Every student deserves a senior year filled with joy, community, and core memories. Our teenagers and young adults should be focusing on dressing up, showing up together, laughing with their friends, and taking photos to look back on for the rest of their lives. Instead, the school system at El Toro High School in Lake Forest has turned milestone traditions like Homecoming into an exclusive luxury reserved only for those with money.
Despite official state metrics showing that 50% of El Toro High School students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, ticket prices for Homecoming have reached an astronomical $90+. For families living paycheck to paycheck, this is an financial barrier that deliberately forces lower-income students out of their own senior milestones.
Worse, this economic divide overlaps with deep social, cultural, and racial inequities on our campus. While wealthy students navigate campus with immense privilege, Hispanic and low-income students are routinely singled out, suppressed, and targeted with punitive attendance tracking, ID confiscation, and unfair dress code double standards. The young adults who face the hardest structural barriers—including transportation gaps and health challenges tied to IEPs—are the exact ones being punished and banned from school dances.
We are seeing a culture of active segregation on our campus: the wealthy get to enjoy their senior year, while the working-class and minority communities are left isolated, leading to an environment of severe stress, depression, and systemic exclusion.
California Education Code § 49010 explicitly states that public school activities must be free and equitable. We are launching this petition to demand that El Toro High School administration and the SVUSD school board take immediate action before Homecoming week ends and upcoming events throughout the school year!
Establish a Senior Equity Fund: Immediately utilize discretionary, PTSO, or ASB funds to subsidize dance tickets, yearbooks, and graduation attire so that any student qualifying for free/reduced lunch can attend for free or a nominal flat rate.
Stop the Attendance and Demerit Penalty: End the discriminatory practice of blocking students from buying event tickets due to tardies or absences that stem from a lack of district transportation, active local construction, and extreme heat waves.
End Selective Campus Enforcement: Establish an immediate oversight review regarding how dress code rules and ID confiscations are enforced to ensure that Hispanic and low-income students are no longer targeted or singled out by campus staff.
No Charger should be left behind because of a price tag or systemic discrimination. Sign this petition to stand with these young adults and the Class of 2027, and force El Toro High School to prioritize its students over profit margins! This petition will ripple affect all future graduating classes at ETHS SVUSD.  Thank you, April Morales, single mother of three, USAF veteran (OEF/OIF)