L.A World Can’t Wait Youth Organizers’ first- hand accounts of the
authorities’ unrelenting attempts to crush this burgeoning student
movement and the battle shaping up around L.A High School organizer
Geovany Serrano. Geovany has been forced to wear an electronic
monitoring bracelet around his ankle and has been transferred to a
different high school. Read the full article covering the ongoing
resistance to the High School students under attack and contact info
for Belmont High’s Principal to demand: Bush Must Go, Geovany Must
Stay, No Reprisal Against the Students, Drop Geovany’s Bogus Charges!
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In the
run-up to November 2nd, a day that will go down in history as the
Beginning of the End of the Bush Regime, Belmont
High School student Geovany Serrano
took up the call from The World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime! in a big
way. His fellow students have since attested to the vital leading role he
played in organizing students for the N2 walkouts.
One student said that, thanks to
Geovany’s bold efforts, she observed a surprising and uplifting scene at
nutrition one day. During the break, everywhere she looked, all the students
were reading the flyer and getting into it. This was truly an inspiring
sight(students learning about the world and taking up the battle to change the
course of history.
The Authorities Move
to Stop the Movement
On November
1st, school officials decided to do something about this ‘problem'(namely,
a flowering of critical thought and resistance to the Bush program. The campus
police viciously attacked Geovany for distributing WCW flyers and stickers,
taking him down and dousing his head with pepper spray. One student said that,
as a number of police had converged on the scene very quickly, the police moved
immediately to clear out any potential witnesses from the ‘rotunda’ on campus
where this grim scene of police brutality went down. A teacher at Belmont
said that the main officer involved is known to be ‘pushy’ with the students.
Here I’ll just add that these cops
are from the Ramparts Division(and anybody who knows anything about brazen
police brutality and fabrication of police reports knows that Ramparts is at
the head of the class. Should we ‘take their word’ on what happened there, as
the school authorities so unquestioningly(and, frankly, vengefully(have? HELL
NO! We intend to defeat the bogus, and quite serious, criminal charges the
police have put on him! We won’t let them flip reality on its head, painting
Geovany as a criminal, when the real criminals in the world, those comprising the
Bush Regime, are moving this society each day closer to a hateful, Christian
fundamentalist theocracy that wages unending war and commits unspeakable
atrocities against the people of the world!
Beyond the criminal charges being
pressed against Geo, the school suspended him for at least 2 days and
threatened him with expulsion or an ‘Opportunity Transfer (OT)’ where he’d be
sent to another school within the LA Unified School District (LAUSD).
The Students Stay
Strong in the Face of Repression
Despite their efforts to crush this
burgeoning student movement, dozens of determined students from Belmont High
took part in the November 2nd walkouts and marched to the Alvarado
& Wilshire (McArthur Park)
convergence and rally point! One student excitedly reported that a supportive
teacher said that almost all of his classes were empty throughout the day.
As the festivities were getting
underway at McArthur Park
(where hundreds of brave students from all across LA celebrated, listening to
music and speeches), Geovany and his mother came by in a police car, returning
home from the juvenile detention facility where he’d been booked. He was made
to wear an electronic monitoring anklet and his home telephone was rigged with
an electronic surveillance box that squaks ‘hang up the phone’ when Geovany’s
been on the phone for any period of time. (As an aside, his mom is so
repulsed(and scared(by this phone box that she keeps it hidden in a drawer and
out of sight!)
He was able to see the protests
underway as he went by and he raised a fist in salute to the courageous
students in the park. He discovered when he got home that he was able to see
the action in the park from his building and he took great heart in this
inspiring sight and wished he could be out there.
Further Reprisals
Against the Students
When
students returned to Belmont High on November 3rd, those who had
participated in the walkout were called to the office to get a re-admit slip to
their classes. When they got there, police officers were waiting and wrote them
truancy tickets! Here we can see the sickening way in which the school
officials and police work hand-in-glove to criminalize and punish these
students.
On Friday, Nov. 4th Geo
had a juvenile court hearing to set a pre-plea court date and to officially
tell him what charges are being pressed against him. He was also assigned a
public defender. He was hit with heavy charges and he was given a pre-plea
court date of
2005
arrest in the meantime, citing his exemplary status as a student with terrific
grades and impeccable attendance and the fact that this was his first contact
with law enforcement, but he was denied.
