THE LOS ANGELES TEACHERS’ STRIKE : Police Find Easy Pickings: Picking Up Truant Pupils

Seventh-grader Kenya Johnson expected to spend the lunch hour Tuesday a little scared, but she planned to be that way with her friends--maybe nibbling some popcorn--as they watched the Stephen King film “Pet Sematary.”

But she never got past the box office. Johnson’s attempt to skip classes on the second day of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike ended when she and six friends were picked up by police outside a downtown theater and hauled off to one of the district’s 11 truancy centers.

There, she was to endure a dose of real-life fear: waiting for the arrival of her mother.

“I told her I wasn’t going to school and she told me if I got in trouble, it was my fault,” Kenya, 13, declared after LAPD juvenile detectives turned her over to the downtown branch of the school district’s Operation Stay-In-School program. “She’s going to be mad, probably.

“I ain’t never ditching (school) again in my life.”

On a day when more than 250,000 of the district’s 594,000 students failed to report to classes, Kenya became one of the unlucky ones. Of the many thousands of students who fled to theaters, parks, beaches and video arcades, only 77 fell into the hands of police and were returned to school. For the most part, the few police officers who were enforcing truancy laws rounded them up at well-known hangouts almost by chance.

Even in normal school times, the Operation Stay-In-School program is busy. The 11 centers, scattered from San Pedro to Reseda, handle 100 to 150 youngsters a day--more than 16,000 each year--from ages 6 to 18. The students are brought in by cooperating law-enforcement agencies, including the Police and Sheriff’s departments, and turned over to counselors who verify their enrollment and lecture them on the importance of staying in class. Then parents are summoned to haul each youngster back to school.

As the strike began Monday, traffic through the centers was uncharacteristically light. Only about 50 students were picked up and returned to classes the first day, said Donald Bolton, the district’s administrator of student attendance. But by Tuesday, as the numbers began to rise, counselors prepared to be inundated.

“Before the week is out, we may have more kids than we know what to do with,” Bolton said. “There are a lot of kids out there on the street, no question about that.”

Students at the downtown center Tuesday were spotted by police at a theater and video arcade on nearby Broadway. “The place was full . . . easy pickings,” Juvenile Detective Steve Markow said of the arcade. “If we’d had a truck, we could have had a whole bunch more.”

As it was, the students arrived by squad car, all of them complaining how unfair this was because of the strike.

Teharia Scott, 13, a seventh-grader at Bethune Junior High School, said she had reported to school briefly but found it intolerable. “All we do is stay locked up in the gym, the cafeteria or on the P.E. field,” she protested.

Veronica Huff, 13, echoed the complaint, saying she reported to class at Bethune Monday and Tuesday but escaped both days. On Tuesday she hopped a fence, she said, and ran to elude a campus security guard.

“I never missed a day . . . until the strike,” Huff said.

Counselors did their best to emphasize the importance of staying on campus. Counselor Bennie Wharton sternly admonished one student by saying, “Why did your mother send you to school? You think she’s playing some kind of game? So why aren’t you in school?”

Parents expressed mixed reaction on learning where their kids had ended up.

When cab driver David Huff arrived to pick up his daughter, Veronica, he explained how he had given her money to go to the movies. Why should she waste time at school, he asked, if instructors were not there to teach her?

“I don’t feel she should waste her time and be bored because teachers cannot get a decent salary,” Huff said emphatically. “My daughter is a B-plus student. How can you tell a child with that much energy to just sit and wait. It’s not fair. A farmer would not treat his crops the way this city treats its children.”

Margaret Straughter, who had been at home washing clothes, glowered as she arrived for her teen-age daughters, Veronica and Anesia. Asked how she felt about the truancies, Slaughter said, “Ask them. When I get them home, they’re going to have some feeling.”

Counselors insist that someone in the family come down to get the students, a policy they say helps to deter repeat offenses.

“Sometimes we have to calm the parent down,” counseling aide Isabelle De La Torre said. “The parents say, ‘Here we thought she was safe at school and she’s downtown . . . with all these drugs.’ One woman grabbed her purse and whack! We’ve had mothers who just grabbed their daughters by the hair.”

Bernetta Bunch did not go quite that far, but she did promise her daughter, Denise, a stiff lesson in compulsory attendance.

“She’ll get it on the behind,” Bunch fumed. “She’s going to get it all. She should have never left home if she wasn’t going to school.”