Kick-a-Ginger & Better “Demographics”

Over the weekend, LA Times’ Sandy Banks wrote a column about the whole, incredibly creepy Kick-a-Ginger day series of incidents that went on at A.E. Wright middle school out in Calabasas.

As is usual, Banks has written an insightful column in which she looks at the issue and the ensuing discussion around the matter from multiple perspectives. Banks also went out to the school and talked to A.E. Wright’s principle, Kimmarie Taylor.

Banks writes of Taylor’s response to her questions about the redhead kicking incidents that left three kids injured, and others badly shaken:

It was “disappointing,” said Principal Kimmarie Taylor, whose Nov. 2 “Note From the Principal” was devoted to the damaging effects of “unkind words, actions or deeds.”

“I don’t think this means we failed,” she said when I visited the campus this week. “They get that bullying is wrong. But they don’t know that’s what they did.”

It seems like a no-brainer to me. You target random classmates, ambush them, taunt them, rough them up. . . . If that’s not bullying, what is?

Good question.

(You can find the message that is posted by Principal Taylor on the school website here.)

I noticed that in earlier articles about the Kick-A-Ginger/A.E. Wright incidents, it was not principal Taylor, but mostly Las Virgines School District Superintendent, Don Zimring, who was quoted. Zimring also seemed have what felt like an awfully lite take on the incidents.

“The youngsters involved understand that this was not acceptable, and they have made various forms of apology and contrition,” Zimring said.

Okay, well, nevermind that we can be fairly certain that kids from certain other parts of town would soon be having regular chats with juvenile probation officers had they engaged in that some kind of “not acceptable” behavior. But whatever. (And now it appears that several of the boys have been charged in connection with the incident.)

When I read the stories, Zimring’s name sounded familiar to me. In fact it brought up the one and only personal experience I’ve ever had with A.E. Wright middle school. It occurred in late 1995, or early 1996. And it involved a school principle whose name I could swear was the same as the district Superintendent: Don Zimring.

I did a quick Google search. Sure enough, Donald Zimring was A. E. Wright’s principle from 1986 until he was promoted to the district level in 1997, thus making him the principal when my decade-plus old incident occurred.

My memory pertains to the period when I was frantically trying to figure out where to send my son to middle school. (He was at the time a 5th grader at Topanga Elementary.) There were a number of public schools that were a possibility, given where I lived and worked. A.E Wright was one of them.

In terms of statewide ratings, Wright was considered one of the most desirable in the area. Good test scores and so on. So I took an afternoon off from work and, together with my attorney friend Wendy whose daughter was a 5th grader, went to an informational event that A.E. Wright was offering for prospective parents. Once there, we were shown around the campus, and then herded in to the school auditorium to listen to a half-hour or so pitch from the school principal.

During the tour, Wendy and I peered into classrooms tentatively, and tried to figure out what we should be thinking. The place seemed nice enough. Clean, anyway. The student body seemed notably—um—not multicultural. (NOTE: In 2008, A.E. Wright’s student body was 78 percent Caucasian, with only 4 percent needing free or reduced lunches, which is about what it was back then.) But, okay, we thought. This is Calabasas. And, since neither of us could afford to send our kids to private schools, we were looking for the next best alternative. Wright, we had been assured, was it.

I don’t remember much of what the principal said in his presentation until he got around to talking about Wright’s consistently good scores on those standardized tests that California public schools are required to administer. Then the man uttered a single sentence that burned itself indelibly on to the surface my inner chalk board.

We have high test scores, the principal said with real pride in his voice, “because we have better demographics.” (I think he actually may have said, “the right demographics,” but since I cannot be sure, I am going with the least icky of the two versions that my memory has forked over.)

Wendy and I glanced cautiously at each other. Then we looked even more cautiously around us at the room full of attentive, primarily upper middle class—and almost exclusively white—faces. No one else seemed to think anything peculiar had happened. And the principal, who I assume was Zimring, went right on talking, his expression still enthusiastic and upbeat.

Wendy and I crept out of the school auditorium as soon as politeness would allow it. Once back in my car and speeding down the 101 freeway toward Topanga, we agreed in a conversation punctuated by nervous and slightly hysterical giggles that, whatever the consequences, hell would freeze over before either of us would send our kids to a school run by adults who believed that the key to pedagogical success was “better demographics.”

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So, am I drawing any kind of whacked out causal line between that foggy, one-sentence memory from 13 years ago, and anything about last month’s redhead kicking attacks?

No.

I don’t have any idea exactly what came into play in this case. Kids do stupid things.

But I do believe that when adults start lauding “better demographics” they have just placed themselves smack in the middle of mighty slippery, us-versus-them slope that generally does not lead to anywhere good.

(For the record, the school choice issue became moot when my son and Wendy’s daughter managed to get in to LAUSD’s Portola highly gifted magnet school, an institution that had its own imperfections (as most do)—but that, by the way, had far higher test scores that those of A.E. Wright, and a decidedly mixed demographic.)