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Billed as crime-ridden, racially divided and
led by a maverick principal, Canyon Springs High School has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. But is the school as bad as its reputation?
THE QUAD
“This is where the trouble usually happens,” Canyon Springs High School Principal Ronan Matthew says as the bell sounds for lunchtime, unleashing students into the quad. If you’re not used to it, the mass of teenage humanity can overpower your senses. The coagulating scent of perfume and cologne. The kaleidoscope of fashion; yellows, pinks and fuschias—and that’s just the young men. Hundreds of mouths talking. Thousands of legs moving. Staying out of the way and off someone else’s feet requires balletic agility; discerning what’s being said, a scientist’s focus. Vernacular isn’t the problem so much as a gaggle of still-maturing voices melding into a shrill harmony, which makes it nearly impossible to isolate just one conversation. Unless, that is, someone is yelling.
Someone is.
A girl. Short. Of nondescript ethnicity. Mouth spewing enough invective for two sailors. She’s got issues with someone. Who isn’t immediately apparent. Seeing someone so small talk so big is, well, kind of funny. Such bravura. But it’s hard to tell if she’s posturing or really serious about whipping somebody’s ass, especially since she pipes down when a snooping hall monitor encroaches.
If trouble’s going to erupt at Canyon Springs, chances are it’ll happen here and around this time. Should rivals want to settle a score, and do it gladiator-style, in front of a big crowd for maximum effect, the quad is their Roman Colosseum.
“Kids like to fight here,” says the 55-year-old Matthew, in his 30th year in the Clark County School District, the last 13 spent as a principal (Western and Cheyenne before this). “But kids fighting is not the real issue; that happens at every school. The real issue is everyone running to see the fight and then [staff] trying to get through the crowd to the people who are actually fighting. The story gets out in the media that there’s a big fight at Canyon Springs with a hundred students involved when it was only a few. I tell the students the media isn’t out to get us. The media is doing its job. We’re the ones who have to stop this behavior.”
Because of several high-profile incidents, Canyon Springs has developed (unfairly, some say) a reputation as an unruly campus, a place where test scores lag, decorum is on hiatus and you matriculate (or work) at your peril. Certainly no local high school has grabbed more headlines for the wrong reasons in recent years:
January 24, 2008: Forty-one-year-old Alicia Mallard brings an unloaded gun to scare Canyon Springs students who’d fought with her daughter.
December 12, 2007: Police use pepper spray to quell a fight between black and Hispanic students in the school cafeteria.
April 12, 2007: A 17-year-old student is arrested for bringing a loaded .45-caliber handgun to class.
March 9, 2007: School police arrest a 16-year-old boy caught with a loaded .25-caliber gun as he registers for classes.
September 21, 2006: Then-student Teren Evans opens fire on a bus full of students. He’s serving four to 12 years in prison.
Any incident of school-related crime is tragic and worrisome in and of itself, given fears of retaliation and copycat crimes (see Columbine, Virginia Tech, etc.). What irks Matthew about Canyon Springs’ coverage is the ensuing fallout. Each incident bolsters negative perceptions about his school. Suddenly Canyon Springs is: a racial powder-keg (tiffs between Hispanic and black students; the ethnic groups compose 86 percent of the student population); unsafe (the gun arrests); a holding pen for underachievers and thugs (on the academic watch list; 80 recommendations for expulsion in 2006-07; an alleged gang hub). To give credence to the headlines and give ear to the scuttlebutt, he says, demonizes the 2,700 students who go to class and obey the rules and the dedicated faculty working everyday to give them a good education.
“Some things have happened, yes, but there are also instances where the media has gotten it wrong,” Matthew says. “One TV station reported that a police helicopter was circling the school. The helicopter actually belonged to the Environmental Protection Agency. These types of things make us look even worse.”
After the Evans shooting in 2006, Matthew began pushing for metal detectors. Having worked at Eldorado High in 1990 when a gunman fatally shot Donnie Lee Bolden in the cafeteria, he wonders if the machines could’ve prevented tragedy. Over the years and at risk to himself, he’s physically pulled guns off of students. Though he offered to find ways to pay for the detectors at Canyon Springs, his request has been mired in bureaucracy.
