Students at several Los Angeles high schools Monday walked out of class to protest Donald Trump and proclaim that he is “not my president.” Around half of the student body enrolled at these high schools were not proficient in English when they initially enrolled in school, California state statistics reveal.
The schools that participated in the walkout were Woodrow Wilson High School, Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School, Theodore Roosevelt High School, Esteban Torres East LA Performing Arts Magnet School, and Abraham Lincoln High School, ABC 7 reported.
Video from the protest shows students carrying Mexican flags and chanting in Spanish. One sign from the anti-Trump protest said “viva La Raza.” Los Angeles County is home to nearly a tenth of the nation’s illegal immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
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These schools all have predominately Latino student bodies. Wilson is 92 percent Hispanic, Mendez is 96 percent Hispanic, Roosevelt is 98 percent Hispanic, Esteban Torres is 95 percent Hispanic, and Lincoln is 73 percent Hispanic. In the Los Angeles Unified School District the average student body is 73 percent Hispanic and California schools statewide are 53 percent Hispanic. This is according to 2015-2016 statistics, as are all the figures in this article.
At Wilson, 32 percent of students speak only English and and 43.9 percent are Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFLEP). RFLEP means the student was initially enrolled in an English-learning program when they entered school but they are now deemed proficient in English.
A little over 51 percent of students at Roosevelt are RFLEP and 17.1 percent speak only English. At Lincoln, 49.3 percent of students are RFLEP and 22.4 percent speak just English. At Torres, 26.4 percent of student speak just English and 46.9 percent are RFLEP. Nearly 58 percent of students at Mendez are RFLEP and 16.2 percent speak only English.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District 39.3 percent of students speak just English and 25 percent are RFLEP. Statewide 57 percent of students only speak English and 16 percent are RFLEP.
California recently passed Proposition 58 which got rid of English-only education in the state. This will allow schools to teach primarily in Spanish.
