Santa Ana OKs School Anti-Gang Pilot Project

Santa Ana City Council members Monday approved for local schools a pilot program they hope will eventually reduce the gang violence that has plagued the city in recent years.

The program, which will be modeled after a gang diversion effort in Paramount, is aimed at students in the fourth, fifth or sixth grades. Students will receive weekly one-hour lessons on gangs intended to counteract the “glamorizing” they may be offered by older students already involved in gangs.

“This program pulls the cover off,” said Lori A. Howard-Griffin, a council aide. “It shows all the negative aspects of gangs.”

Local recreation leaders--athletic coaches, parks supervisors--will help administer the program “to present alternatives, based on where (students are) living, that perhaps they’re unfamiliar with,” she said.

The program will also include neighborhood meetings targeted at parents in areas of high gang recruitment.

In Paramount, where the Alternative to Gangs Progam is offered to fifth-graders, the number of active gang members has dropped since 1981 from 1,000--in a city of about 40,000--to 200, Santa Ana Police Lt. Hugh Mooney, who heads the city’s anti-gang detail, said.

Police-enforcement costs for gang-related activities in Paramount dropped 50%, and 95%of the students who participated in the program said they had not joined a gang and did not intend to do so, according to a staff report.

Santa Ana hopes it can get similar results.

“This program is not directed at current gang members,” Howard-Griffin said, but rather at “the wanna-be’s, the potential or could-be gang members. We want to choke off their supply.”

Gang activity in Santa Ana has surged in recent years. The number of cases assigned to the gang detail jumped from 286 in 1986 to 396 last year. There were eight gang-related homicides--the highest number since 1979, when there were 13.

The council approved $20,000 in funding for the program. That will be enough for 10 elementary schools with 150 fifth-graders each. However, some school officials have indicated that, because the Santa Ana Unified School District already has an anti-drug education program in its fifth-grade classes, they may prefer to introduce the gang program to sixth-graders in the city’s three intermediate schools. There are about 180 sixth-graders at each school.

While the grade issue and other details of the program remain to be worked out with the school district, Councilman Miguel Pulido said he has reservations about taking it out of the elementary schools.

“I’m really concerned that the success may not be there,” Pulido said. “They might already be in a gang by the sixth grade.”

The visual materials used in Paramount, such as coloring books, posters and films, may not be appropriate for 11-year-olds, he said. “Their (Paramount’s)recommendation is to go to the fourth grade, if we can’t do the fifth.”

Money for the program will come out of the city’s community development block grant contingency funds and would run out in June, Pulido said. Money for the next fiscal year--currently projected at $40,000--may come from new block grants from the federal government, he said.