COLUMN ONE : America’s Students: Armed and Dangerous : As many as 90,000 schoolchildren carry guns to class every day. And serious injuries are on the rise as campus violence spirals out of control.

Arthur Jack knew for a split second that there was a gun being pointed at him.

He started to run, but it was too late. One of the bullets hit him in the back. The crowd around him screamed and some ran for the door. Others hit the deck.

Jack, who was 17 and the captain of his football team, was killed two weeks ago as he stood in the breakfast line of suburban Crosby High School. He was shot by a 15-year-old girl who had borrowed a gun from a friend before she hopped on a bus for school.

As police have put together the story, LaKeeta Cadoree, who had never been in trouble with the law before, shot Jack because at some point the day before he had called her a “bitch.”

What happened to Jack, though, is most troubling because it had a naggingly familiar sound to it: the mixing of school and violence. Only the week before, another Houston high school student was shot to death when he was caught in the middle of a gang fight after a Friday night football game.

Two young children have been raped and two others wounded as they walked to school this year. A junior high school girl strode into class last month and threatened to kill another girl whom she had been fighting with earlier. Only this week, a student accidentally shot a friend in the leg when he was showing off a pistol while taking the bus to school.

A grim litany, this one, and one that is bound to get longer as the school year goes on. And not just in Houston. The sad fact is that America’s schools are becoming more dangerous with each passing year, not only in the urban ghetto, but also in suburbia and rural America.

According to one estimate, as many as 90,000 schoolchildren carry guns to class every day. Fueled by the availability of weapons, the increase in gang activity, drugs and broken homes, violence on America’s school campuses is spiraling out of control. The desire to learn has been supplanted in many schools by the desire just to make it through the day, to avoid being shot, stabbed or beaten up.

“While parents have always worried about their children’s education and their abilities to read, write and do basic mathematics, many are becoming horrified by a new threat,” said a report on gun violence by the Washington, D.C.-based Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. “They fear that their children may be severely injured or may not come home from school at all.”

Or as Ronald Stephens, the executive director of the National School Safety Center put it: “If a foreign nation had done what we have allowed to be done to our schools, we would declare an all-out war.”

Stephens, whose center is in Westlake Village, Calif., testified before a congressional subcommittee last July. And what he said described the ominous course being set in America’s schools today. He said that while the actual number of violent incidents was static, the seriousness of the injuries was rising dramatically.

“Many of the former fistfights are being replaced by gunfights,” he said. “Fire drills are being replaced by crisis drills. Oakland and Los Angeles and even Cokeville, Wyo., have bullet drills where youngsters are taught to take the prone position when gunfire occurs. Other school systems have ‘DBS’ (drive-by shooting) drills, drop drills and ‘red alert’ drills.”

The drop drill was evident in Southwest Los Angeles last weekend, when a high school football crowd at Jackie Robinson Stadium was sprayed with gunfire. The Crenshaw High and Dorsey High teams immediately dropped like soldiers in a line of fire. Two spectator students were injured by ricocheting bullets. The game was called off.

The Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, in a report issued last year, said that at least 71 people--65 students and six school employees--were killed with guns in schools from 1986 to September, 1990--and those figures were based on newspaper clippings rather than any centralized reporting. There were another 201 who were severely wounded and 242 held hostage.

Teachers talk of an inability to teach because students are distracted, and they also talk of fearing for their own lives as attacks on them by students increase.

“Students can’t learn the lessons they need to succeed in life if their attention is on first learning how to survive the day in school,” said Pat Tornillo, the president of the Florida teachers’ union.

Hector Madrigal, the head of the Los Angeles Unified School District unit that handles expulsions, said the increase in the number of weapons on campuses in recent years was a reflection of what is going on outside the school grounds and that most of the guns and knives are for self-defense.

“When we talk to these kids, we find that the majority (who take weapons to school do it because) they did not feel safe going to school or coming back home from school,” he said. “Most of them say they have been harassed by gang members and they felt they needed to be armed to protect themselves.”

The sustained fear of violence that surrounds the lives of many schoolchildren, particularly in the inner city, is enough to shock even the most hardened.

One telling example involves a visit by a veteran of the Persian Gulf War to a Watts elementary school, whose third-graders there had written him a series of touching letters. After listening to such things as descriptions of rocket attacks and running for cover, the students nodded sympathetically.

“They understand,” said the teacher. “It’s like when the shooting starts on Friday night and their mothers make them lie down on the floor behind the couch.”