Matthew wants to believe the slow-moving nature of change in a 300,000-student school district is why his pleas have gone unanswered. That he’s not being penalized for three decades of vocal criticism of school leaders and district policies, for branding people as racists, for uncovering one of the district’s biggest scandals—blowing the whistle on former schools athletic director Larry McKay’s theft of school funds. That his mouth, long his most potent weapon, hasn’t become his—and Canyon Springs’—biggest liability.
More than anything, he doesn’t want another student, especially at Canyon Springs, to meet Bolden’s fate.
PERCEPTION
Violence is quickly becoming the narrative of the 2007-08 academic year. A sad recap: Palo Verde freshman Christopher Privett is slain on February 15 as he walks home with friends. Teens Gerald Davidson and Ezekial Williams are facing murder charges. Less than a week later, Bonanza High students run for cover as a gunman shoots a man he’s scuffling with. On February 25, Western High student Victor Bravo is shot near Gibson Middle School. Sixteen-year-old Tevin O’Neal, a fellow Western student, is nabbed in connection with the shooting. A day later, school police catch a 19-year-old man with a gun near Clark High. Last Thursday, police pull over a suspicious car near Chaparral High and find a shotgun and ammunition. Two of the three people arrested are Chaparral students.
Save for, perhaps, Western—in the news recently for the Bravo shooting—none of the schools linked to recent violence has Canyon Springs’ reputation. None of those other schools is in North Las Vegas, a city in the midst of its own image rehab. Palo Verde is in Summerlin, and Bonanza and Chaparral are in older parts of town, areas seen as immune to the kind of ills endemic to urban schools.
So far as Clark County Education Association President Mary Ella Holloway knows, none of the teacher’s union’s 13,000-plus members has told her anything negative about Canyon Springs.
It’s a different story for security expert Ken Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Service. He was talking with a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter for a story about school safety when Canyon Springs popped in his head. “I know about the school. But I only know about Canyon Springs because I read up on this type of stuff every day, and it’s been in the news quite a bit.”
The descriptor that popped up most in a query of nearly a dozen students from Legacy, Western, Advanced Technologies Academy and Cheyenne about Canyon Springs was “ghetto.” Harsher adjectives—a bit of it Canyon Springs-specific; some of it tinged with racism and geographic elitism; much of it lamenting recent school-related violence—appear on newspaper comment sections and education-related blogs.
The North Las Vegas neighborhood surrounding the school is anything but ghetto. Newish subdivisions resembling the dainty-looking, sappily promoted subdivisions you see on billboards lie to the south and west of the school, which sits at the northwest corner of Alexander and North Fifth Street, a block south of Craig Road. Nearby environs pay homage to Northtown’s industrial roots: Nearby are the Potlatch Corp paper-manufacturing plant and Republic Services’ headquarters. Nope, no war zone here.
Student posts on greatschools.net present conflicting pictures of Canyon Springs: It’s both a good school with a few really bad apples and a campus in peril.
“Canyon Springs has its rough spots, but so do most other Clark County schools, believe me.”
“I find the school to be excellent! Canyon has the same problems that other schools in the Valley have. Yet, due to its diverse student population, it is a convenient target to criticize. What people do not recognize is that Canyon Springs has more benefits than drawbacks.”
“As a student that attends Canyon Springs and in the magnet program I feel as though the program is definitely falling apart. I am not learning as much as I should be, especially in my magnet class. I even feel that I could get taught better from an online class than at this school.”
“This school is not safe anymore. There are constant fights. But the magnet program is amazing. It really helps students learn about law and leadership.”
Maybe this is a first: We’ve heard about good schools in bad neighborhoods. Could Canyon Springs be a bad school in a good neighborhood?
REALITY?
“Capt. [Chris] Larotonda met with the principal at Canyon Springs High School. They were having an inordinate amount of violence at/or near school grounds. School District police are stationed at the high school. A solution to some of this violence at Cheyenne and Canyon Springs High School was to assign officers on an overtime basis to attend the dance to show police presence to dissuade any problems. This seemed to work. Another solution was to have officers park in front of Canyon Springs and walk through the corridor area to, again, show police presence to the students.”
