Principal Kevin Morris greeted students and staff back at Mount Olive Innovation & Technology High School. It was his birthday, which coincided with the beginning of the school year in August. Students playfully joked with him while ushering celebratory remarks.
Not only was it a happy day for the alternative school that recently moved to share Duarte High School’s campus this year, but it was also the early days of an ethnic studies curriculum that took years to find its way to a classroom.
Morris, principal at MITHS for 20 years before being promoted to lead the new combined campus, emphasized the value of cross-cultural education and that Duarte has never been simply trying to check off a box.
“We believe Ethnic Studies is an essential part of our students’ educational and cultural experience—honoring cultural knowledge, lived experiences, and the importance of knowing your own story while understanding the stories of others,” he wrote in a statement to the Southern California News Group. “It also gives students the opportunity to examine history more truthfully and critically, including how colonial perspectives have shaped our understanding of race, gender, sexual orientation, identity.”
MITHS teacher Arianna Rocha has been working hard to present that history in the classroom. She helped build the district’s first ethnic studies course, which rolled out last school year but is beginning as a graduation requirement this year under state law.
That law, five years old come Oct. 8, requires schools to require one semester-long ethnic studies course to graduate high school starting with the class of 2030.
Rocha was part of the district ethnic studies team, including Duarte High history teacher Casey Ramirez and film teacher Emerita Bustos, that collaborated with the UCLA History-Geography Project in 2025 to create the course.
Under California law, districts can choose whether to use the state model curriculum to develop their own curriculum within guidelines. Regardless of what department they house the course, the required course must use ethnic studies content as the primary content.
However, without appropriation of funding from the state budget, the mandate lies dormant. Districts such as Duarte have invested their own labor and resources to ensure the ethos of the course is carried out intentionally.
And that’s what Duarte has done: Build a course.
Duarte began developing the foundation for their ethnic studies courses prior to the pandemic through a partnership with Creating Creators and Cal State L.A., which combined literacy and professional filmmaking experiences for students from K-8 Beardslee Dual Language Academy to the high schools. Students in elective courses created digital “testimonios,” films and oral histories, and participated in the CSULA Chicanx Latinx Film Festival.
The collaboration supported the ethnic studies classes’ multimedia showcase of their historical research of local Rocktown at Duarte’s Historical Museum, where film students recorded oral history podcasts on-site at the opening.
Rocktown was a majority Black and Mexican American neighborhood in Duarte targeted by freeway construction and commercial development. Ethnic studies students pored through newspaper clippings and worked with film classes to record interviews with Rocktown residents to uncover stories of a vibrant community left out of the headlines.
The intergenerational event packed the museum with a line out the door as Rocktown members who had not seen each other in years reminisced and brought mementos from home.
The Rocktown history project set the groundwork for the school district’s first ethnic studies classes, which Duarte staff hope to continue to build on.
Rocha recalled a Chumash student who began a dialogue with her grandmother by sharing what she learned in class about local Native Americans.
“I think that’s just what we want; we just want kids to feel like they’re being seen,” Rocha said.
In Rocha’s ethnic studies class last month, fairy lights illuminate the room where students were scattered, some working in table groups, others cosied up with a stuffed animal on her couch.
It was an inclusive atmosphere that lent itself well to the new course when it was launched.
Many students have praised the nascent class.
“I felt welcomed and seen for the first time in a history class,” wrote Vicente, who took Rocha’s course last school year. “We learned about history that is actually relevant to me, and I felt a little more connected to my community and I understood my classmates a little better.”
Morris highlighted how Rocha’s classroom matched the safe, empowering energy of Ramirez’s classroom, which also hosted the ethnic studies course pilot to great success last year, in part from drawing on the school’s thriving film program.
Ramirez, the history teacher who helped build the course, beamed as she described plans for a permanent display of her students’ work, advocacy toward a Rocktown memorial plaque, more Rocktown residents to be interviewed and digital archives of the community histories.
“To see that they took a lot of pride in finding out about their community — it really pushes us to want to continue that work. It takes a lot of time, and it takes a village,” Ramirez said. “The fact that we even had a modicum of success was just … exciting.”
Ellen Wang was a 2026 intern with the Pasadena Star-News through a partnership with the Asian American Journalists Association’s Los Angeles Chapter, AAJA/LA.