The Fight for the
Future Rages On
On Monday,
Nov. 7th the Assistant Principal called for a meeting with Geovany
and his mother to discuss the punitive measures that the school would be taking
against him. The local World Can’t Wait! youth and student committee mobilized
to rally students and others to take up Geo’s defense and demand that he not be
punished for building a student movement to Drive Out the Bush Regime. Some of
the students had heard about his situation and others were just learning for
the first time, but all were totally outraged!
By this time, another lawyer had
stepped forward to fight on Geo’s side and one of his former teachers came to
speak on his behalf. Additionally, several of the students we spoke to outside
of the school left their classes and came to the principal’s office to voice
their support. They said that what the school authorities and police are doing
to Geo and accusing him of is complete bullshit. In the meeting, the assistant
principal and campus security and police had a hard time getting their story
together. One thing that marked the whole proceedings, from their standpoint,
was the automatic assumption of Geo’s guilt.
They put forward as the
unquestionable truth that Geo had initiated this whole incident, but later
admitted that the officers physically detained Geo, themselves initiating the contact.
They claimed that they thought Geo might not have been a student and thus went
after him. But what they didn’t speak to(and what has become clear in this and
other cases around LAUSD, and the country(is that this was a blatant attempt to
silence the political (constitutionally protected) free speech rights of
students. Another student reported that he and his friends admired Geo’s
boldness in fighting for this cause because they had been threatened by the
campus police for wearing the Resist or Die! stickers. But Geo would not let
them intimidate him from doing what he knew was right!
The school officials refused to
budge from their position and insisted that an Opportunity Transfer be imposed
on Geo. Despite the climate of persecution he faced at Belmont,
Geo wants to continue going to school there. And we are determined that this OT
be overturned! (Oh, here’s an additional outrage: during the meeting, the
school officials actually claimed that the officer who assaulted Geo was
‘fearful’ of Geo’s return, and therefore, Geo has to go! How about shipping out
the brutal police who beat up and pepper spray the students(not their victims?!
The Students Strike
Back
On
Tuesday, Nov. 8th a crew of World Can’t Wait youth & student
organizers went out to Belmont High at
By this time, the word about Geo had spread pretty far and we put out the
slogan: ‘Bush Must Go! Geovany Must Stay!’ We took a bullhorn, WCW posters,
leaflets and stickers and we pulled together a mass of about 30 students on the
spot out in front of the main entrance to the school who were defiantly
chanting this slogan. School security and officials soon emerged, yelling at
the growing mass of student resisters, ‘Don’t let them use you!’ and telling
some of us organizers that ‘These students don’t know anything about what’s
going on in the world!’
One of the school deans came out
with a video camera and was intimidating the students with penalties, saying
‘we know who you are.’ The students were anything but deterred! The first bell
rang at
were 40 or so students who decided that this was more important than going to
class. After a while some LAPD showed up and tried to tell us that we were
disrupting classes and that they would have to arrest us if we continued. We
said, ‘good, the classes should be disrupted since the Bush Regime is
disrupting the future of the planet and its inhabitants.’ Overhead, students
poked their heads and fists out of classroom windows to show their solidarity
with the protest.
We continued to rally in front of
the school for a while longer and then we began marching around the campus
grounds, calling on students to, ‘Join Us! Join Us!’ and ‘Outta your class and
into the streets! The World Can’t Wait!’ and, of course ‘Bush Must Go! Geovany
Must Stay!’ continued to set the tone for the day. On a couple of occasions, as
we marched around the campus, students ran to the gates that held them in and
scaled them to join us. Everybody cheered triumphantly!
It just so happened that one of the
local ACLU offices is located in close proximity to Belmont,
so we polled students to see if they wanted to march over there. We explained
that the ACLU had yet to take up the defense of the students who walked out on
Nov. 2nd and that we wanted to go make as compelling a case as
possible for them to take this up urgently(and what better way to do it than
for the students themselves to march to the offices and demand their
assistance?!! The students were all for it!
