Task Forces Examines Thurgood Marshall Incident

SFUSD hopes to involve all communities

By May Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

Hoping to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 11 melee between police officers and students at Thurgood Marshall High School, the superintendent of schools and the San Francisco Unified School District are working to create a task force that would address that incident and avert other ones from happening.

Gwen Chan, chief development officer for the SFUSD, said that what happened on Oct. 11 was an unfortunate affair. The district’s goal for the task force is to look into why the riot happened in the first place.

“The task force will look at Oct. 11 and at Marshall [High School] and the future,” Chan said. “We’ll look into what led up to the fight, how and why the fight got out of control during just a few hours.”

What started out as a student fistfight turned into a violent confrontation between some 60 San Francisco police officers and sheriff’s deputies in riot gear wielding batons and ambushing students. The dispute spilled onto the streets, where scores of students reported having injuries inflicted upon them by police.

According to school officials, the initial fight on that Friday morning started when several Asian Pacific American youths, who did not attend Marshall, got into a scuffle with a black Marshall student, off-campus. When a brother and a friend of one of the Marshall students involved in the confrontation arrived at the school to meet with the principal, another fight broke out.

Many parents and students have said that this incident was race-related — a manifestation of the tensions between APA and black students. But SFUSD Deputy General Counsel Victoria Li said SFUSD’s investigation showed no evidence of the riot being spurred by racial tensions.

“This wasn’t racially motivated, but about two students who were friends. After a drug-related affair turned sour, they turned on one another,” Li said.

Derek Toliver, the track and field coach at Marshall and also a father of a Marshall student said that in his five years of working at the school, he has not seen any visible signs of tensions among APA students and other non-APAs.

“Sure, you have your usual disagreements between students that occur in all high schools, but I see that happen between students of the same color and different colors,” Toliver said. “To my knowledge, I’ve never seen any tension between APAs and other students in the schoolyard.”

Toliver added that even after the incident, he has not seen an increase of fights, or factions among the students. Rather, he said he believes that students have become more united because they all feel that they were mistreated.

The district acknowledges the high percentage of APA students in the Bayview district school and is trying to work with the parents of these students to help them understand the situation and to assuage any apprehension.

As of Oct. 24, 35.5 percent of students at Marshall are Chinese, 1.1 percent are Southeast Asian, 0.9 percent are Samoan, 0.3 percent are Japanese and 0.2 percent are Korean.

Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said she spoke to a few APA parents and worked with organizations that sponsored small group discussions with APA parents who did not feel comfortable in large settings.

“Everyone wants to feel safe,” Ackerman said. “No one wants retaliation on any side. Mainly, the APA parents ask questions about what’s going on with the investigation. We listen to the needs of the APA parents who want to participate in small group settings.”

Ackerman said the school district has sent out notices to parents of Marshall students in various languages. To address the high percentage of minority students at Marshall, the school has set up a multilingual phone line, which includes Cantonese and Mandarin, informing parents about the ongoing investigation.

Li said that memos, translated into Chinese, have been sent out asking parents to participate and get involved in making the school a better environment. Letters, in Chinese, that inform APA parents of the nature of the investigation, and ways to get in touch with the district were also mailed out last week. The school has also set up a hotline in Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish, which parents and the public can call for information.

“The Community Task Force is currently conducting its investigation into this incident,” Li said. “We anticipate that our investigation will be completed no later than the first week of December.”

Four students and one teacher were arrested and charged in this incident. Charges against Thurgood Marshall English teacher Anthony Peebles, 29, have been dropped. Peebles was arrested for videotaping police actions during the riot. The four students still face juvenile court hearings.

Toliver said the police department was responsible for causing the riot because of the unnecessary and excessive force they used on the students.

“Never in the history of San Francisco has this happened before. You show me something like this, better yet, have the cops show me that this has happened before,” Toliver said.

Thurgood Marshall High School is home to more than 1,000 students. It opened in 1994 at a site off Silver Avenue, once home to Pelton Middle School and later to Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School. It is considered to be a high-performing academic school, and boasts a 92 percent graduation rate.

Reach May Chow at mchow@asianweek.com.