L.A. Unified's decision to move students from Boyle Heights to Lincoln Heights sparks furor - "more than 25 gangs on both sides with long-standing rivalries, some of which go back decades." (Apparently two more neighborhoods that didn't get the 'Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength!' memo.)

L.A. Unified's decision to move students sparks furor

Officials didn't take into account long-standing rivalries when they decided to transfer about 280 students from Boyle Heights to Lincoln Heights, critics say.

By Teresa Watanabe

March 16, 2014, 9:10 p.m.

The two schools are a two-minute drive apart in similarly low-income, largely immigrant neighborhoods. But to hear students tell it, the two places might as well be different planets.

Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, located on the edge of Chinatown in a hilly area of Victorian dwellings and low-rent apartments, is home to 29,000 residents, mostly Latino and Asian.

The Academy of Environmental and Social Policy is a small campus affiliated with Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, an enclave of 91,000 mostly Mexican American residents, small businesses and a burgeoning arts scene.

The two neighborhoods, however, maintain fierce pride in independent identities — a sense that carries over to what police say is more than 25 gangs on both sides with long-standing rivalries, some of which go back decades.

And that is one reason why a recent decision by the L.A. Unified School District to relocate the Roosevelt academy to Lincoln High for the coming school year, quietly made without input from students or parents on either side, is now escalating into a bitter furor. . . .

www.latimes.com/local/la-me-boyle-lincoln-20140317,0,6894934.story#ixzz2wLaqZObE