El Sereno charter school teams up with Chinese campuses

A charter school in El Sereno took a small step this week toward putting its feud with talk radio behind it. Academia Semillas del Pueblo became perhaps the first Los Angeles campus to establish sister-school relationships in China, a conscious effort to bring a less divisive issue to the fore.

In the picture at left, Zhang Yun, China’s consul general in Los Angeles, receives a gift bag from student dancers wearing Aztec headdresses at Academia Semillas.

Academia Semillas is best known for being accused of preaching “anti-American” values, of allegedly celebrating indigenous cultures as superior to that which conquered them. It made for great talk radio fodder.

The Semillas founders have denied any improprieties in their curriculum, which, they say, is fundamentally based on California’s academic standards. 

Now Semillas, a kindergarten-through-eighth grade school with 310 students, is reaching out to a larger audience, both here and abroad, with its sister-school agreements with the Guanqumen Middle and the Gexinli Elementary schools in China.

The link was formally recognized during an outdoor celebration Monday in the campus’ small parking lot-turned-recreation area. In the short run, most of the communication will be online, but school co-founder Marcos Aguilar said an organization has come forward with a pledge to help sponsor trips for a dozen students to travel to China for intensive language study during the summer. Aguilar will use proceeds from school fund-raisers to offset the rest of the cost.

On Monday, 13 intrepid student dancers, each clad in an Aztec huipilli (blouse) and copilli (feather headdress), braved unseasonable heat on the baking asphalt to kick and spin and shake the chachayotl noisemakers wrapped around their calves -- all to the delight of Zhang Yun, China’s consul general in Los Angeles. He said it is the first sister-school relationship he knows of involving China and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

This partnership makes sense partly because Semillas has taught students some Mandarin since its inception in 2002. The school also conducts lessons in English, Spanish and Nahuatl, the native Aztec language.

Charter schools are independently-run public schools that do not have to follow some district and state mandates.

Aguilar laid the groundwork for the China linkage during his trip there last July. The experience, he said, was something of an education for him. The teachers' lounge at the middle school was beyond anything he’d seen stateside -- with a piano, a stage, a nonalcoholic wet bar and a workout room. The teachers also had a say in the school’s governance and culture. On the other hand, a teacher there told Aguilar that they had to compete with each other to keep their jobs: Achieving stellar student performance was mandatory. This teacher found the situation consistently stressful.

Academic performance on standardized tests has become more of a focus at Semillas in the last couple of years. It was a matter of survival. The school district nearly shut Semillas down because of low test scores.

The charter school narrowly won a reprieve after pressuring the school board with raucous shows of support from both its families and from community leaders. The school also argued that students in its multilingual curriculum were at an initial disadvantage on tests given in English. The school offered some evidence that its older students are catching up. And last year the school’s overall score made a significant jump, although it’s still low.

This week, teachers are working with students on practice tests and pumping up test-taking spirit through such activities as Pajama Day and Crazy Hair Day.

What could be more traditionally American than that?

Which isn’t to say the school has sacrificed its indigenous or activist bent.

The ceremony was replete with the pounding of the rhythmic huehuetl drums and the burning of copal incense, a prized Mexican sap that is not surrendered by the tree until it reaches 500 years of age, said the school's co-founder and principal, Minnie Ferguson.

The aromatic smoke is intended to purify, to bring past and present together through the long life of the tree, and to connect humanity to the earth, she added.

“When the children find an insect in the school, they don’t want to kill it,” said Erica Villarreal, a parent and the school's International Baccalaureate coordinator. “They want to let it go. The energy of the school is one of respect for children, one of love for children. And it’s about using skills to change the world, picking causes that students would like to change as leaders: homelessness, graffiti, war or child poverty.”

-- Howard Blume

Photo courtesy of Academia Semillas