La Familia

"I think the school district just doesn't want to have a high school on the Westside," Pecina told the Weekly at the time.

More protests and sit-ins followed. The activist parents eventually filed a lawsuit against the Kansas City School District. At the end of a two-day trial in September 1981, a county judge scolded district officials for breaking their promise -- but ruled that the law allowed them to do so. District officials boarded up West High, adding it to a long list of Westside school closures. "The biggest villain back then was the school district," says Gilbert Guerrero, Alta Vista's director of education. "They always felt that if they had to close a school, it would be a Latino school."

Three years later, federal Judge Russell Clark found the Kansas City School Board guilty of violating the U.S. Constitution by maintaining a racially segregated school district. Lawyers began crafting what would become the most expensive desegregation remedy in American history -- an effort that would only stoke the feeling of disenfranchisement within the Latino community.

"Desegregation didn't really address the issues of Hispanic students," Guerrero says. "The desegregation plan, for us, was black and white. We were not a first thought. We were not a second thought. We were an afterthought."

"Latinos were not part of the violation findings," says Arthur A. Benson II, attorney for the plaintiff schoolchildren. In spite of the Westside Community School debacle, Benson says, "There was no system of discrimination against Latinos."

Yet Benson says the desegregation plan made space for Latinos. Shortly after the guilty verdict, he presented Judge Clark with case law indicating that desegregation efforts must consider all minorities. So Clark ordered that the plan -- which proposed creating state-of-the-art magnet schools to lure white students from the suburbs -- be directed toward "minority" and "nonminority" students rather than black kids and white kids. Each school was expected to reach and maintain a specific ratio of minority to nonminority students. Latinos were allowed to choose whether they were one or the other. This, Benson says, was an advantage because they could get into any magnet school they wanted.

Guerrero remembers it differently. As a young activist, he went on a promotional tour of the city's magnet schools in the late 1980s. A district marketer -- whose job it was to entice white families into sending their kids to the inner-city schools -- told him that "the great thing about being Hispanic is you can choose if you want to be black or white."

"It burned when I heard that," Guerrero says. "I was very, very angry."

Around the same time, in 1989, a national study on dropout rates proved that public schools had failed to engage Latino students. Officials at the Westside's Guadalupe Center (a community center offering job, health, anti-crime, education and recreation programs) reached out to administrators at the DeLaSalle Education Center, an alternative school operating on Kansas City's predominantly black east side. DeLaSalle had been educating potential dropouts since 1971. Officials there were eager to help young Latinos as well, but found that few of them were willing to venture so far across town. So, with a $50,000 grant from a private foundation, DeLaSalle and the Guadalupe Center partnered in 1990 to establish Alta Vista High School.

"It was a victory, a little victory," Guerrero says. "When I got the news that the school was going to be funded, I called some of the old radicals and told them we were finally going to have a school. I told them it was going to be small. But it was a moral victory."

The school started out in the basement of Alta Vista Christian Church, at the corner of Mercier and what's now called Avenida Cesar E. Chavez. They had funding for fifteen kids, but thirty showed up.

"We infused the school with the culture of the community," Guerrero says. "When we asked students what they wanted to learn, I remember one kid said, 'I don't want to know his story. I don't want to know her story. I want to know my story.'"

It worked. Year after year, dozens of kids who had been on the fast track to dropping out have put on caps and gowns and grabbed their diplomas. By 1996, the school enrolled 84 students and boasted a 91 percent graduation rate. Alta Vista held its first graduation at Guadalupe Shrine, a church with room for 300 people, but so many family members came to see the ceremony that officials had to search for a bigger facility the next year. They moved on to a lecture hall at Penn Valley Community College, but even there the audience spilled out into the aisles and blocked the doorways. Last year's celebration was held at the gym at Primativo Garcia Elementary, where more than 500 people watched two dozen students pick up their diplomas. With a graduating class of 44 predicted for this year, school officials aren't sure where they'll have the ceremony.