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Hispanic Activists Call for One Day Boycott
SANTA ANA — The Santa Ana Unified School District is raffling off a free color TV to students who ignore an economic boycott by Hispanics and instead show up for class Friday (12/12/03).
Hispanic activists -- including a former member of the Santa Ana Unified school board -- called for the one-day boycott after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a repeal of a law that would have granted driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.
School districts lose funding when students don't attend classes, up to $40 a student per day. The boycott could have a significant impact on the Santa Ana school district, where 92 percent of the students are Hispanic, said the district's Lucy Araujo-Cook.
"Obviously, we want our students at school, and if somebody is specifically asking parents to keep students home, that's a concern to us," she said.
She said the raffle was planned before the boycott was announced. "We actually decided to do some attendance initiatives months ago," Araujo-Cook said.
"Typically we have high absences before the holidays and I know there are people encouraging parents to keep their children home tomorrow," she said.
Another television will be raffled off on Dec. 19, the last day before the Christmas break, and still another will be given away in January, she said.
"This is the first of numerous attendance initiatives that we're going to implement because when we improve our attendance here in Santa Ana Unified by 1 percent point, it generates an additional $1.7 million," she said.
Fliers detailing the raffle will go home with students this afternoon, she said, and calls will go to each student's home through the automated calling system.
David Smollar of the Capistrano Unified School District said that each student absence carries a cost.
"It's $40 per student per day," he said.
The district, one of the largest in Orange County, has not adopted a specific program district-wide to discourage absences, but individual schools with Hispanic majorities have been monitoring the situation, Smollar said.
Silvia Pule, principal of San Juan Elementary School in San Juan
Capistrano, said recorded messages about the importance of attending school tomorrow will go out over the school's automated calling system this afternoon. The school recently held a fund-raiser that generated $500, she said. Pule said she has emphasized the importance of parents sending their children to school tomorrow by pointing out that just 10 students staying home would nearly "negate an entire night's fund-raising."
Nativo Lopez, a former Santa Ana Unified School District trustee and head of Hermandad Latinoamericana in Santa Ana, has been credited with coming up with the idea of the boycott, but he disagreed.
"It came from the people themselves," he said. "They asked Hermandad Latinoamericana to lead it. We're leading by obliging."
Lopez said he sees no reason why children should not take part in the effort, and he disagreed with his former district's television offer. "It's pretty sad they need to entice children with material objects instead of teaching them to defend their rights," Lopez said.
Araujo-Cook said incentives are common practice in the schools. Business partners often offer coupons for things like free ice-cream sundaes for children with perfect attendance records.
Lopez said tomorrow's boycott -- on the same day as the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe -- "is just the beginning."
"We've seen that political means are ineffective," he said. The Hispanic community will be urged to engage in a series of "non- cooperation and non-participation" activities, he said.