Under the Gun: Armed Kids Have Teachers’ Nerves Shot

The seemingly endless series of stories of teen-agers shooting each other hits awfully close to home for schoolteachers. Let’s be realistic here: Kids spend six hours a day in school. You think teachers aren’t worried that some kids are packing guns in class?

At least one teacher is, and she talked about it after school Tuesday. This isn’t a Nervous Nellie. She has taught for 20 years. She knows the lift teachers get when former students come back and thank them for what they learned. She knows the frustration that comes when she just can’t get through to a kid. While she and her colleagues have seen hundreds of other teachers burn out and drop out, she’s stayed on the job.

But this business of violence inside the schoolhouse--they didn’t teach that in teacher’s college.

“Teachers are scared about it,” she said, not wanting to identify herself for fear of reprisal from administrators at the South County high school where she teaches. She talked about 100-pound teachers being threatened by 200-pound students, known drug pushers still walking the halls and kids who should be carrying clarinets to school carrying guns instead.

I suggested it was preposterous that teachers were fearful in their own classrooms. “It strikes me as preposterous that I can’t lock my door or shut my door during the school day and that I have to worry about who’s coming down that hall,” she replied. “I’m not paranoid; I have no reason to be.”

She said she’s heard of occasional incidents of students carrying guns at her school. The information spreads through word of mouth from students to teachers, she says.

“The teachers are furious, not with the kids, but with the administration for not getting tougher, throwing kids off campus who commit major infractions,” she said. Too often, she said, those kids return to classes.

“They give these kids chance after chance. The administration hushes up everything. They don’t even tell the teachers about the kids, which I think is really bad. We’re not forewarned about anything. Instead of being the last to know, we need to be the first to know.”

On the front line daily with teen-agers, high school teachers don’t need to read the papers to know about troubled kids. They know about the Loara High School student who held a class hostage last year before shooting a classmate. This year, a Dana Hills student shot another youth on the beach, and word spread that he had had the gun in school during the week. Headlines tell of another youth who shoots his sister; another youth who shoots a friend.

And in Anaheim, salary bargainers for the teachers this year negotiated for stronger measures to guarantee teacher safety and made some modest gains.

“It used to be that if there was a fight, a teacher would step in and break it up,” says Norma Potter, a special education teacher in Anaheim and an Orange County official of the California Teachers Assn. “Not anymore, because the teacher is afraid the student might pull a weapon.”

Figures from the state Department of Education show that the number of weapons seized from California public school students increased 43% during the 1988-89 school year, the latest figures available. In Orange County, a state spokesman said, 400 weapons were seized that year, including 24 guns.

“What prompts it is TV and movies,” the South County teacher said. “How many murders were there in ‘Lethal Weapon’? Kids love this kind of stuff. They thrive on these movies. They go to movies a lot. The ones that are the most popular are Clint Eastwood and ones like ‘Lethal Weapon.’ That’s their role model. That’s what they emulate.”

I told her it was hard to argue with the logic: If kids have access to guns, as the headlines prove they do, should we be surprised if they bring them to school? And use them?

The teacher wanted to make it clear: she and her fellow teachers aren’t paralyzed with fear.

But there’s a feeling that there are too many guns available and no safeguard at the schoolhouse door to keep weapons out. Someday, she said, a kid will walk down the hallway with a gun and leave victims in his wake.

“It will happen,” she said. “I really predict it will happen. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it will happen in my school. You can’t put this many kids together--and we know we have lots of troubled kids--and not have something happen.”

For teachers who are supposed to be worrying about lesson plans and grading quizzes, that’s a chilling prediction. “I don’t want to predict doom and gloom,” she said. “But it’s a definite possibility. I don’t think you could talk to a single teacher at my school who doesn’t believe that.”