L.A. Schools Vote to Expel Students Who Are Armed

The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Monday night to automatically expel any student who is found to have a knife or gun on or near school grounds.

School officials said the new guideline will help set a consistent policy throughout the sprawling district, ending a situation in which some students--with the aid of their parents and a lawyer--can get a lesser punishment than others for the same offense.

“I want there to be no question in anyone’s mind where we stand . . . on the possession of a lethal weapon at school,” said board member Roberta Weintraub, sponsor of the motion. “Regardless of whether a student is from East L.A or Watts or Chatsworth, there should be an automatic expulsion.”

Students who are expelled from their schools are usually sent to special “continuation” schools, although a handful have been barred from the school system entirely.

Weintraub said she was surprised in recent months to find that school disciplinary committees, citing “extenuating circumstances,” had voted against expelling students who had knives or guns on campus.

Last year, Los Angeles school officials reported confiscating guns from 145 students and knives from 574 others.

The district also said 231 teachers were attacked on the job last year, some by students and some by intruders.

In a separate report, the district said 487 students were expelled from school last year, most of them because they were nabbed by undercover drug officers working for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Don Bolton, director of the school district’s Pupil Services Division, said a three-member expulsion review committee examines each student’s case before deciding to recommend expulsion to the full school board. In recent years, the board has routinely approved the review committees’ recommendations.

The committees have decided against the most severe punishment, he said, “if, for example, it was a small knife that was concealed.”

“If a student brandishes the weapon or is involved in violence, then that would be another matter,” he said.

Board members Jackie Goldberg and Rita Walters argued against the motion, saying the committees should retain the right to judge each student’s case on its merits.

“As a classroom teacher, I have a grave interest in keeping these things out of school,” said Goldberg, who teaches in a Compton high school. “But I’m not interested in setting automatic requirements.”

Both Goldberg and Walters have also regularly opposed many of the recommended expulsions of students who were caught in campus drug raids, arguing that the police undercover operation entrapped the students.

The motion was finally approved Monday by five board members, with Goldberg voting no and Walters abstaining.

Under the terms of new policy, district officials will send out specific rules by March 1 to be posted at each school making it clear that any student bringing any weapon to school faces expulsion.

“My hope is that this alone will have a chilling effect on the students,” Weintraub said.

In other actions, the school board, after another long and bitter debate, voted to have the district staff study whether it can find a way to limit the bus rides of students in the voluntary integration program to no more than 45 minutes each way. Each day, about 21,000 students, most of them black or Latino, are bused to another school, and 7,900 of them are sent on rides of more than 45 minutes.

Board members disagreed, however, whether another study could find a way to send them to integrated schools closer to home.