Schools’ Psychological Team Tries to Help Students Coping With Crisis

A psychological crisis team created after the 1984 sniper attack on the 49th Street Elementary School has been dispatched to help the pupils testifying in a molestation case that went unreported by Los Angeles school officials for more than a year.

Made up of school psychologists, medical personnel and academic counselors, the district’s so-called Psychological First Aid Team is designed to move quickly onto campuses that have been involved in schoolwide crises.

This is the team’s first major project since the Feb. 24, 1984, tragedy at the 49th Street School, in which three people were killed and 12 wounded by a gunman who took his own life after firing into the schoolyard from a house across the street.

The team has started to contact parents of the more than 10 girls who testified at the preliminary hearing of 68th Street School teacher Terry Bartholome, 48, who was arrested in May and later charged with one count of rape and 27 counts of molestation and lewd conduct. The hearing, which began July 9, is scheduled to resume this week.

“The team initially offered its services in December when the incident first broke,” said Bill Rivera, spokesman for the school district. “But there wasn’t much interest on the part of the parents.

“Now that the children are being interviewed in court, stress has begun to exhibit itself and the district reoffered its services.”

“Our plan is to deal with recognized trauma as quickly as possible. The entire team can be alerted with a single phone call,” said Alfred Clark, head of the Student Health Services Division, which oversees the team.

“In aftermath of 49th Street School situation we discovered that most governmental agencies and private businesses had developed plans for physical first aid, but not for psychological first aid,” Clark added. “It is something that has been overlooked. Our plan recognizes that a traumatic event can have long-lasting effects that must be dealt with.”

Before classes resume in September, the team will meet with the faculty and staff of the 68th Street School to try to help them cope with allegations against their former colleague. In addition, the counselors will instruct teachers in techniques to help students understand and come to grips with the situation.

Meanwhile, the school district appears to have become preoccupied with the growing controversy over administrators’ yearlong delay in notifying police after the administrators were made aware of the molestation accusations.

School board members said their attention has been diverted from the 1985-86 budget and other projects.

“I can see this thing evolving into a major issue that will take the entire attention of the board and dominate our actions,” said David Armor, who has sat on the school board for less than a month.

“Nothing’s happened all week,” added Roberta Weintraub, another board member, in a telephone interview last week. “This week reminds me of busing when just one issue dominated all our attention.”

During the last week, high-level administrators were tied up for hours while being interviewed by Ron Apperson, the district’s legal adviser.

Apperson is scheduled to give the school board a detailed report Monday on why there was a delay in reporting the molestation accusations to police. He spent most of Friday in “brainstorming sessions” with top administrators trying to decide whether action should be taken against any of the administrators who are said to have had some knowledge of the accusations, according to district sources who asked not to be identified.

The district attorney’s office is also investigating to see whether state child abuse reporting laws were violated.

The school district’s largest teacher’s union, United Teachers, Los Angeles, issued two harsh statements chastising administrators for their slowness in calling police.

“The law has been broken and as a result children may have been subjected to physical and psychological harm,” union President Wayne Johnson said in a statement. “Those responsible for not reporting the suspected abuse should pay the legal price.”

Because of the investigations by the school district and the district attorney’s office, school district officials said they have been instructed not to disclose the number of child abuse cases that are reported annually in the Los Angeles system.

However, the frequency of reported incidents can be gauged through statistics from the Child Abuse Recognize and Eliminate Program, known as CARE, which trains school staff members on how to spot children who are victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

Thirty-six schools--but not 68th Street--have volunteered to be part of the program. It was established in 1980 with federal funding, said Shayla Lever, director of the district’s child abuse program, which oversees CARE.

According to Jo-Ann Ratcliff, a private consultant who worked with CARE from September, 1984, through May, 1985, 317 child abuse reports originated from the participating schools, though none involved teachers. The teachers’ union estimates that the CARE schools account for about 32% of the reported cases of child abuse cases in the district.

About 75% of last year’s cases involved physical abuse, Ratcliff added. The remainder involved some type of sexual abuse.