Oakland Schools Get the Word: Fight Campus Crime

As he does every day, Principal Dennis Chaconas spent his lunch hour circling the neighborhood around Oakland Technical High School in his 1984 Mazda compact, looking for trouble.

Spotting half a dozen young toughs wearing beepers, the latest marketing accouterment of drug dealers, Chaconas braked and jumped from the car.

“Take your beepers and get out. Out. Now,” he ordered.

Not far away, he watched while a television camera crew, drawn by word that campus police were taking a more active role at Oakland Tech, interviewed some students in a fast-food restaurant parking lot. One girl told the reporter that she was pleased that officers were more visible; it made her feel safe. Chaconas noted that the girl is no longer an Oakland Tech student, having been expelled for being caught with a gun.

A graduate of the Oakland schools, Chaconas, 39, has been the principal of Oakland Technical High School since 1983 and has learned something about weapons on campus.

One day last December, one 17-year-old Oakland Tech student lost a fistfight to another in the main corridor. Then he pulled a gun and shot the other youth to death in front of dozens of students.

“I thought this was a sanctuary,” Chaconas said. “I couldn’t believe it. Not here.”

Six months later, the body of a school custodian, stabbed fatally in a quarrel with a one-time friend, was found lying in a pool of blood on campus.

Fight Against Crime

At most of the Oakland Unified School District’s 92 schools, the fight against crime and violence is unending. An Uzi semiautomatic rifle, with 15 hollow-point bullets, was among the weapons confiscated by district officials within the last year. In a housing project adjacent to a grammar school, police made 156 heroin arrests during a single month recently.

Franklin Elementary School Principal Jay Cleckner, trying to ensure that students know to hit the ground when bullets fly, carries out “shooting” drills twice a year, an idea he devised when gang warfare broke out in the neighborhood a few years back. There have been no shooting incidents near “Fort Franklin” since spring, 1985, but Cleckner continues the drills. “It doesn’t occur just in poverty areas. This is a violent society and it’s going to get more violent,” he said. Many educators in and out of the Oakland schools argue that campus crime here is no worse than at many other big city school districts. However, unlike other districts, Oakland is facing a court order to guarantee students’ safety.

The order, issued last June by an Alameda Superior Court judge in nearby Hayward but stayed pending appeal, is the first of its kind in California. But it does not figure to be the last.

At least 30 similar lawsuits, all based on a section of the 1982 “Victims Bill of Rights” initiative, are pending throughout the state. Among the districts facing such suits are the Los Angeles Unified School District, and districts in San Diego, Inglewood and San Bernardino.

The “Victims Bill of Rights” created a state constitutional amendment that says students and school employees have an “inalienable right” to attend crime-free schools.

Citing that, Judge Richard Bartalini ordered the district to submit a plan designed to guarantee the safety of students. Submission of the plan has been delayed while the district appeals.

Ironically, the suit that resulted in Bartalini’s order involved not gang battles or Uzis in Oakland’s inner city ghettos, but incidents at two prestigious campuses in the community’s affluent hilltop neighborhoods.

In 1981, Stephen Hosemann, a Montera Junior High School student, had his watch stolen by another student, Edward Hardy. Hosemann reported the robbery and Hardy was suspended. Hardy tracked down Hosemann months later and twice assaulted him, court records say. Hardy was expelled from Montera Junior High.

Barred From School

When Hosemann graduated to Skyline High School, the district’s best academic campus, Hardy was barred from attending. That upset Hardy’s parents, who lived within Skyline’s attendance boundary and thought the school their child was reassigned to was unsafe. When the Hardys sought to get their son admitted into Skyline, Hosemann’s mother, Constance, filed suit demanding that Hardy not be allowed to step onto the Skyline campus.

“All I asked for was protection (for her son) and the district wouldn’t do it,” she contended in an interview.

Hardy never did attend Skyline and Hosemann is now in college. But the suit did not end. It is being pressed by lawyer Kevin Washburn, the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation and the National Center for School Safety, a Reagan Administration-funded group that has exhorted schools to clamp down on crime.

Robin B. Johansen, whose law firm specializes in constitutional law and was hired by the Oakland district after it lost the trial, will argue on appeal that Bartalini overreached his authority by ordering a school safety plan.

Hosemann’s lawyers never sought such an order, and the judge never gave Oakland a chance to explain what it has done to solve campus crime, Johansen will argue.

Unless the ruling is overturned, educators and lawyers involved in the case say, other judges may take Bartalini’s lead and consider taking control of school security, much as some judges did to ensure school desegregation in the 1960s and ‘70s.

“It was necessary in the integration plans, and I think it’s going to be necessary in the school safety plans,” said Sharon Browne of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “Somebody has to step in to the protect the children, if the school district is dragging its feet.”

