Teachers, Pupils Edgy : Weapons Invade the Classroom

Beverly Zwick, a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher for 12 years, has had a chair thrown at her, been hurled against a wall and knocked to the floor of her classroom by students.

Judy Rooney-Carter, an 11-year teaching veteran, was punched, kicked and almost stabbed by a pupil wielding a pitchfork outside her high school classroom.

Frankie Bryant was nearly raped at knifepoint and gunpoint, threatened by a man brandishing a gun on school grounds and beaten by a student on drugs--all on elementary school campuses in South-Central Los Angeles.

These were not isolated incidents. In big cities across the country, violence--all too frequently involving guns, knives and other weapons--is spreading from the streets into schoolyards and classrooms. It is a fact of life in the inner-city, where the prevalence of gangs and drug dealing brings weapons to the schoolhouse door.

Shattering the Quiet

But it also is shattering the quiet of some suburban areas, as evidenced this week when a teacher in the San Fernando Valley was stabbed by a student she had reprimanded, and last month in La Crescenta where a teacher disarmed a 13-year-old boy who waved a loaded .357 magnum in a classroom.

Lax discipline, overcrowded campuses, inadequate school police protection and district policies that allow disruptive or violent students to be transferred to schools outside their neighborhood are among the reasons for rampant school crime cited by teachers, principals and other experts.

More weapons are appearing on or near Los Angeles district campuses and are being used more often in school assaults. There are no figures to show whether the trend is nationwide, but authorities agree that violent incidents generally are becoming more serious.

“Fistfights,” said Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center in Encino, “are being replaced by gunfights.”

On Their Guard

The attacks have set students as well as teachers on their guard. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of our kids are good kids,” said Jim Lucas, a teacher at Belmont High School in Los Angeles. “(But) I think most experienced teachers would never let a student get behind them, especially in a tense situation.”

Dionne Shoemake, a junior at Fairfax High School, where a former student was fatally shot two years ago by two students who were thought to be gang members, said: “I don’t really feel safe--not at this campus.”

And, said 12-year-old Lisa Guzman, who next year will attend Olive Vista Junior High in Sylmar where the recent stabbing occurred: “I want to go there, but now I’m kind of afraid.”

The problem is forcing school officials in Los Angeles and in other urban centers across the nation to grapple with hard questions of how to make campuses safe without trampling on students’ rights or turning schools into fortresses.

Some school districts are turning to extreme solutions. In Detroit, metal detectors have been used to screen students at 23 high schools since 1984, despite initial long lines and delays of up to three hours in starting the school day.

The New York City school system last fall introduced detectors at five high schools and plans to expand their use at 10 additional campuses this year. Baltimore schools recently began enforcing a dress code that prohibits students, when they are walking through hallways, from carrying bags or wearing jumpsuits, sweat suits or overcoats that could conceal weapons.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school board so far has resisted such Draconian measures. But reports of firearms seen in and around its 600 schools have tripled in three years, according to statistics collected by the district and reported to the state.

Even with 302 sworn officers--which makes the district’s police department the fourth-largest in Los Angeles County--officials say that they cannot add enough police officers to keep up with the fast-growing student enrollment and, largely because of rigorous training and screening and low salaries, vacancies are hard to fill.

3 Million Campus Assaults

Nationally, 3 million assaults occurred on public school campuses in 1986, according to Stephens, who is the director of the National School Safety Center, a joint program of the U.S. Department of Justice and Pepperdine University.

According to a 1978 study by the National Institute of Education, nearly 282,000 students and 5,200 teachers were assaulted in school each month, but teachers were five times as likely as students to suffer serious injuries in the attacks.

“We average one teacher a day being attacked badly enough to require medical attention and time out of school” in the Los Angeles district, according to United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson. He said he based his observation on telephone calls from teachers to the union. “There is growing concern among teachers about violence.”

In 1987-88, the district reported 300 assaults on employees and 561 attacks on students. More attacks occurred at junior high than at senior high campuses--”raging hormones,” one district official said--but the high school assaults tended to be more severe.

