School Violence Is Rising, Experts Warn

A gun-wielding madman takes over a classroom. The teacher feels his pulse race and his temples pound. And then, even as the drama is unfolding, he starts to daydream and feels an overwhelming desire to sleep. Some of his students put their heads on their desks and nod off.

Bizarre as this scenario sounds, teacher and students in this hypothetical scenario are demonstrating a normal human response to danger--a primal desire to escape through sleep, a panel of experts on hostage-related stress told a conference of school administrators from nine Southern California school districts on Wednesday.

The “Safe, Secure and Peaceful Schools Conference,” sponsored by the Los Angeles County Office of Public Education and held at a Garden Grove hotel, presented a view of public education in America today that seemed anything but safe or peaceful. Topics ranged from dealing with students who bring automatic weapons to class to handling bomb threats.

Violence is on the rise in the nation’s schools, and no school system, no matter how suburban or middle class, is immune, the experts warned.

“There is every reason to expect that the recent trends of school violence will continue to worsen,” said a paper presented by a team of legal and psychiatric experts formed by the Simi Valley Unified School District.

“If you are an educator in an inner city secondary school, it is likely that you will need no encouragement to prepare for the threat of armed assaults and hostage taking on your campus,” the paper said. “However, the problem is not confined to these high-risk schools.”

Simi Valley Police Lt. Robert Klamser, an international consultant on hostage negotiating and a co-author of the paper, told the conference that 150,000 crimes are committed each year in the nation’s schools.

In 1988, hostages were taken in 18 classrooms around the country, Klamser said.

Klamser added that 95% of all hostage situations are resolved with no loss of life. In most cases, it is simply a matter of calming the captor down and then waiting for him to reach a point of exhaustion, which usually comes 13 to 14 hours after the siege begins.

“The longer the bad guy and good guy are together, the less likely the bad guy is going to kill the good guy,” Klamser said. “ . . . If the hostage taker wanted to commit a massacre, he would have already done it.”

Anthony Bonaccorso, a Simi Valley psychiatrist and a consultant on hostage negotiations, advised educators to be cooperative and reassuring to a captor, even if they are ordered to leave their students alone with the hostage taker.

The so-called Stockholm syndrome, in which captives identify with their captors, is common among hostages, although some of them may later feel guilt, Bonaccorso said. The feelings arise from healthy survival instincts, he said. Police welcome such developments because they tend to defuse the situation and buy them more time, he said.

“Time is on your side,” Bonaccorso told his audience. “Exhaustion is what police officers are waiting for. . . . Suddenly, we’re negotiating for a McDonald’s hamburger and a cup of coffee.”

Klamser said police who are criticized in hostage situations for failing to act quickly enough may have simply been buying time. He noted that 85% of the captives killed during a hostage situation are killed after police attempt a rescue.

“Once we get talking about food, it can go on and on,” he said. “ ‘Do you want McDonald’s or Jack-in-the-Box? Do you want it with ketchup or without? . . . ‘ We want to keep him making decisions because that wears him out.”