I’ve been reading on and off about the Miramonte School in California that Jezebel has been reporting. Today, yet a third teacher has been arrested and details emerged of a school aide writing “love letters” to a child back in 2009. Two of the three people arrested in connection to these abuses so far, have been named: Mark Berndt and Martin Springer (keep in mind those names for what’s to come later on). According to the article at Jezebel:
The mom reported the letter, but school officials said the aide was just expressing grandmotherly affection, and did nothing. Now the district and police are launching a real investigation — three years after the fact.
And then out of curiosity, I thought I would google some basic demographics data about the school. And lo and behold, this is what I found:
Miramonte Elementary School is located in unincorporated South Los Angeles within the Florence-Firestone area. We are an urban school serving a minority community that is predominantly Hispanic. The residents, for the most part, are low income.[…]
Miramonte’s kindergarten through 6th grade programs service 1,396 students, of which 98% are Hispanic and 2% African-American.
The cynic in me cannot help but make a connection between the fact that these kids, Hispanics and African American were systematically dismissed and their complains ignored while they were being abused by people that, by the sound of their names, belong and have all the protections of the dominant culture. If this doesn’t reek of institutionalized racism, I don’t know what does. However, I have yet to see Jezebel making these connections in any of the four articles they have, so far, posted on the subject.
ETA: Also, I cannot help but wonder how many of these Hispanic kids were part of undocumented families. And subsequently, wonder if the abusers didn’t know this (either intuitively or through direct knowledge) and actually thought they could sort of get away with the abuse because some of these parents would not report them or, if they reported them, they would not be taken seriously by authorities/ school staff.
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