The most popular weapons were knives. In 1987-88, the last full year for which statistics are available, Los Angeles district schools reported 478 incidents involving knives, almost double the number reported in 1985-86.

But incidents involving firearms have tripled over the last three years, from 75 in 1985-86 to 255 in 1987-88, the figures show.

“There is no question in my mind that the threat of firearms in and about campuses is greater now than it ever has been,” said Wesley C. Mitchell, the district’s chief of police.

And no school is immune. “We have nice, suburban schools where we pick up youngsters with guns,” Mitchell said. “And we pick up guns at elementary schools.”

Judy Rooney-Carter was attacked a year ago while teaching at View Park High School, a continuation school in the mid-city area.

“A student who was believed to be under the influence of PCP came at me with a pitchfork,” she said in an interview this week. The student, whom she recalls as being over 6 feet and weighing more than 200 pounds, lunged at her with the pitchfork. She avoided getting stabbed, but she was punched, kicked and flung about by the hair. She sees a chiropractor for her physical injuries. She has been treated by psychiatrists and psychologists for the emotional wounds.

“Everybody starts to doubt you, and you start to doubt yourself,” she said. “It’s been a horrible nightmare.”

Beverly Zwick described the last attack she experienced, which took place in November, 1987.

“I was at Venice High School,” the teacher recalled. “This student was giving me a hard time, and I said, ‘Let’s go to the office.’ I was standing in the doorway. He took some papers I was working on off my desk and threw them. I asked him to pick them up.”

But instead, the student, a 15-year-old boy, uttered an obscenity, grabbed Zwick by the shoulders and threw her into the door.

“I ran into the hall to try and get help from the teachers. Everybody closed their doors. I asked the librarian across the hall if I could use the phone to call the office. There were phones in the rooms but they didn’t work. . . . I had no support,” she said.

Zwick has not returned to teaching since the incident and has filed a worker’s compensation suit against the school district.

Expressing shock over the recent stabbing of a teacher at Olive Vista Junior High, she said: “Maybe they need to put metal detectors on campus, like they do at airports.”

In Detroit, the first district in the country to employ walk-through and hand-held metal detectors on a wide scale, the devices are used to check students about once a month at each of the 23 high schools, district spokeswoman Marie Furcron said.

Metal Sweeps Continue

The metal sweeps have continued despite a court challenge by the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union that they violate students’ constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Although Furcron said she could not provide specific figures, she said the district views the detector program as a success because officials are discovering fewer and fewer weapons.

She also said the majority of students and parents have accepted the use of detectors because “the alternative--having guns at school--is so abhorrent.”

In the New York City school system, where about 160 guns and 1,500 knives were confiscated last year, hand-held metal detectors are used to check students at five high schools one day a week, according to school security chief Bruce Irushalmi. Security officers screen every second or third student.

“We’re finding more weapons than before. . . . They’re not getting past the door,” Irushalmi said.

But, with only three months of using the detectors, it is too early to tell whether the screening program is making a dent in weapons on campus, he said.

Principals, parents and students, however, feel the devices are “unequivocally successful,” Irushalmi said, adding that some principals have reported that fewer fights are occurring on their campuses since the detectors were introduced in November.

Nevertheless, the New York schools security chief does not view metal detectors as a long-term solution.

“I view education as the solution and the desire of the community (to tackle the weapons problem) as a solution,” said Irushalmi. “I think it’s regrettable to have to use (detectors) in schools.”

Los Angeles school board member Alan Gershman, who proposed a study of metal detectors a few years ago, said the devices are costly and may be impractical, particularly in Los Angeles where many high schools have 3,000 or more students.

But, after this week’s knife attack on the teacher at Olive Vista, he said, “Maybe it’s something we ought to revisit.”

Mitchell, Los Angeles Unified’s police chief, said he is concerned about metal detector screening causing long lines outside the school gates. And, he added, a detector program would not be foolproof. It would not stop students from dumping their weapons in hiding places in the neighborhood and retrieving them later in the day, after the metal detectors have been turned off.