–Minutes of the North Las Vegas police’s October 30, 2006 NLVPD Community Council meeting
On the southeast wall of the administration office, just behind the receptionist’s desk, is a poster outlining “What You Can Expect” at Canyon Springs. The fifth item on the list: “[You can expect] … a school that is safe, clean and inviting.” The irony might be amusing were it not for the school’s recent past.
Opened for the 2003-04 academic year, Canyon Springs looks like a college in miniature, two stories of brick-and-mortar interconnectedness and walkability. The campus is clean and, judging by first impressions, orderly. No students wandering hallways without passes. Parents dropping in for student-teacher conference. Lots of visitors.
Nary a day goes by when outsiders aren’t on campus—professionals, retirees and volunteers regularly speak to students. This morning, on the northeast side of the campus, it’s a middle-aged black man astride a large white horse. He beckons students to pet the animal. Some have never come this close to a steed, so they flinch when it grumbles. Through two hallways and in a classroom is the horseman’s cohort, a fellow member of the local chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers. He’s talking about the group’s origins as a colonial fighting force of former slaves and free blacks. Some students in the packed classroom soak up the lesson. Others sneak looks at their cell phones.
Over near the 500 Hall, court is in session. Literally. In a room arrayed like actual chambers—judge’s bench, dais, plaintiffs’ and defendants’ quarters, seating for jurists, bailiff and the audience—Leadership and Law Preparatory Academy students participate in a mock civil case of a student charged with academic laziness. It’s the only facility of its type at a high school west of the Mississippi, Matthew says, and might be the nation’s first prep courtroom. A real case involving a pedestrian accident was held last year, the first time a civil trial’s been held on an American high school campus.
Student command of legalese and etiquette is impressive. Motion. Objection. Sustained. Your honor, may I approach the bench? John T. Jones Jr., a deputy district attorney in the juvenile division in the Office of the District Attorney, presides over the hearing, coaching when necessary. I ask a student for a quick case summary: “The defense is losing. The defense is having a hard time justifying why their client didn’t pay attention in class.”
In his day job with the DA, Jones admits seeing more Canyon Springs students than he’d like to. “I know some of their probation officers.”
Jones bangs the gavel and recesses the trial to explain some bit of procedural minutiae. It’s one of three cases he’ll mock-judge that day, including a hit-and-run (a motorist rammed a bicyclist) and a parent suing the school for not keeping steroids off campus. This a homecoming for him. Fresh from the Indiana School of Law and armed with a teaching credential—obtained through that state’s one-year Transition to Teach program—he followed his mother and sisters into education. He applied at Canyon Springs, teaching Fundamentals of Law and Constitutional Law when the school opened. “Canyon Springs didn’t have a bad reputation because it was a new school, but I did know about the demographics going in, that many of these students came from a lower socioeconomic status, so I knew what I was getting into,” he says.
Not everyone thrives in such an environment, he says. Translation: It can be difficult for white teachers on a campus that’s 86 percent minority and where most of the students are from tough backgrounds. Bridging cultural gaps can be tricky. Black parents of students in the district have complained that teachers are too quick to discipline their children and routinely mislabel behavior problems as learning disorders. “I grew up in Indiana. I came from a small town, and it wasn’t very diverse. People are going to be different and that’s not right or wrong. But some teachers can’t adjust. I did. I love the school.”
Such hosannas aren’t the norm, according to Academy Coordinator Zaid Haddad.
“Oooh,” said in mock-sad tone—this is the usual response when Haddad tells colleagues where he works. District staff are the worst. On recruiting trips for the Academy, he’s heard people say students get shot at Canyon Springs, despite the fact that no such thing has ever happened.
Were things that bad, he says, more than 1,000 students wouldn’t have applied for the 150 Academy spots available in 2008-09. Nor would collegians from UNLV’s Boyd School of Law or members of the State Bar of Nevada regularly come to campus to teach, mentor, participate in mock trials and train students for leadership. “Even the kids that give us a bad name,” Haddad says, “they only act up once in a blue moon.
