ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 2, 1997 TAG: 9703030074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
THE FIRST STEP was simply acknowledging a problem existed. Lots of hard work followed.
Waynesboro High School has faced its share of racial flare-ups the past few months.
In November, resentments erupted after someone wrote "Blacks go to Africa" and "White Knights" on a bulletin board - comments that police later said were written by a black student who wanted to spark turmoil.
Then, in late January, a fight broke out after a black girl said a white boy spit tobacco juice on her.
The next day, a group of black students gathered in protest and refused to go to class. Police used pepper spray to scatter them - prompting some parents to complain that officials had overreacted.
When tensions run so high, what can be done to ease them - and deal with the underlying problems that helped cause them?
It's no easy task. Educators and experts on race relations say attacking racism and healing racial wounds takes sustained effort: First, you have to admit there's a problem. Then you have to do some grueling, time-consuming work - holding meetings, talking, listening, hashing out the problems, finding common ground, then taking action.
"In our experience, these issues are very complex to start with," Waynesboro schools Superintendent Lowell Lemons said. "There are lots of variables to manage and lots of issues that come up on the table."
A task force has been working on racial issues in Waynesboro schools since last fall, but after the recent melee, Lemons said, he was impatient "to get things moving."
"It got to the point where I needed to take some action," he said.
Last week Lemons released his proposals, which he said he hoped would go hand-in-hand with whatever ideas the task force eventually comes up with.
He wants to have a community group work with school staff to come up with a list of racially offensive language and actions - for which the schools will have "zero tolerance."
He also wants to arrange training in cultural awareness and communication for all school employees. And he plans to revise and put more emphasis on the schools' rules of conduct.
An NAACP leader told the Charlottesville Daily Progress that Lemons' ideas were not new, but "I'm glad he's doing something."
Lemons said that in admitting the problems, you don't have to completely tear down a school. People should understand "that schools that have these issues are still outstanding schools."
Lemons said Waynesboro's schools also will work harder to hire more black teachers. Although Waynesboro has hired more black teachers in the past three years than it did in the previous 15, they still represent just 3 percent of the city's teachers. About 15 percent of Waynesboro's schoolchildren are black.
The high school has also started a program called the Unity Campaign, which tries to get students away from "us vs. them" thinking. At one assembly, a black student read a poem beseeching students to cast off racism. A white student talked about how, to him, being a "redneck" meant he was a hard-working country boy, not a racist.
"We said: `Look, a lot of this is misunderstanding - who's prejudiced and who's not, who may have just worded something wrong and didn't mean to project the image that they did,''' Stacey Evans, a black guidance counselor at the school, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The school system also has hired a consultant, Wendell Hylton, who specializes in helping schools defuse racial problems.
Hylton, a former Henry County teacher who now helps schools all over the country, said one of the most important tasks is helping people understand the "language of prejudice."
Everybody knows the "n-word" is offensive, but not everyone understands how labels like "honky," "you people" and "Oreos" can offend.
"Once you get the parents to work through these words, then they can go back and talk to their children and tell them these words are offensive," Hylton said.
Once everyone agrees which words are beyond the pale, then the schools should have "zero tolerance" - "just like we have zero tolerance for drugs and weapons in schools."
Hylton says his most important point may be this: Schools shouldn't wait for the problem to get out of hand to do something.
"One of the best things they can do is prevent it in the first place," he said. "Many schools really do not have strategies and structures in their systems to prevent these problems."
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