Teacher’s Assault on Violence Criticized

When Rudy Cordero’s second-period students came into his Eagle Rock High School classroom on May 23, they told the history teacher that a 14-year-old girl had just been stabbed. Minutes earlier, many of the students had watched the girl, dazed and bloody, stumble into their first-period classroom.

Cordero went home sick that day. “Sick,” he explained later, “that a school campus could turn into a battle zone.”

In the weeks that followed, Cordero and a small group of parents and students launched an attack on a formidable foe--the rising number of violent assaults at Eagle Rock.

The group achieved victory by helping to create a toughened district expulsion policy, adopted last week by the Board of Education, for students carrying weapons on campus.

In the process, however, Cordero has paid a price. Although his intentions were applauded, the history teacher has since been rebuked for encouraging a student walkout and criticizing the school’s principal.

“He’s a great teacher, and I totally agree with the end result,” said Joel Ginsburg, a math teacher at Eagle Rock, which serves 2,500 students in grades seven through 12. “I just disagree with the fact that the kids thought they couldn’t work through the system to make a change. It’s just a matter of approaching the proper people in a proper fashion.” The 40-year-old Cordero is no stranger to conflict; yet he always has been detached from the battle. During Vietnam, he taught Air Force pilots how to use flight simulators. Since then, he has had a fascination with war books. At Eagle Rock, battles for “Admiral” Cordero and members of his Star Trek Club have been reserved for fantasy--usually during Trekkie rerun festivals.

He joined the front lines, he said, when his students became the victims.

“This isn’t a paper-work job,” Cordero said. “You’re dealing with kids. What good is a job if you’re going to allow kids to get hurt or die?”

That threat has increased this school year at Eagle Rock. Between September and June, five students were caught carrying guns. Six other students were stabbed or attacked, Principal John Anderson said.

“This is all very much out of sync with what’s taken place at this school,” said Anderson, who has been principal since February, 1989. No students were stabbed or found with guns last year, and few violent incidents occurred before he arrived, he said.

“I went there for six years, and I can’t remember a single knifing incident,” said Sandy Cole, an Eagle Rock student who graduated in 1987.

Cordero, who has taught at Eagle Rock for about five years, said he had grown frustrated with the increasing violence and had agitated unsuccessfully for something to be done by the teachers’ union and the school’s leadership council.

In March, a 10th-grade boy was stabbed by two classmates in a gang-related incident. Authorities treating the victim discovered that he was carrying a pistol. A month later, Cordero began his protest. He quit the union and the council, dissatisfied, he said, with the groups’ failure to respond to the issue.

The stabbing of the 14-year-old girl prompted a broad campaign. Shortly after the incident, hundreds of students walked out of their classes for an hour and wore black wristbands for a day. Cordero encouraged the walkout but did not initiate it, he said.

More than 200 angry parents attended a community meeting about the issue. After it, parents bombarded district officials with letters and petitions. Their criticism, and Cordero’s, largely was aimed at two groups: the Board of Education, for voting down in May a measure that would have automatically expelled any student caught with a weapon at school, and Eagle Rock administrators, such as Anderson. The principal, Cordero and some parents and students claimed, was too worried about the image of the school to speak out on the issue.

On June 25, the board approved a revised expulsion measure that automatically kicks out of the district any secondary-level student caught with a firearm or any student who assaults another student in a way likely to cause serious injury.

Julie Korenstein, who introduced the measure, acknowledged that protests by Cordero and Eagle Rock parents helped spur her to action.

“There hasn’t been another community that I’m aware of that’s gotten the spark behind them to come out, like Eagle Rock has,” said David Michels, co-chairman of a board-appointed task force on violence in schools. “I think it really brought the message home . . . that something had to be done.”

To some, the board’s action made Cordero a hero. To others, it was a successful end acquired by questionable, sometimes irritating, means.

“He taught us to stand up for what we wanted, instead of hiding in the shadows,” Cole said. “He taught us that if we want things to change, we have to stand up for ourselves.”

Other teachers said they, too, want their students to be safe. But they argued that there are more appropriate ways to seek remedies than encouraging student walkouts or criticizing administrators.

“It is the students’ right to speak out,” Ginsberg said. “But our authority is to keep students in the classroom, not encourage them to be outside the classroom. We have input into the Board of Education, we have input from parents. We go through our representatives and they are much more attentive than anyone wants to believe.”

“I think Mr. Cordero needs to work with people and not be sort of defensive and accusative at the same time,” added Lucy Cole, a parent and leadership council member who is not related to Sandy Cole. “He’s the only teacher of all the ones over there who seems to feel that way.”

Anderson would not comment on Cordero’s role in the events at Eagle Rock. Nor would he comment on the teacher’s criticism of administrators or Cordero’s claim that Anderson pressured him to stay quiet.

“Let me just say this,” he said. “Rudy Cordero is a concerned person about safety on campus. He does a lot of positive things, both at school and in the community, in the name of young people.”

For Cordero and others, the issue of student violence most likely will remain dormant until classes resume in the fall. At that time, he and Anderson said, school officials may consider measures such as opening an information hot line for parents, initiating an anti-violence poster campaign and installing a campus metal detector.

And at that time, Cordero said, he will resume his fighting stance on the front line--no matter what the price.

“I have just tried my best to break the depression and fear in my class,” he said. “I’d rather lose my job and save a kid than save my job and watch a kid get killed. I either believe in something or I don’t.”