When we got to the ACLU they said
that they were ‘too busy’ to take this up and instead referred us to some other
lawyers! It turned out that one of the students is a card-carrying member of
the ACLU and he (among others) was outraged at their response. (Since then,
he’s received a call from someone at the ACLU who is interested in learning
more about Geo’s case, based on a written report he submitted that day at the
office.) We left the office a little disappointed, but still determined to keep
marching.
From there, we did another route around
the campus and more students came to join us. There was even an off-track
teacher from Belmont who hooked up with us. He also had connections at the
local Pacifica station and got some
of the students on the air for the
news. We wanted to get the word out more broadly, so we decided to march
downtown to the Business Magnet
High School there. This was another
school where N2 walkouts had taken place.
When we got there, escorted by
legions of police cruisers along the way, the school had been sealed off and
all we could see was a handful of school officials who had come outside to
smirk at us. We chanted as loud as we could, but the students either couldn’t
hear us or were being kept from joining us. We got lots of love from the
passing cars, pumping fists and honking horns, and many people hurriedly passed
donations out their windows when we took donation cans to them.
Finally, we decided to march back
to Belmont. Students were clearly
being kept from exiting the school grounds by lockdown and by police
intimidation. One aide from the campus, who also volunteers with the local Pacifica
station was arrested by the LAPD because he had been going in and out of the
school to talk to students. He had joined the march earlier and got taken by
the police when he strayed from the crowd. The students took the street and
surrounded the car, chanting ‘Let him go! Let him go!’ but it was too late.
Before we finished, we asked
students what they thought the next step should be. Some thought there should
be a campus group that takes this up and others said that they wanted to do
this every day until Geo’s let back onto campus. We decided to break up and
head out for the day. Students agreed that not returning to school for the rest
of the day was the best idea. So we all walked down to a nearby major
intersection and made sure that everyone had friends to walk with. Then
everyone went their separate ways. We later learned that a group of the
students went to a local restaurant to eat lunch and were swarmed with police
who came screeching up in their cars and stormed the restaurant. The students
were handcuffed and taken back to school, where they were ticketed!
The Struggle
Continues
In the wake
of the big day of protest on Tuesday, Geo received a letter from the Assistant
Principal stating that he is entitled to an appeals process for the OT, but
that the Assistant Principal would not hear it. Instead, he referred him to a
LAUSD board member. We will be taking up this battle, to get Geo fully
reinstated at Belmont. In the
meantime, beginning on Wednesday, Geo started taking classes at Marshall High
(another school where students walked out on the 2nd!). On his first
day there, the principal told him that, ‘you won’t be passing out any flyers
here.'(!!!) On Thursday, he wasn’t allowed into school there because he brought
a water bill, and not a gas bill, as proof of residence.
We returned
to Belmont on Wednesday and
Thursday and found that the school had been converted into a full-fledged
prison. There were anywhere between 6 and 10 police cruisers parked directly in
front of the school and another 3 or 4 actively patrolling the periphery. They
stepped up their threats against both the organizers and the students. There
were many students who wanted to walk out, but were thwarted at every turn.
Organizers were threatened with tickets for ‘loitering’ and told (LIES) that
they weren’t allowed to pass out leaflets to the students.
On
Thursday, one of the WCW organizers was arrested when they were IDed and found
to have a minor warrant. This is complete bullshit because the police had no
right to stop them in the first place! When they ran the ID checks on the
organizers, they told them that they’re ‘not allowed to pass out pornography to
the students’! The police dragged this whole process out as long as they could
to keep the organizers from interacting with the students. After they arrested
and hauled off one organizer, they told another that they had to leave and that
if they were seen around the campus again, they would be arrested on-sight!
The
students are beside themselves about this whole situation and determined to
take this struggle to a whole other level. Everyone reading this should be
outraged, too! Call the school officials listed below (and also contacts in the
media, the academic and legal communities and beyond) and make the following
demands:
BUSH MUST GO!
GEOVANY MUST STAY!
NO REPRISALS AGAINST
THE STUDENTS!
DROP GEOVANY’S BOGUS
CRIMINAL CHARGES!
Call School Principal Gary Yoshinobu at: PHONE – (213)
250-0244, FAX – (213) 250-9706 or email: gary.yoshinobu@lausd.net