Chalkboard Jungle : Gang violence is scaring some students away from school. A new program brings classroom to them.

Another youth, a 16-year-old, was shot in the Mar Vista Gardens housing project last Sunday.

He lay moaning and bleeding on the sidewalk until the paramedics arrived. They stuck an oxygen mask over his face and cut away his clothes to reveal three bullet wounds in his back and buttocks, put him on a stretcher, and rushed him to an emergency room.

Hours later, while the wounded youth was still in intensive care, gang members gathered around the football field at the project and boasted about their own near-misses with death. Several of them yanked up their T-shirts and pulled down their socks to show off bullet wounds and knife scars. One man holding a bottle of beer pointed across the field to a young man in a wheelchair and said that he helped put him there.

But for all their bravado, these gang members are afraid to go to school.

And with good reason. School district boundaries have been superseded by gang turf lines. Mar Vista Gardens, situated just west of Culver City in the Del Rey section of Los Angeles, is in the territory of a Culver City gang, but youngsters from the project and blocks around it are assigned to Venice High School--smack in the middle of enemy turf.

“If I go to Venice High, they’ll probably kill me,” said Edmond, 12, who said he is not a gang member.

Rick Lopez, a 19-year-old gang member in a red bandanna, agreed: “It’s a fact of life. If you grow up around here, you’re gonna get your a-- kicked if you go to Venice.”

As a result, some students--how many is in dispute--end up bouncing from one school to another to escape gang problems. Others drop out altogether.

To provide an alternative for some of these teen-agers, this fall the Los Angeles Unified School District launched a program at the 598-unit Mar Vista project to teach them basic skills and prepare them for the General Educational Development, or GED, test, the national exam that adults can take for the equivalent of a high school diploma.

School officials hope the program becomes a model for other urban areas experiencing similar problems because of clashes between gang and school boundaries. Project director Dawn Melton says that 34 students are enrolled in the class, and at least twice that number are waiting to get in. Some days the classroom in the Community Service Center becomes so crowded and hot that students take their workbooks out to a picnic table.

Students spend mornings Monday through Thursday studying a workbook. Every now and then they see a video on job skills. Their average reading level is grade 5 1/2. Some parents say the program is better than nothing, but complain that their kids have a right to a full education.

“He has no prom, no sports, no extra subjects,” a mother named Maria said of her son, asking that their last names not be used. “I feel sorry for him.”

School officials wonder what more they can do. It would be absurd, they say, to build each gang its own school. Officials sometimes debate redrawing boundaries in areas of Los Angeles rife with gang conflicts, but board member Mark Slavkin calls that idea impractical, too. “Gang territories come and go every year or two. Creating boundaries around them is slippery,” he said.

Slavkin said one solution is to make it easier to transfer from schools. Currently, students at Venice High can apply for transfers into the Culver City Unified School District or to another school on the Westside. Getting one of these transfers, however, often entails a battle with school authorities.

When “Eva,” 15, graduated from Marina del Rey Junior High School last year, she begged to transfer out of Venice High School. (Eva and her counselor asked that her real name be withheld to protect against retaliation.) She was not a gang member, she said, but she could be perceived as one.

“I told them I was gonna get beat up and my life was in danger,” she said.

Officials told her they could do nothing until something happened to prove her fears were real.

“We can’t just transfer a student because he thinks something is going to happen,” said David Bice, an attendance counselor for the school district, noting that a school’s funding and staffing is tied to stable enrollment. “He has a basic obligation to try and adjust.”

Scared, Eva played hooky for the first two days. On the third day of school, she went to school--and was beaten up by 15 girls and four boys, she said.

“I felt like crying. Not because it hurt me, but because of anger at the school. It’s stupid that I had to get hurt to transfer,” she said.

Others agree. “The district policy is tough, it is a pain, it is cumbersome, you really have to press your case, and that has to be looked at,” Slavkin said. “If a student is concerned about his safety, he won’t be able to concentrate in a classroom.”

But Andrea Natker, principal of Venice High School, says such stories are the exception.

This year, she said, only 22 students asked to transfer out of Venice High School--and all but five of them dropped their requests after talking it over with a counselor.

“Our students are safe,” she said. “If you’re not dressing or acting like a gang member, you’ll be OK.”

Gang tensions, however, ebb and flow. There have been times when students from Mar Vista Gardens--especially those not in gangs--could attend Venice High without fear. But many youngsters from the project do not share Natker’s view that this is such a time.

Counselors who work with Mar Vista Gardens children also questioned Natker’s statistics, and predicted that the number of transfers will increase as the year continues.

Last year, according to district figures, 36 students were granted transfers into Culver City, and 27 were denied transfers. Figures on the transfers requested and granted to schools inside the district, and the number of dropouts and truants from the Mar Vista Gardens area, were unavailable.

One school official, who asked not to be identified, said that Los Angeles and Culver City agree on an informal “quota” of students that can transfer into Culver City every year. Dr. Vera Jashni, deputy superintendent for the Culver City district, said the district does not accept students who are active gang members or who have a criminal record. Officials say such are the consequences of gang membership.

Counselors argue that in some rough neighborhoods the decision to join a gang is pure self-preservation, and that society has an obligation to provide even hard-core members with an education and an avenue of escape.

“All I needed was a chance, man,” said Lopez, the gang member with the red bandanna. He explained that he dropped out of Venice High School and went to live with a relative in the San Fernando Valley, where he finished high school. He now has a job in a supermarket.

Culver officials say they have no responsibility to Los Angeles schoolchildren. They say they want to help, but they must protect their own students.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Pat Nichols, assistant principal at Marina del Rey Junior High. “If we can get gang-bangers into education maybe they can see a way out. But in the meantime we can’t kill the other kids.”

There is no easy solution. Even when students transfer to other Westside schools, they sometimes must ride buses through enemy gang territory. The risk, time and hassle of getting to schools so far away from home contribute to truancy and tardiness, said Jesse Colon, a counselor with Project Heavy West, a youth counseling service.

Other students have discipline and gang problems in their new schools and eventually are expelled to yet another campus. Teachers refer to this rotation of children as “the dance of the lemons.”

“Nobody really wants these kids,” Colon said. Youngsters sense this and become frustrated and depressed, he said. Eventually, many drop out.

By the time they regret it, it may be too late.

When older gang members kick back, Lopez said, they sometimes stop talking about their scars and battles and talk about school.

Lopez said he often hears his homeboys say, “I swear to God, man, I wish I had my diploma.” He gestured to the field of boys and men drinking beer, the cars blaring music and the children gathered around an ice cream truck--where, just hours before, a kid had been shot.

“This ain’t life, man,” Lopez said. “This ain’t life.”