Inglewood Schools Adopt Strict Anti-Gang Strategy

The Inglewood Unified School District took on the Inglewood Village Crips, Crenshaw Mafia, Samoan Crips and other local gangs this week with a new policy that aims to reduce their influence and activities on school campuses.

The “gang suppression strategies” approved Wednesday night by the school board will forbid students to wear gang-style attire, pay parents to patrol the campuses and transfer hard-core gang members to a special school.

There is a gang problem in all grades and it is getting worse, said Hollis Dillon, the district’s director of special projects.

Members of the security force that patrols the district’s schools have reported that numerous guns and other weapons have been seized from high school students. The also say that many fights at the schools are gang related.

“We’re losing our schools,” Dillon told the board.

Although opposition to gang activity in the schools was universal, some board members and others said that the ban on gang symbols is too broad and could be used to harass non-gang members wearing the wrong colors or haircuts.

Amon Rashed, the student body president at Inglewood High School, criticized dress and hair restrictions already in place at his school for restricting the freedom of students who have nothing to do with gangs. He said he was required to trim his beard and allow the zig-zag and arrow designs in his hair to grow out during his campaign for president.

“In a few months I’ll be able to vote for president of the United States,” Rashed said. “I should be able to decide on my own haircut.”

Included in the series of steps in the new policy is one that prohibits “any apparel, jewelry, accessory, notebook or manner of grooming which, by virtue of its color, arrangement, trademark or any other attribute, denotes membership in such a group that advocates drug use or exhibits behaviors that interfere with the normal and orderly operation of a school.”

Violations will result in a parent conference for the first offense and could lead to expulsion after four infractions.

At Inglewood High School, Principal Lawrence Freeman already enforces a dress code as strict as the anti-gang code adopted districtwide Wednesday. Freeman said that bizarre student hairstyles like duck tails or symbols cut in the eyebrows or side of the head begin as a fad and are later adopted by gangs. Beepers and red and blue shoe laces or belts also are banned under Freeman’s code.

“They have every right to look like what they want to look like--but not at Inglewood High School,” Freeman said.

Calling it a “hairy” issue, school board President Larry Aubry said the district’s new anti-gang policy must be carefully implemented.

“I have some problems deciding who’s a bad dude and who just looks like (one),” he said.

Board Vice President Joseph Rouzan, a former Inglewood police chief, said it is essential to have a strongly worded policy. He successfully supported including a ban on making gang signs.

“People are flashing signs and getting killed,” he said. “I understand there’s going to be a lot of judgment in this.”

The parent patrol program, called the Parent Aid Corps, will pay 18 parents $6.50 an hour to monitor students at Morningside High School and Monroe Junior High School. The program will begin at those two schools, where gang problems are considered the most severe, and may be expanded to other campuses later, district officials said.

The parents, who will be hired within the next few months, must have had previous volunteer experience in the schools and have children in district schools. They will be instructed in gang symbols and what constitutes gang activity. Officials said that the parents will not intervene directly if they spot any gang activity, but will be instructed to notify school security officers. Officials say they believe the parents’ presence on campus will help curb gang activity.

In another anti-gang initiative, the district agreed to move hard-core gang members who are “nonfunctioning academically and nonconforming to school rules” to the Hillcrest Continuation High School in Inglewood. School officials estimate about 150 students in the sixth through ninth grades fall within this category. The program will cost the district about $100,000 a year, officials said.

The problem students will have more class time at the Hillcrest campus than at regular campuses, and transferring them will remove a negative influence from the other students, officials said.