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who has joined Oakland in appealing the ruling, decries such efforts, saying educators know their needs far better than courts.

‘Volatile Student Body’

“Right or left,” he declared in an interview, “judicial activism is judicial activism. . . . We should do everything under the sun to ensure the safety of our students. But the courts should not get involved in the day to day operations of the schools.

” . . . Oakland has the same problem that all areas have. There is a volatile student body. You need strong leaders to deal with it.”

Some Oakland principals, meanwhile, believe that they may be held responsible for crime on campus and have bought liability insurance, according to one elementary school principal who recently took out a $1-million policy. And although Oakland Unified School District Supt. Joseph Coto said it has nothing to do with Bartalini’s safe schools order, he has directed that armed district police officers be stationed at high school campuses.

Some Oakland administrators maintain that their district’s problems are blown out of proportion. And several said there is a large measure of racism in the perception that Oakland schools, where 85% of the enrollment are ethnic minorities, have a crime problem.

And educators say crime is a symptom of other problems--boring classes, uninspired educators, political squabbles, trouble at home, a seeming lack of job opportunities.

“The fact is that Oakland schools should be quieter, safer places to learn,” said Robert Blackburn, a former assistant superintendent who is now an education professor at California State University, Hayward.

‘Swept Under the Rug’

“But it’s also true that families should not face devastating problems of poor medical facilities, unemployment, poverty. It is very hard to ask a bunch of school teachers to deal with all the issues that the rest of society has swept under the rug.”

Such problems are especially evident in Oakland. The number of Oakland children from welfare families exceeds that of 99% of the other school districts in the state. Based on the turnout for school board elections, parental interest in the system is less than keen. In the last two elections, turnout was under 16%.

James W. Guthrie, an education professor at University of California, Berkeley, conducted a lengthy and critical study of Oakland schools in 1984 and ’85 at the request of the district. He concluded that the district was “out of control,” mired in petty politics and suffering from “decades of neglect.” He estimated that one in three Oakland students drops out, compared with a statewide average of 18%. About one in five students attends private schools.

A survey that was part of Guthrie’s study showed that parents’ two biggest concerns with the Oakland schools were the safety of their children and a lack of discipline.

“There is nothing parents will act upon more quickly than fear for the safety of their children,” he said in a recent interview.

Dropout Rate Decreasing

Supt. Coto responds that Oakland schools are doing their part to turn things around, inspired in part by Guthrie’s report. He has begun trimming what was perhaps the most top-heavy administrative staff in the state. He points to a decreasing dropout rate, stricter discipline and better test scores--though last year’s senior class still scored at the bottom four percentile in reading, writing and mathematics.

Coto hopes to curb drug dealing by outsiders by closing campuses during lunch hours. The district is giving drug education classes in the earliest grades and creating counseling panels to work out problems among students.

He and Honig point to Oakland Tech as a place where the new program seems to be working.

Chaconas became principal when the school moved out of vermin-infested portable classrooms and into a grandly refurbished site in the center of town. He instituted the slogan of “Tech Pride,” and cracked down on everything from kids wearing hats at school to possession of drugs. Possession of a single marijuana joint results in suspension. More than five joints results in expulsion.

Once the leading school in Oakland, the alma mater of actor Clint Eastwood and Black Panther Huey Newton, Oakland Tech’s reading test scores had sunk to the bottom eight percentile in the state by 1984. Last year, reading scores rose fourfold to the 32nd percentile.

Despite his emphasis on discipline, Chaconas isn’t sure Bartalini’s court order can be met. “Guarantee safety? I don’t know that you can guarantee anything any more,” he said.

Lt. Jim Hahn, head of the juvenile unit of the Oakland Police Department, agrees that improvements are under way throughout the district. There has been a “distinct awareness” of the need for more security, he said.

But many familiar with the district believe that more could be done. Oakland did release a safety plan shortly after Bartalini issued his order. But it has been criticized as vague and incomplete. The author, School Board President Sylvester Hodges, did not return phone calls from The Times.

It is clear, too, that if even Oakland administrators know the depth of their schools’ difficulties, they downplay it. Oakland, for example, reported to the state only 15 instances of drug abuse on high school campuses in the 1985-1986 school year--a figure so low that the smallest, most sedate school district in the state could cite it with pride.

Nor do the school’s statistics mesh. District policy is that any student caught with a weapon be expelled. In 1985-1986, the district expelled 46 students, the bulk of them for weapons. Yet the district reported to the state Department of Education that it confiscated 151 weapons on campus--including 45 reported guns.

District officials said they couldn’t explain the difference in statistics.