In years past, school violence was predominantly a problem of the East and West coasts, where most gang activity was located. Two years ago, Peter Blauvelt, a nationally recognized expert on school safety, predicted that the violence would soon spread to the heartland of America, not only to urban ghettos but also into the suburbs and rural areas. His prediction appears to have come true.

Take, for instance, the case of East High School in Salt Lake City.

On the first day of school, assistant coach Bill Price tried to break up a melee between rival gang members. As Price was approaching, six shots were fired. One hit him in the leg and another narrowly missed the head of a math teacher who was also approaching the students.

“I had coached the majority of these kids and been around them and their parents all my life,” said Price. “It didn’t even enter my mind that a weapon would be used.”

The 16-year-old who did the shooting has been committed to a 90-day period of observation and assessment, but Price thinks the sentence is too lenient for such an offense. So does Gerald Pescaldo, the math teacher who was almost shot.

“Now a kid goes back to the street and he is a hero to the gang,” he said. “What he is is a potential murderer.”

Texas A & M University studied 23 small communities in Central Texas and concluded that more than half of the boys and 20% of the girls had been involved in fights using weapons in the previous year. One fourth of the students said they had carried a weapon to school at least one time during the year.

That does not mean every school is a place that breeds fear. Mostly rural Nebraska, for example, did not have a case of an armed attack all last year.

But Nebraska is an exception:

--On the first day of school in Washington, D.C., seven shots were fired into a crowd of high school students during the lunch hour. Four days later, an armed man entered another D.C. high school, hit a female student in the head with his pistol, then exchanged gunfire with another youth after he left the school building.

--In such diverse places as El Paso, Anchorage and Tustin, Calif., any clothing that signifies gang membership has been banned.

--At Santa Ana High School, a teacher was caught in the middle of a drive-by last month as she was leaving the school. School officials have had a section of street closed off to prevent drive-by shootings and have hired an extra security guard.

--Teachers in Columbus, Ohio, now carry wallet-size cards with exact procedures of what steps to take if they are attacked by a student.

--According to Stephens, 25% of the nation’s 50 largest school systems are using metal detectors in at least one of their schools.

--The first statewide survey of school violence in Florida showed there were 46,000 criminal offenses last year, ranging from murder, rape and robbery to simple threats of assault.

-Board trustees at Orange Unified School District recently agreed to allow a probation officer, who specializes in gangs, to be stationed at two of its two high school campuses. The school district has also set up a series of community meetings so that parents can learn more about gangs directly from police officers.

--Detroit school security guards have asked that they be allowed to carry guns when conducting weapons sweeps and have also asked for a study to see if they should have side arms at all times. Meanwhile, a 16-year-old boy was beaten to death in suburban Detroit recently by a gang of 10 or 12 youths.

--Almost every Chicago-area school has a sign that says, “This is a Safe School Zone,” Since the start of the school year, at least 26 guns have been confiscated from students.

-In Orange County, there was a 95% increase in the number of assaults with weapons in schools over the past four years according to figures compiled by the State Department of Education. There were 43 such cases in 1985-86 compared to 84 incidents in 1988-89. School officials say that an increase in gang membership has led to more more violence on campuses.

The efforts to stop the violence usually start with beefed-up security and metal detectors. A number of school districts in New York participate in programs designed to teach students how to resolve conflicts without using weapons. Others around the country have attempted to convince students that telling teachers and administrators about weapons in the classroom is not being a snitch.

Many schools around the country have initiated strict anti-weapons policies, even those places where school violence is not considered a major problem.

“We’ve adopted a zero-tolerance policy for weapons,” said Tom Moore, assistant superintendent of the 4,000-student Caldwell, Ida., School District. Under district policy, “any object which can be used, or can be intended to inflict pain or injury” is prohibited. Moore said that includes Boy Scout knives.

A similar policy exists at the Santa Ana Unified School district, where students face expulsion if caught with a weapon.

Vanessa Scherzer of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence contends that curbing access to guns can begin at home, because that is where most students get them. The center has also developed a curriculum that would teach students the danger of guns in a society in which the value of life has been cheapened.

“It’s obvious there is a disregard for life,” she said. “It’s in the papers every day.”

Stephens wants a federally mandated school violence reporting system to study just how large the problem really is. He said only two states--California and South Carolina--now require such reporting.

“I believe school safety has to be placed on the agenda, both nationally and locally,” he said. “I believe the situation can be turned around. But it took a long time to get where we are now and it may take a good while to return it to the way it used to be.”

Staff writers Sandy Banks in Los Angeles, Mike Clary in Miami, Doug Conner in Seattle, Lily Eng in Orange County, Janine DeFao in Washington, Lianne Hart in Houston, Ann Rovin in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago and Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.