April 05, 2006, 6:18 a.m.
Left Behind from the Protests
It’s an education, back in Lockdown L.A. High.

By Maia Lazar

Wake up, go to school, and smell the refreshing scent of Lysol mixed with marijuana wafting through the halls — it’s how most of my school days begin. "Whew, bebe,” my about-to-retire first-period teacher said to a glazed-eyed student, “somebody's been smoking something!"

But, apart from the smell of marijuana, last Tuesday got off to an unusual start. Los Angeles public high schools were under lockdown to keep students from protesting against a new U.S. Senate bill on illegal immigration. The lockdown had nothing to do with the politics of immigration; the L.A. Unified School District loses $28 in state funds per student absence, so when 8,000 students walked out last Monday the district lost almost a quarter-million dollars just for that day. That’s a bunch of money, so they were pretty serious about this — we weren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom.

The lockdown meant that our first-period class — Chemistry — lasted two-and-a-half hours. My Chemistry teacher takes an apathetic approach to the class, so I spent most of the time talking to friends, sleeping, and finishing up my math homework. The boredom was unbearable. I had a lot of time to think, so that’s what I did. I thought about how, last November, our high school encouraged anti-Bush protesters by allowing students to ditch school. As a result, each of my classes was half empty.

On Monday, my English teacher asked our class how many of them were involved with the protests that brought half a million people to downtown L.A last Saturday. Of a class of 30-something, maybe five people raised their hands. Apparently the protests aren’t so popular with my classmates on the weekends.

Still Chicano pride is a big thing at my school, where 70 percent of the student body is Chicano, Latin American, Salvadoran (they seem especially proud of their heritage), Guatemalan, etc. The day before the lockdown, Monday, Hispanic boys were marching the halls and yelling at the top of their lungs "WALKOUT!!!" They seemed so enthused that I thought about adding immigration as in issue in the Political Debate Club. But maybe it’s too controversial, and we really do try to keep protests to a minimum during the debates.

My AP Econ teacher jokingly asked me if I were leading the walkouts. Knowing my political leanings, he mused over whether they would allow conservatives to protest. Maybe not, but it didn’t really matter. I’m as happy as any other teenager to get out of school, but I’m just not the protesting sort. And besides, I have a mixed opinion on the issue of illegal immigration. I’m against it, and we should certainly enforce our borders. But, at the same time, there are a lot of smart kids and future leaders who have come from illegal-immigrant parents or were illegal themselves and are helping to make America a better country.

Take, for instance, the substitute teacher we had for my English class last week. He was an interesting Salvadoran man who declared to us how much he loved yoga and George Orwell's 1984. He suggested that there was no spirituality in America today, or, for that matter, in his native land, El Salvador. Yoga, it seems, is the answer. He said he wanted to get a permanent job teaching yoga to high-school students, to share the "beautiful voices that wake in the body each day." Thirty minutes after he began his monologous biography, he mercifully allowed a few students to do book reports.

Right now I have to do some math and science homework, which I have left to the last minute due to my chronic senioritis. That's better than protesting the protests, which might cause another lockdown anyway.

— Maia Lazar is a senior at a Los Angeles public high school.

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