailed the reporter and the Chron's reader rep about this and will add their response, if any.
udpate: formating fixes by KC
4 Comments:
the middle school i teach in is completely uniformed, with no red or blue allowed (predominantly latino). i personally think that for the students, actual gang involvement is nill, whereas romanticizing it is big. and, of course, with teenagers, anything outlawed is going to be romanticized even more.
i had a bunch of ex-students come by last week and tell me that now that they are in high school and don't have uniforms, they wish they did. i never thought i'd hear that!
I hated uniforms in catholic school. but after seeing how much vanity and money kids will put into garb ( or nag their mom to) in high school, I can only agree that uniforms are the way to go. Might help those families with their saving plans too.
Since middle-class parents in the know realize that school uniforms mean that gangs are a potential problem at a school, having uniforms may translate into fewer middle-class applicants.
Regarding the comment that some parents see uniforms as signaling gang presence in a school -- as I noted in the original post, the gang-color issue is essentially entirely Latino. Predominantly African-American schools in my district seem likely to require uniforms too. It's part of the package of more-regimented schools.
What I do see is the likelihood that uniforms will become a signal of a low-income, disadvantaged school. That's a very consistent pattern in my district (despite its very aggressive effort to diversify schools, some are undoubtedly far more middle-class than others).
By the same principle: Just as Jonathan Kozol writes sadly that any school named after a civil rights leader is likely to be starkly segregated, schools with "academy" in the name are increasingly likely to be struggling, low-performing and serving low-income kids. That's likely to happen to "college preparatory" too, and any school that refers to its students as "scholars."
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