La Familia

Yet the students at Alta Vista say the talk of gangs is overblown. It's just "neighborhood pride," one senior says. The factions tend to coexist peacefully -- no small feat considering the school's cramped hallways. Trouble erupts once or twice a year, says Cyndee Gusman, one of the school's counselors; most often it's instigated by girls, usually because of a boy. The faculty generally gets the situation under control quickly, but they sometimes must call police, as happened last year when a crew from Kansas City, Kansas, came brandishing guns and the melee spread from the school's front steps down the hill toward the restaurants on Southwest Boulevard.

Alta Vista is not an academic utopia. It's as if the students and teachers have been transported half a century back in time, to the days before Brown v. Board of Education. Alta Vista is separate and unequal by almost all standards. Its facilities are substandard. The building, a former print shop, sorely needs a coat of paint. The science teacher lacks Bunsen burners and beakers. History and English instructors often work from photocopies of textbooks. And the school's state-mandated test scores are among the lowest in the Kansas City system.

Yet something amazing is happening at Alta Vista. Scuffles aside, kids here claim they've found a community unlike any they've experienced in a school, public or private. Virtually every kid at the school was, at one time or another, heading toward dropping out. Now they thrive in the Latino vibe that permeates the place, from the images of Aztec gods painted on the walls to the sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club streaming out of the art room.

"Everything in a Mexican neighborhood, you try to keep Mexican," says Arturo Lopez, a friend of Sylvia and Amy. "It's better, dude, because you're learning with the people you want to chill with."

Alta Vista opened its doors in 1990, but its ideological birth had come more than a decade earlier, in the summer of 1978. That was when a handful of parents, led by Don Pecina, began scrutinizing West High School, a now-mothballed three-story brick schoolhouse near downtown on Summit Street.

They all hailed from Kansas City's Westside, a dense enclave of tiny, weathered ranches and creaky Victorians, brightly colored restaurants, light-industrial warehouses and small tiendas stretching from the hills west of Penn Valley Park to the rise shadowing Kemper Arena. Beginning in the 1920s, newcomers from Mexico and points farther south settled in the area, replacing the Irish immigrants who had lived there. They opened Mexican markets and music stores and took jobs on the railroad, building a tight community that has remained intact for several generations.

Good blue-collar jobs were plentiful in the early days. But by the late 1970s, work became harder to find. A new generation of Westsiders began making dangerous choices. Pecina was "appalled by the fact that young Westside men ended up either at the penitentiary or at McGilley's Funeral Home," according to a 1981 story in a community newsletter. Education, he surmised, was the key to reversing trends. So he gathered up some parents, and they roamed the halls of West High, which boasted the Kansas City School District's largest population of Latino students. They poked their heads into classrooms and found students talking, sleeping, watching television. In one class, they caught a teacher reading Playboy while the students looked on.

They formed the Coalition to Preserve Education on the Westside and, on August 7, 1980, took over the school in protest. After three days of tense negotiations, the school board unanimously agreed to develop a "community-sponsored experimental high school," which would open the following year in the West High building.

Plans for the West Community School proceeded fabulously at first. Hundreds of parents filed into the West High auditorium in January 1981 to hear about the new school. Some wore brown berets to signify their allegiance with the Chicano movement. Facing the glare of TV lights, members of the school-board-appointed Westside Community School Committee and consultants from Midwest Research Institute described a small school -- no more than 200 students -- that would stress basic reading, writing and math. "The emphasis is on each individual achieving his own potential," committee member Pecina told the crowd. "We're not going to try to force the kids to learn, since that doesn't work. But we're going to tap their motivation."

By that spring, parents were signing up their kids for fall classes. The committee was searching for a principal. But by the time they found one in April, school district administrators had pulled back on their commitment; on March 20, then-Assistant Superintendent Wayne Dotts had called a Westside Community School Committee member and said that the school plan would have to be scrapped because a drop in federal funds was predicted. According to a June 1981 article in the now-defunct newsletter Westside Weekly, "Since the West plan didn't rely on any federal funds, Dotts eventually admitted the real reason for killing the plan was certain unnamed 'political considerations.'"