“Sometimes off-campus and neighborhood stuff spills into the high school and Canyon Springs gets blamed. You have to realize, we’re dealing with emotional teenagers. Other schools have the same problems we have. They found a gun at Arbor View, but you don’t hear about that. It gets swept under the rug. But if something happens here, everybody knows about it. It’s not fair.”
•••••
Whether you call it a trend or not, it certainly qualifies as troublesome: racism as a running (if marginal) theme in recent violence. Black-Hispanic run-ins have occurred at Canyon Springs, Desert Pines and Western. Holloway has heard about the tensions: “Neighborhoods are changing, and that could be the cause of some of it.”
From his office, where a framed portrait, “The Golden Rule,” by Norman Rockwell, hangs, Matthew has an expansive view of the quad. Able to see all the action. During our conversation, he keeps his head on swivel and ears alert, snapping it when he hears a loud voice or cursing.
Amid the organized chaos of lunchtime at Canyon Springs, some patterns emerge, most notably a cliquishness that falls along racial lines: groups of black students (by the stairs and the administration office); Hispanics (middle of the quad); other students (whites, Asian) interspersed. On the surface, there’s nothing ominous about the divisions, nothing to indicate this lunch period is any different from the several dozen taking place around the Valley at the same time. Intermingling does occur. Before I finish the question, Matthew dispels the notion. “We don’t have a race problem. We didn’t have racial tension until this year. The tension sparked after that shooting. I hope it’s not a trend.”
On December 12, a day after gunmen shot six students (four of whom went to nearby Mojave High) at a bus stop a mile to the east of Canyon Springs, black and Hispanic students at the school fought in the cafeteria, stopping only after police unleashed pepper spray.
That morning, sensing tension, Matthew went on the school’s closed-circuit television program and made a plea: “Students, for years we have had no racial problems on this campus. It is my intention to keep it that way. We must have respect and understanding for each other regardless of race. Only ignorant people would want to hurt someone because he is of a particular race.”
As adamant as Matthew is about race being mostly a nonissue, he’s convinced that many of Canyon Springs’ problems stem from another source: gangs. He disdainfully mentions the cliques by name. Walk the hallways, check bathroom stalls or just chill in the parking lot and you can hear the names—violent hybrid outfits (Squad Up, The Wood) that have law-enforcement agencies scrambling. If they have demarcated turf on campus, it’s not overtly apparent: Tags are few and between. The handwritten scrawls here and there are easily covered by paint.
A brick wall across the street bears witness to the ever-present specter of gang culture. Someone has spray-painted “DSC 103”—an acronym for young members of the Donna Street Crips—in squiggly letters in blue, the North Las Vegas outfit’s trademark colors. Matthew promises to have it down in a day or so.
Aside from the obvious reasons—the danger they cause—Matthew despises gangs because, in some cases, he not only knows some of the troublemakers, but also their families. It’s a byproduct of his tenure in the district and principal stints at Western and Cheyenne, both purported to have blocs of students claiming gang ties. “If you’re a gang member and causing trouble, I will get you out of here.”
Matthew doesn’t say it, but the conviction is his voice is gives it away: Gangs are his bane. They might be Canyon Springs’ single toughest problem; one that must be monitored constantly, lest tensions mount and insults, or worse, begin to fly.
True to his word, the graffiti is gone the next day.
•••••
Pretty soon Tom Rizzo will need more wall space. A (growing) number of regional and national awards hang on the wall outside his office, testament to the top-tier work done by his broadcast-journalism students. Where the woodshop would be sits a modern television studio that’s the envy of local prep programs and even a few professional newsrooms, Rizzo says. When Matthew wanted to quell racial tension a day after the bus-stop shooting, he went on the school’s TV station. “Everything here is digital, and we can broadcast from anywhere on campus.”
