On September 7th, I had an interview with Mr. Brar regarding the 2nd annual Welcome Back assembly, and the effects that the rescinding of DACA would have on James Logan. He was very passionate about both topics, always relating them back to the strength of community.
What do you think of the Welcome Back assemblies? How did they go?
I think they went well. I think the overall… what my intention was, what I had hoped that we would be able to at least communicate is what I think happened. The reason why we have Welcome Back assemblies is to help students and staff at the very beginning get to see who we are at school, what is our belief system, what we want students to be able to get out of the school year, and welcome everybody of course. And hopefully to set some tone for the school year, that we are a school that everybody belongs here, that there’s something for everybody on this campus, anywhere from courses to curricular activities to extracurricular activities to clubs. There’s something for everyone here. So, find it, make this your home. Logan is your home for four years, so we want you to find something that makes it meaningful, helps you feel like you belong, so nobody feels like this feeling of being an outsider, or not fitting in. That’s my hope, and that’s my goal, and I think that’s what we were trying to communicate.
So, what do you think about this year’s school spirit?
It feels very positive. We’ve been here all summer long, so from the work that went into revamping the freshmen orientation, we call Link Crew, to a completely different model than we’ve done before, welcoming freshmen, doing activities with freshmen on their first day to school, before school even started, their orientation day and mapping out a whole year’s worth of activities we want to do with all freshmen hopefully helps ease that transition from middle school to this very big high school that we have. And in addition to that, just walking around when people were here, even on the day that we had the solar eclipse, everybody brought their solar eclipse glasses, people were showing me like, “Oh, come watch the solar eclipse with me!” It feels positive, it feels very upbeat and I’m really excited about that and I’m hoping that we’re going to continue that throughout the school year, that the beginning of the year is not just going to be this fun part, and we hold that true for the whole year.
Will there be more assemblies this year? I’ve had people ask about more assemblies because they find them fun.
We’re trying to work out assemblies. There’s definitely going to be one more school-wide assembly that we do at the beginning of second semester. So, this was the Welcome Back assembly and we want to do some type of a mid-year check-in type of assembly. We’re not going to call it check-in, but something like a mid-year check-in.
And that’s a new thing, right?
It is a very new thing. This is the second year we’re doing the Welcome Back assembly; it’s something that we put together last year, so we want to keep doing it, we want with each year to make it a little better, a little bit more engaging, a little more interactive, more fun. To have 2,000 students in the Pavilion all at once and not have any kind of interactive part to it is, it makes it very quickly for kids to tune out. We want to make sure they’re interactive. And my hope and my goal is to build on that, every year we add more assemblies. We are a very diverse school, it’s something that I added in the assembly, not just ethnically, socioeconomically, but we are a diverse school by our countries of origin, the languages we speak, cultures that we bring in, backgrounds that we have, so my hope is that as we work on figuring out where we can fit in more assemblies, that that’s something we continue to keep in mind, that it is a celebration of who we are and making sure that everybody gets to see themselves represented in who we are. The challenge with trying to figure out where we put these assemblies is where do you carve the time, how do you not disrupt instructional time that teachers need in their classroom, make sure that they have enough time to cover a year’s worth of curriculum. Where do you carve the time? So, there’s got to be a balance between the two things. That’s going to be something that we try to work on every year, can we carve a little time here, can we carve a little time here and here, to do more of these things. We definitely are planning on doing, in addition to the two during-class assemblies, a few more during lunchtime. So, Mr. Malcolm, our new activities director this year, we’re already talking about some lunchtime, where if you are free and you want to come in, come watch the assemblies that we’re planning.
Onto DACA, is it possible for me to ask you how many DACA students we have at this school?
You can, but in California, we do not. No public school ever asks for students’ citizenship or residency status. So, there’s no way for us to know who is a DACA recipient, who is a citizen, who is a legal immigrant, who is here without documentation. We have no way of knowing that, and in my opinion, that’s not my business. I’m here to help educate any student who walks through our doors, and that’s what we’re going to do.
Logan is very diverse, so there is a big possibility that there are DACA students here.
Oh, I’m sure there are, yes.
So, were your comments during the Welcome Back assembly, about inclusion and making Logan feel like a home, was any part of that directed towards the DACA students in the assembly at the time? Did you want to make them feel that this is a safe haven?
