Controversial ‘promposals’ at Los Gatos inspire district to take action against racism

Three months ago, Los Gatos High experienced two racially charged prom askings: One student wore blackface to ask a girl to senior prom; the other used a racial slur on a prom poster that referenced lynching.

In response, district officials have refocused efforts to improve community-wide racial sensitivity, hiring Epoch Education, a company that offers consulting and other resources on cultural and racial sensitivity, to facilitate training sessions for Los Gatos and Saratoga High. Leadership students from both schools attended their first joint meeting on Sept. 14.

“It was really great,” said senior Kyle Wang, who attended the first meeting along with six other SHS Leadership class students. “We were able to really sit down and discuss many of the issues regarding racial and cultural sensitivity that still affect our community today.”

After a larger lecture and discussion session in which participants continued their training in cultural sensitivity, each school’s participants split off into smaller groups to focus on school-specific planning.

For Saratoga High’s representatives, discussion centered around the ongoing racial interpretation of academics and fostering a community of inclusion. Having decided on three major “themes” for the 2017-18 school year, a committee has been formed with  staff members, students and administrators from both schools and .is now drafting a mission statement.

“Obviously, race and self-separation are still very, very sensitive issues on campus, and the situation has undoubtedly improved over the years,” Wang said. “But even at Saratoga High — one of the more culturally aware campuses — I think there’s always room for further growth.”  

Prior to the joint meeting, Epoch hosted workshops at Los Gatos on Aug. 21 and Saratoga on Aug. 22. All 60 Leadership students attended the workshop, participating in a series of activities that sought to train them on the tenets of Critical Race Theory, a framework that was introduced in 1995 and is used to examine and challenge the ways racism impact social structures.

“We did many activities that highlighted the racial differences in today’s world,” sophomore Timothy Yoon said. “The teacher demonstrated how race separates us in a high school setting.”

Yoon thinks one of the main issues that separate students in Saratoga is their focus academic achievement — an area which the joint Los Gatos-Saratoga committee has now sought to address.

Nonetheless, overt racism seldom exists on campus, sophomore Rohan Rao said. Rao, who moved to Saratoga from Texas a few years ago, said that the absence of direct discrimination was one of the largest differences he noticed at first.

Having come here from Houston, Rao found the Bay Area “very welcoming” in contrast to his former hometown, where there were “a decent amount of ignorant people.”

Rao and Yoon said they liked the ongoing efforts to better understand and promote diversity.

Nevertheless, both objected to some parts of the training.

“A lot of us [in Leadership] think it focused a bit too much on white privilege, which is not that prevalent in our school,” Yoon said. “They should have focused more on the academic differences that separate the groups at our school.”

As the district plans on moving forward with fostering a race-sensitive environment at both Los Gatos and Saratoga,  Epoch will continue to host workshops with smaller groups of Leadership students, administrators and staff from both schools.

“We’re not expecting a change overnight,” Wang said, “but we genuinely think that we’ll be able to make things better.”