On one visit, students are wrapping up the day’s broadcast of Inside Canyon Springs. Previous episodes play on computer monitors in the control room. (The latest, Episode No. 5, highlights all the community-service activities students engage in—volunteering at the Boys & Girls Club and painting fences, to name a few.) During another visit, Demetrius Pipkin and Trevor Royer man all equipment in the computer room. They play clips of newscasts and a video chronicle of the school band’s trip to London.
As journalists, nothing irks Pipkin and Royer more than their school’s bad reputation. Says Pipkin: “The media has already identified Canyon Springs as a place where bad things happen. So the media pays attention to us more so than other schools.”
Adds Royer: “Our reputation is not deserved. We’ve had problems that got media attention and deserved media attention. And now, suddenly, we’re a bad school. But you don’t ever hear about the guns found at other schools. Everybody waits for something to happen at Canyon Springs. This is our way of changing perceptions. We know we have a great school. We’ve got problems, but we have many more positive things going on than we have problems.”
DANGER
“It’s sad what happened at Palo Verde,” Matthew says of Privett’s death. “We have to change the way we protect campuses.”
In an October 10, 2006, letter to his supervisor, Associate Superintendent of Superintendent Schools Karlene McCormick-Lee, Matthew asked for metal detectors. Along with principals from Legacy and Cheyenne, whose schools were beset by shootings after football games, he got them installed at athletic events. The next logical step would’ve been incorporating them on a trial basis to gauge their effectiveness. To remove any excuses, he even offered to raise the money to buy them, only to have school police question the economic feasibility of acquiring the machines.
McCormick-Lee failed to return calls seeking comment. In an e-mailed statement to the Weekly, school board trustee Ruth Johnson, whose district includes Canyon Springs, says: “The district reviewed these safety issues over the last few months and determined that there are many other productive means to creating a safe campus. The district has issued a position on metal detectors and that position has not changed to my knowledge. In terms of school security, we look first and foremost to the proactive leadership of administrators on campus and we look especially to our principal and his staff to create a environment where students are learning and engaged in positive activities.”
School police spokesman Ken Young says it’s not as easy as buying the equipment, setting it up and catching knife-wielders and gun-toters. Schools have multiple entrances, which defeats the purpose of standard detectors at the front door. He says they present personnel issues, too: Campuses would need more cops (every high school has two on site), counselors and hall monitors.
Edward Goldman, associate superintendent for discipline, emits a knowing laugh—he’s heard this before. “It’s BS,” he says. He concedes that schools aren’t built for security and that there’s little anyone can do to stop a determined student from sneaking a weapon on campus. Used properly, he says, metal detectors can be effective deterrents. “Maybe the student doesn’t sneak a knife, brass knuckles or gun into his or her backpack if they’re there.”
Ten months ago, Goldman visited Edison High, perhaps Philadelphia’s worst school. Roving gangs attacked students as they walked home, prompting parents to beg the school district to intervene. What Goldman saw was a school fortified like the Green Zone in Iraq: cops block streets to prevent drive-bys; students go through metal detectors; their bags run through screening machines. A full-time force of parents serves as eyes and ears. The system works. “And it doesn’t take three hours to get kids in. Things move very quickly. You can get the kind [of metal detectors] where belts and coins won’t set them off. And you can do it without hiring a lot of people. This is not a personnel issue at all.”
And now for some numbers. First from Goldman’s office: Canyon Springs had 29 recommendations for expulsions in the fall semester, that’s fewer than Basic High in Henderson (34), Del Sol (36), Bonanza (53), Cimarron-Memorial (30) and Shadow Ridge (40), among others. And from school police: Cops fielded 303 calls for service at Canyon Springs from September 1 to February. (Calls for service range from police responding to fights to such innocuous things as helping a parent with a flat tire.) The number fell in line with high-school averages. During the same period, police didn’t confiscate any weapons from students.
Taken together, the statistics seem to indicate that Canyon Springs is no more dangerous than, say, Green Valley High, in spite of recent troubles. The district has come under fire for discrepancies in its accountability reports in 2006-07. Canyon Springs listed 18 incidents qualifying for expulsion to the state, but made 80 recommendations to the district. What gives? Matthew told the Review-Journal that he hoped staff wasn’t underreporting incidents.
