Some nights David Resendiz wakes up thinking: Man, I'm not in school.

Then the 15-year-old flashes back to last Oct. 20, a regular day at Jefferson High School, where he was a sophomore. Two friends had gotten into an argument with other students earlier on the troubled campus, which broke out in racial conflict last year. But he and his buddy Miguel Martinez weren't with them, so there was nothing to really worry about as the four walked home together.

Several blocks away from school, however, at 41st and Zamora Street, a campus cop stopped the group of Latino students. He asked if they were planning to start a riot with African American kids. David and Miguel said, "No way." In fact, they'd left the campus right after school to avoid any hassles.

The officer, David said, kept up his questioning, insinuating they were in a gang. When the two repeatedly said they had no gang affiliations, the officer insisted they were lying and ordered all four students to go to the front office before school started the next day.

So that's what they did, still convinced it was no big deal. But they were mistaken. One at a time, each was called into the dean of student's office and, after some more questions, was summarily told he was receiving something called an "opportunity transfer" to another school for his own safety. Miguel would be going to Manuel Arts High School and David to Roosevelt.

But on Nov. 14, when David and his single-mother Manuela went to Roosevelt High School to enroll, an administrator told them that the paperwork provided by Jefferson wasn't adequate, and no one at Jefferson had called to make sure a place was even available. On a piece of scrap paper, the administrator scribbled, "Did not accept student" without even including David's name.

When the frustrated mom and son returned to Jefferson, the dean of students blamed them for the enrollment problem. Moreover, she said L.A. Unified could take Manuela to court if David wasn't going to school.

"We tried to look for another school, but we needed all those papers to go back," David explained before a protest began Dec. 6 outside the Los Angeles Unified District's headquarters on Beaudry Ave. near downtown. "It ain't fair. And now we have to take this step so people could hear us. 'Cause if we stay quiet, we're going to stay like this forever without school."

The teenager has been out of school now for more than two months. He can't even study at home because administrators at Jefferson took away his books.

"My mother is worried I'm not going to school," David confided. "She's thinking I'm probably going to miss a grade. And I'm worried because I was planning on going to junior college to become an electrician. That's what I want to be.

"I don't know where to go," he said, shaking his head "I'm trying to fight, you know, and make them take their words back and keep me in. I just want to go back to school, that's all."

Systemic problem
Opportunity transfers are happening to between 4,000 and 8,000 students every year in the Los Angeles Unified School District, according to L.A. VOICE, which organized the LAUSD protest. The interfaith community group, in fact, calls the problem systemic.

It stresses that the controversial transfer policy is just another way for failing public schools to ship "struggling students" to other locations, knowing full well that they may never re-enroll. And transferred students aren't counted in the district's drop-out rate.

But even more important, by getting rid of poor students, public schools are able to raise their overall test scores to meet requirements of the No Child Left Behind federal law and not lose crucial funding.

"We come together today as L.A. VOICE --- congregations and schools coming together to speak out about the injustice of the so-called 'opportunity transfers' that LAUSD is using to essentially expel students from district schools," declared Lisa Milton, executive director of the grassroots organization at the sidewalk rally, which drew more than 200 parents, children and other protesters.

"Thousands of students every year are being expelled for no reason. They're not given their rights, and it's a way that LAUSD gets around the state law which protects students if they're actually expelled. These opportunity transfers are nothing more than an opportunity to kick out low-performing students."

Milton said the devious procedure is based on two practices. Poor performing students are sent to schools so far away from their homes that many soon get discouraged and drop out.

Or, as in David's case, their paperwork gets misplaced, with the result that students are bounced back and forth between schools until they and their parents become so frustrated they simple give up.

"It's a big problem; it's a huge problem," Sister of St. Louis Karen Collier, pastoral associate at St. Agatha Church and an L.A. VOICE supporter, told The Tidings. "In our words, it's a sin. Because these are innocents. They can't fight back. And their parents don't know how to fight back because they don't speak English and they don't know how the system works.

"It's the immigrants and poor they're doing it to," she pointed out. "You try to do this to a parent in Brentwood, no way! They'd have a lawyer, and they'd fight back."

At the protest, the words of David Resendiz's mother were translated as she spoke to the crowd in front of L.A. Unified's high-rise headquarters.

"I am very worried about my son being away from his studies," she said. "I do not know what is going to happen to him. So what I want for my child is to let him return to Jefferson High School."