PAGE 13
However, because
of the school’s
audition-based application process,
this shouldn’t be the
case. “Other schools
are wholly and totally
bound by their geography — OCSA gets
to pick the student
population,” said
Heidi Bowman, Lit &
Comp teacher. This
creates the question: If OCSA gets to
choose who goes
here, why are we
choosing a student
population that is,
according to OCSA’s
website, nearly 70
percent white?
Some believe it’s
just a matter of who
applies to the school,
and who has access to the resources
needed to match
what OCSA looks for
in its applicants. “We
invite in students with
incredible talent,”
News
said Bowman, “and
where do those brilliant violinists come
from? They’re a product of the private
education they’ve
been given as young
kids.”
Due to statewide
budget cuts, many
of Southern California’s urban public
schools have been
forced to reduce or
eliminate their fine
arts programs, giving
students from these
schools less access to
things like music, theater, and visual arts.
This generally means
that, as a school
centered around the
arts, OCSA receives
less applicants from
diverse inner-city
neighborhoods and
more applicants
from, well, suburban
Orange County.
Bowman continued,
“OCSA could work
on bettering our
outreach in more
diverse communities,
but I don’t know if it’s
something that OCSA
can do. I think it’s
something that society at large needs to
do.”
Where institutionalized outreach is
concerned, Pat
McMaster is OCSA’s
director of community programs. One of
the programs she organizes is the popular
Camp OCSA, which
many students take
part in. Each Tuesday
after school, approximately 500 local
elementary school
students attend
classes on campus
for free. The classes
are taught by OCSA
students, happy to
share their art knowledge. The program
has won awards from
both the city of Santa
Ana and arts organizations, McMaster
said.
Additionally, students from Santa
Ana make up more
of the population
than from any other
city, with 209 students
coming from the city.
OCSA has an agreement with the city
to accept 30% of its
population from local
residences.
As far as what we
HOLIDAY 2014
can do to improve
the cultural environment students, staff,
and faculty individually create, Sylve
proposed, “We need
to start talking about
it. Everyone here
hates talking about
racism, like it’s this big
elephant in the room,
and that’s why some
people act so ignorant — because no
one’s told them any
better.”
It may not seem like
much, but to many
students of color
here, a little sensitivity
can go a long way.
“Our generation has
a tendency to fall
into the mindset of
thinking that racism,
because we didn’t
start it, is not our
problem,” said De Los
Santos. “On this scale,
education is the best
cure; we need to
realize our actions do
not take place in a
vacuum.”
That might mean
skipping out on the
offensive joke you
were about to tell
your friends or removing some words from
your vocabulary —
things that everyone
here should be capable of doing in order
to make OCSA the
embracing, openminded school we
know it can be.