But it does happen. Goldman says No Child Left Behind is part of the problem. Record too many problems and principals risk having their school labeled “persistently dangerous.” By law, students at such schools, or who are victims of violent crime at school, must be allowed to transfer to a safe campus. The other culprit, Goldman says, is school-district policy. “For example, per board regulations, for the first alcohol offense, you can give a student a referral for expulsion. But some schools don’t make those recommendations. Others have zero tolerance and do make the recommendations. Both are within their rights. For a second alcohol offense: All principals must refer expulsion. If principals don’t report it, it means something didn’t happen. If Coronado has 50 [recommendations for expulsion], it doesn’t mean Green Valley didn’t have 50 [incidents in which expulsion could be recommended]. You get principals that hide stuff, that don’t expel students. Matthew is strict. If you cross that line, he’s going to do what he has to do.”
Canyon Springs is among a trio of schools (joining Mojave and Legacy) that North Las Vegas police pay extra attention to, department spokesman Mark Hoyt says. When asked, Northtown cops will pitch in to track down truant students, investigate burglaries and assist school police working on gang intelligence, catching up on the latest beefs and conflagrations. Of late, Hoyt says things have been pretty quiet at Canyon Springs.
“This one [increase in patrolling] kicked off because of the shooting [of the Mojave students]. We do get complaints about kids congregating to fight after school [at Canyon Springs], but we get that at a lot of schools. Every type of call for student misbehavior is going to go up when school ends. A fight inside the school might carry to the neighborhoods. Kids hear about a fight, and people will congregate to watch it, and neighbors will call.”
Nearly two years ago, North Las Vegas began patrolling high school football games at Canyon Springs, Mojave, Cheyenne and Legacy to quell a rash of fights, burglaries, drug use, loud parties and several shootings in nearby neighborhoods.
“We use them at sporting events because we have controlled access to people coming and going—one entrance and one exit,” explains Young, noting that the issue of metal detectors isn’t dead. Talks are ongoing, he says, and feasibility studies are in the works. He, for one, doesn’t buy into the negativity that hangs over Canyon Springs. “My daughter graduated from there. There are a lot of good students and only a few bad apples.”
•••••
Danger, indeed, is in the mind of the beholder. To the bullied student, the smart kid or newbie teacher, Canyon Springs (or any school, for that matter) could be the worst place on Earth. Or it could be a walk in the park for a thug. Or Camelot for jocks, cheerleaders, the homecoming court or the band—Canyon Springs’ athletic teams are generally formidable, and the band is among the best in the state. Or it could be a great training ground for life’s next phase: Last year’s student-body president is studying at Georgetown University. Student-body president Bernadine Roth, 17, plans on double majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology once she graduates (hopefully as valedictorian) in June. Typical teenage drama is behind most of Canyon Springs’ problems, she says. “We are teenagers, and we do argue. People have drama. People make it out to be a racial problem or a gang problem, and it’s not.”
Which goes to Matthew’s laments about media coverage of Canyon Springs’ troubles: If every incident is worth a story, then why aren’t there dozens of stories about every single gun found? And where’s the coverage of the many positive things about the campus? “Fair is fair.”
To be fair, visits to Canyon Springs’ campus are only partially determinative. In large part, the school’s reputation is a function of its location—housing overflow from nearby campuses Cheyenne and Mojave—meaning it inherited a built-in reputation as a tough school. Ghetto by birth, you might say. Labeling a school as such can have the same effect as telling someone he’s stupid over and over: Don’t be surprised if that person lives up (or down) to your expectations.
As it is, I certainly felt no palpable sense of anti-intellectualism or present danger. Cause for unease? Sure. Due mainly to my hypersensitivity about racial tension between blacks and Hispanics. This being Los Angeles in miniature, it’s only a matter of time before what happens in LA comes to Vegas. Gangland geography is my biggest concern. Canyon Springs draws from rival neighborhoods, making flare-ups almost inevitable. The combustibility is worrisome when combined with the perverted sense of school pride that seems to have taken root in town. Used to be that rival schools settled things with fists. In late 2006, North Las Vegas police intercepted a foreboding piece of intelligence: A contingent of Rancho students planned to shoot up Canyon Springs. Thankfully, nothing happened.
