Television cameras and reporters flocked to San Marin, a suburban school with 1,022 students. Journalists examined bathroom graffiti, recorded classroom discussions and conducted interviews with students, in hopes of gaining insight into the nation's more insidious and invisible lingering elements of racism and homophobia from the mouths of its babes. The story was particularly juicy because it occurred in Marin, Northern California's notorious counterculture haven, which prides itself on being progressive and tolerant. But within the county, working-class Novato has always had a reputation as backward and less culturally diverse. Minorities actually make up about 15 percent of the town's population, however, making it one of the most diverse towns in Marin.

Now, as the dust from the media flurry has begun to settle after two months, it is unclear whether the intense dissection of the town has hurt Novato's efforts to fight its problems or helped them. On the defensive, the school and town responded with a kind of New Age boosterism: citywide "rallies against hate" and school spirit assemblies where students were urged to "stop such hateful, heinous crimes" amid chants of "Go Mighty Mustang." Some residents fought off charges of racism and homophobia by shifting the blame to an amorphous group of students known as "the hicks," who reportedly hold supremacist beliefs and intimidate minorities. Yet while it may be more expedient and easier to single out a community or group for condemnation, in reality it seems that Novato is less an anomaly than a reflection of affluent communities all over America that are struggling with changing demographics.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Like most suburbs, Novato has that manicured idealism that allows few of its problems to show through on the surface. Blocks of tract houses with two- and three-car garages and front yards with porches and potted plants surround the high school. The campus itself is idyllic, made up of single-level buildings that face a courtyard with grass and large shady trees. The school mascot, the Mustang, stares from all directions, and sports fields stretch behind the campus.

Assistant Principal Candace Curtis recalls that when she arrived here in 1995 from her previous job at a high school in Daly City, an industrial suburb of San Francisco, she experienced a kind of culture shock. In Daly City, she broke up gang fights at least once a week. "I could count on one hand the number of fights that we have had here," she says. Her first impression of San Marin students was: "These kids don't know what the real world is. They're living in Shangri-La! They're back in the '50s." So Curtis took it upon herself to update them. She began to incorporate diversity training into the school, first through staff workshops and later with the kids. "Not because I felt the kids were racist," she adds. "I felt that they were just uninformed and had very little exposure to kids of different cultures." Among the many efforts the school has made during the past few years to expose students to other cultures: Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, ethnic dancing, group seminars and showings of a video entitled "Respecting Yourself and Others," storytelling programs and multicultural luncheons featuring international menus.

With the help of the national gay and lesbian organization Spectrum, San Marin was in the midst of developing a Gay-Straight Alliance when Adam Colton transferred in from a private school for his senior year. Curtis describes Colton as intelligent, highly articulate and at ease with adults. When she met him last summer, Colton asked her if San Marin had diversity clubs and showed particular interest in the alliance. "He said, 'I've decided that I'd really like to be an activist and do something to help make changes at San Marin,'" Curtis recalls. Although a number of students became dedicated members of the club, Colton's leadership skills, verbal openness about his sexuality, "gay-positive" T-shirts and occasional eye shadow made him emerge as its "poster boy."

For whatever reason -- the attacks on Colton or the hostility generated toward the town -- San Marin students seem to have been seriously shaken during the past several weeks. The first time I spoke with Curtis, she had spent the morning evacuating the school after a phony bomb threat. Since February, Curtis claims that students have been streaming into the suicide crisis prevention center at the local hospital. "The most difficult thing to deal with has been the extreme depression of many of our students," says Curtis, whose school provides unusually extensive peer counseling for its students. "There's all this tension and strain on campus." Pressure on the students has actually been building since the basketball incident last year. Shortly before the most recent attack on Colton, a San Marin student brought a gun to school. After a friend found a suicide note written by the boy, school staff intervened and the police were called in to disarm him. Curtis believes that students already suffering from low self-esteem and emotional problems are feeling added pressure because "suddenly they can't even get esteem out of their school." The school rally was designed to raise students' pride in themselves through their school.

In any county but Marin, school pep rallies might seem like an odd way to fight highly personal problems such as depression and suicide. But San Marin also seems to be grasping for any solution as it has come increasingly under siege. At one public forum, Adam Colton's father, Jerry, publicly blamed the school for not notifying the family immediately when his son's car was vandalized last fall, the day on which he was later attacked. Had the school taken action then, Jerry Colton seemed to believe, it could have somehow prevented the most recent attack as well. Curtis did accompany Adam Colton to the hospital when his parents could not be reached after the beating on campus. But since Principal Rudy Tassano was abruptly reassigned to the district's administrative offices shortly after, she has also been forced to take much of the heat for the school's problems.

This includes its handling of the racial incident at the basketball game last fall. According to the allegations of the lawsuit against the school district, San Marin students yelled "nigger" at visiting black players from Tamalpais High. (At the game, a San Marin administrator contended that they were chanting "Yanger," the nickname of a visiting player, although he later recanted this.) Later, the school acknowledged the slur and disciplined one student, but the parents' suit alleges that an entire "cheering squad" of students in Afro wigs and other '70s regalia took part in the incident.

Further attempts to deal with it by the school and the school district -- after formal complaints were filed by some Tamalpais parents -- also fell woefully short, according to the lawsuit. The district held a forum to discuss the problem, but Tamalpais High Principal Leigh Akins, who transferred last year from San Leandro High School in San Leandro, Calif., said the meeting was unsatisfactory because students and their parents were forbidden to discuss the actual incident. (Under Akins' leadership, San Leandro faced controversy about its Gay/Straight Alliance after a teacher was fired for disciplining two lesbian students who were openly kissing and fondling each other in front of the school.)

The county's athletic league then put San Marin's athletic programs on probation, but the terms of that penalty were "undefined," according to Akins. "Our feeling was: How can San Marin make progress if they don't know what they're making progress toward? How do we hold a school accountable for something if they don't know what the rules are?" Finally, Tamalpais refused to play basketball against San Marin "because of concern for the emotional and physical safety of our players," Akins says. The two schools continued to play against each other in other sports, but when Tamalpais played San Marin in football last fall, police officers from both cities accompanied the Tamalpais team. This solution infuriated Tamalpais parents such as Ellen Dolores, whose son is on both the football team and the basketball team that was allegedly taunted with racial epithets.

"I don't want African-Americans to get the message that whenever they show up in a significant number, they have to be escorted by police," says Dolores. "If that's what it takes to be safe, they shouldn't have to play at all." The lawsuit contends that the police escorts are evidence of the school's pattern of cultural insensitivity and practice of "blaming the victim" when racial incidents occur. (The Novato Unified School District declined to speak to Salon for this article.)

Dolores, who did not participate in the lawsuit, sees the explosions at San Marin as part of a much larger problem that exists throughout the county and the nation. "Novato has a reputation for being redneck," Dolores says bluntly. "[But] I think it's a little too easy and a little too comfortable for people in this county to point their fingers at Novato." Dolores sympathizes with the town residents -- especially the youth "who are being portrayed as racists and aren't" -- but she is also frustrated by their failure to take more concrete action. "All they'd been doing is whining about how they're not racist," she says. "Their task is to stop whining and do something."

Next page | Doing the best they can?