Again, like I said, California law does not distinguish who gets to go to public schools in California, and we’re going to honor that. Any student who lives in our community is welcome to come to this school. We don’t care about somebody’s ethnic background, socioeconomic background, we don’t care about what you have done before, this is your home school. As long as you’re a part of this community, you’re welcome here. Legal documents, those are papers. For somebody else, they might be important, but for our purposes, for public education, that does not make a difference on who we educate.
So, when you call Logan a safe haven, what is the distinction between a safe haven and a sanctuary school, if any at all?
That’s a really good question. When I call Logan a safe school, it means that anyone and everyone who attends here has a right to feel safe, a right to free, public education, a right to not be intimidated by anyone, and a right to express themselves. Now, the legal definition of what a sanctuary school or sanctuary city is, it’s very nebulous. Every state has their own version of it, every county, and there’s been some effort in Union City to make Union City a sanctuary or safe city. Again, the folks who are in the legal world, and politicians can figure that part. Our work is, as long as you’re a student here, we’re going to help educate you. And I don’t consider it our business to meddle into people’s personal lives, and as long as you’re a good human being and you’re doing your best at school, you’re welcome to attend school here. As long as you’re a part of our community.
If there is a chance that ICE comes to Logan, what is the procedure to go about that? I know that they are not allowed on campus, but if they had a warrant, what are we to do? What is the staff to do, what are students to do?
You know, it’s new territory. We don’t know yet what’s going to happen, this is all so new, we don’t know. What I have heard, and I don’t know if it’s official or if it’s documented somewhere, but Union City, the city itself, is not participating in any raids with ICE, or going in and finding people who don’t have the right paperwork. So, if the city is doing that, that automatically then covers everything within the city, so we’re a part of Union City, so that’s going to apply to us, as well. My expectation and my hope would be, then, that one, that nobody is coming to Union City, no federal ICE agents, but if they are, they’re going to go through our city’s infrastructure. They’re going to go through the Union City police department, and so far, what we know and what we’ve heard, is that Union City is not participating in those things. So, that’s going to help. We do have a fairly strong support staff within Union City, we have a whole division called Kid Zone. There are two staff members here at Logan who are Kid Zone staff members, and they’re doing a lot of work to help connect students, families, in Union City who may need assistance, who may need legal guidance, who may need just somebody to talk to on how this whole process is going to work, because so much of it is unclear. Our Kid Zone staff has already done a few workshops for families and students, we did a couple of them here at Logan. There’s some that have been in the community and we will continue to do that, we’ll continue to help educate people so they know their rights, like what are your rights? Somebody knocks on your door, do you have to open the door? Not necessarily. They have to have a warrant to open your door. So, just because somebody’s asking you, or stops you, you have rights as an individual in our community, even if you’re a DACA recipient, even if you are undocumented. You know, DACA is a category for child arrivals, but that’s only about 800,000 people in the entire country. In addition to that, there are still millions of people who live in the United States, and I’m sure, many who live in our community, may be undocumented. Undocumented folks, and people who live in our community have rights, and we want to make sure everyone is aware of their rights. People who are students at our school, people in our community, and anything that we can do to help, we’re going to continue to do that.
That is amazing. Being at Logan, you’re the principal here, Logan is unlike any other school. There are surely very few, if not any other principal who have to deal with this in such an unusual time where everything is so unclear and they way you’re handling this, is very well, very respectable.
And one last question, my economics teacher, Mr. Henderson would like to know what you’re middle name is.
My middle name is Singh, and that’s the the community, the part of India that I come from, from Punjab. Most Punjabi names, the middle names for men are Singh, and for females, it’s Kaur. And so that’s one way to make a distinction between male and female, because several first names in Punjabi culture are unisex. For example, Gurpreet, my older brother’s name is Gurpreet, that’s a gender-neutral name. It could be a male’s name or a female’s name, it doesn’t matter. So, usually your middle name helps identify it. So, my brother is Gurpreet Singh Brar, so anybody reading his name would automatically know, ‘Oh, that’s definitely a male name.’”
I never knew that, thank you for letting me know. Okay, that concludes this interview, thank you so much!