•••••
Frequent school-district critic Louis Overstreet sees a lot of himself in Matthew: Both are African-American (Overstreet from Ohio;, Matthew from Antigua) and are known as straight shooters and unabashed advocates for their race.
Decades ago Overstreet raised hell about Alaska’s prohibition of corporal punishment. He moved here in the ’90s and immediately set about ridiculing inequity in the school district. It’s criminal, he says, for the district to recruit Matthew to revive troubled schools and not promote him or give him extra resources.
“He’s given all the shit assignments and gets no reward for being able to manage those assignments. It’s got to be frustrating as much as he cares about students. But one thing I’ve learned is that it’s almost impossible for the person to make change to be the one to benefit from the change.”
Matthew hates bullies. It’s why he says he turned McKay in. They clashed when he was principal at Cheyenne. McKay was indicted for stealing $67,000 from the district.
He was given probation.
Were the McKay case the first time he’d spoken up, then his enemy would be easily identifiable. In 1978, his first year as a teacher, Matthew says his boss at Woodbury Middle School singled out black students as the main disciplinary problems. He took his concerns to the school board. While at Rancho in 1988 (he was the dean), he challenged a school trustee for insinuating that a black person shouldn’t be considered for an assistant principal’s job in Moapa Valley (translation: The city is too white). He’s also had starring roles in other dust-ups: threatening to forfeit a game after the Canyon Springs football coach disparaged the officiating in a game; asking a Coronado teacher to submit to a lie-detector test after she claimed Matthew cursed her out (the teacher refused to write a letter of recommendation for his daughter, a straight-A student); claiming he was deliberately passed over for the post of associate superintendent of Superintendent Schools; accusing former school district police chief Hector Garcia of obstructing his attempts to get metal detectors.
Activism has its drawbacks. Seems fairly counterintuitive: fight for one thing and you can alienate people on the other side. Invoking racism even when it’s pernicious, persistent and culturally ingrained is risky, especially if you rely on the people who run the flawed system for resources. Might Matthew’s years of telling it like it is—“doing what’s best for the students,” as he says—finally be coming back to roost?
“I don’t want to blame everything on Larry McKay. I don’t go looking for trouble. The district has a way of ostracizing people it doesn’t agree with,” Matthew says. “I had everything to lose coming to Canyon Springs. My reputation is good. But I did it for the kids. Now give me what I need to help make these kids safer.”
THE PARKING LOT
Trouble can occur here just as easily as in the quad. It’s 12:15. Outside the school’s westernmost entrance, a group of boys shoot dice. Another small crowd has formed near the ballfield, playing music and dancing. Cell phone pressed to his hear, one parent tells the person on other end of the phone that “it’s done.” He’s removed his daughter (a junior) from Canyon Springs. The recent incidents spooked her. “Before this stuff with the mother and the gun happened and these fights, things were decent.”
A dad sits in his truck waiting for his son, who’s in the 10th grade. He reads the paper for an hour. And watches. And listens. Lots of students staring at each other; more cursing than he cares to hear. He’s Hispanic. He comes every day, he says, because black kids pick on his son, and he’s worried about the boy’s safety. “I don’t want him targeted.”
The bell sounds, ending school. Students head every which way. Again, patterns emerge along racial lines. Intermingling is sparse, but expected. It’s time to go home, or to work, to wherever it is students go at 1 in the afternoon.
Parked next to me is a white Ford. Two boys are slap-boxing and cursing up a storm. One of them sees a girl and mock-threatens her. “If you get in that car, I’ll tear that motherfucker up!” She does. He curses, spits on the windshield and kicks the door. Boom! The driver stops, glares. Is it about to go down?
No. Thankfully.
Everyone laughs—driver, car-door assailant, passengers and onlookers bust up laughing. I breathe a sigh of relief. Not for myself, but for a school that doesn’t need any more bad headlines.
Damon Hodge is a Weekly staff writer.