“Unless you wipe out truancy, you can’t stop them from bringing their weapons after school,” he said.

The Los Angeles school district spends $20 million a year on its police force. Of the 302 sworn police officers, 143 work in plainclothes and are stationed at specific campuses. About 90 uniformed officers patrol in marked cars the schools and district offices that do not have officers assigned to them. All 49 high schools and 51 of the junior high schools have at least one officer each. The other 22 junior highs and all 410 elementary schools are served by daily patrols. The department also includes 18 investigators.

It currently has 13 vacancies which have been hard to fill largely because many applicants do not make it through the required Police Academy training and because the district’s salaries are not competitive with the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department, which the district considers its chief rivals for officer candidates.

“There is no question we would like to have an officer on every campus,” Mitchell said. “And there is not an administrator out there who does not believe we could use more (officers) in general. But who knows what is enough? I remember a period of time when we had as many as four officers assigned to a campus and I don’t think they were any more effective than with two.”

Johnson, the teachers union president, criticized the deployment of district officers, arguing that all should be assigned full-time to campuses.

Critical of Transfers

He also was critical of the district’s policy of transferring students with discipline problems from school to school. Noting that the Olive Vista student who stabbed his teacher was attending that school on an “opportunity transfer,” the district’s system for temporarily assigning students with discipline or other problems to a different campus, he said: “This is what they (the district) do. They take a kid who has problems, who is potentially violent, and they just transfer him to another school. That doesn’t solve the problem.”

But Donald V. Bolton, administrator of the district’s student attendance and adjustment services office, said the transfers are effective. “Very often, a transfer does shake (the student) up, it tells the student, ‘This is serious.’ If the kid likes his (neighborhood) school, he’ll straighten up” so that he can return to it.

Occasionally, Bolton said, opportunity transfers have brought students to campuses where they caused violence. Several years ago, he recalled, Narbonne High School in Harbor City received several members of the same gang on transfers who subsequently got involved in a shooting incident as they were leaving the campus. And, one of the students implicated in a fatal shooting at Fairfax High School two years ago also had been on an opportunity transfer, he said.

The school board approves 10,000 to 12,000 such transfers every year. In 1986-87, the last year for which figures are available, nearly 27% were for disobedience and 16.5% were for the protection of the student, a district report found.

According to Los Angeles School Board President Roberta Weintraub, fighting school violence will require a variety of approaches, including hiring more police officers, installing a telephone in every classroom and training school employees to be alert to potentially dangerous situations.

Mitchell said a strong principal who sets clear rules for students and enforces them is a key.

“One variable seen in all the research,” he said, “is that an effective principal does run a safe school . . . someone who makes clear what the rules are to students and staff and what the consequences of failing to meet those expectations are.”

Marcus Felson, an associate professor of sociology at USC who has studied school crime rates, relates the severity and frequency of violent acts to school size. Schools with large enrollments have more crime, he said, so one way to attack the problem is by making smaller schools.

“School size is a big contributor. . . . California and Chicago are among the worst offenders of common sense in terms of school size,” he said.

Stephens of the National Center for School Safety said the most promising long-term strategies for reducing school violence involve teaching students alternative ways of resolving conflicts. Teaching “simple courtesy, how to get along with others, good decision-making skills,” can make a difference, he said.

According to Helen Bernstein, a counselor and teacher at Marshall High School in the Los Feliz area, where she said a boy was stabbed two years ago, much of the problem is rooted in the home.

“When I was a kid, if I had misbehaved and they’d called my parents, I was dead,” she said. “(Nowadays) I don’t know where half the parents are. I can’t reach them. I’m not putting them down . . . (but) they’re doing a lot of things and they don’t always have time to deal with the school.”

Maria Guzman, a San Fernando Valley parent whose daughter will be attending Olive Vista Junior High next year, said the schools must not overlook parents and the community as part of a lasting solution to school crime.

“The root of the problem is our society. No one wants to hear that. . . . We have kids who never learned values. We have to teach parents how to better parents.”

Times staff writer Sam Enriquez contributed to this article.