Relentless Anti-Gang Lessons Urged : Schools: Violence shows that students need to be ‘surrounded’ with the message throughout curricula, educators say.

Citing a dramatic rise in gang violence among adolescents, gang experts and county school officials urged teachers and school districts Saturday to incorporate anti-gang lessons into everyday curricula.

“The kids need to be surrounded by prevention messages,” said Nina J. Winn, director of the county Department of Education’s Safe School Projects. “If I talk to them and you talk to them and the teachers talk to them, then something has to sink in.”

With the county becoming increasingly multicultural, teaching schoolchildren to communicate with each other and learn to understand ethnic differences can help stem the hate that leads to gang warfare, officials said.

“You should not only be teaching history,” said Joe Cervantes, a Cal State Fullerton clinical psychologist, “but you have to teach (students) to talk with each other.”

Cervantes’ comments came during a lecture at the central office here of the Department of Education, which held the first of a series of gang awareness seminars for teachers, school administrators and counselors.

The series, offered under a grant by the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning, will continue Saturday and conclude the night of March 5.

It is aimed at encouraging varied agencies to work together as a way to combat gang violence and to discuss the department’s Project Yes curricula, which teaches student leadership development, conflict management and self-confidence.

“When we started the (program), we aimed to build teamwork,” Winn said. “We think we are doing that.”

She said the series is needed because many teachers, although standing before youthful gang members five days a week in classrooms, are often unfamiliar with the nuances of the subculture and language of street gangs.

Cervantes, who specializes in the psychology of gang members, told the group that many schools, particularly in low-income, high-crime areas, have been forced to become virtual fortresses against outside violence, thereby cutting off vital communication between families and teachers.

Both teachers and parents are often unaware of how much students are involved in gangs on or off campus until too late. “There’s no effective dialogue between school and community,” Cervantes said.

No county community is immune to gang violence, said Gary Bushman, a longtime member of a Santa Ana police anti-gang unit and now an investigator for the county district attorney’s office.

In an hourlong presentation that included a graphic video of a fatal gang-related shooting in a convenience store, Bushman warned that such movies as “Colors” and “New Jack City” provide youngsters with a blueprint on how to act as gang members.

He said graffiti on schoolbooks and paperwork and clothes identifiable with gangs should not be tolerated. School officials should monitor such behavior which, he said, ultimately leads to violence.

“Kids are getting killed out there over the color of their shoelaces,” he said.

He said some neighborhoods are virtual “war zones” in which residents sleep on floors and stack sandbags in windows as a safeguard against stray bullets.

Most teachers agreed, expressing frustration that they seem powerless to protect innocent children outside the schoolyard and unable to persuade them that gang life is not as romantic as portrayed by their peers.

“It’s amazing the horror stories they tell us,” said Kathy Woll, a Santa Ana High School instructor. “Some kids who have (relatives) in prison, they see them as heroes. What do we do about that?”

For years many school, city and community leaders refused to acknowledge the growth of gangs in the county and stymied some anti-gang efforts, Winn said. But in the last year, she has seen a breakdown of those barriers.

“It’s good to see that we are no longer ostrich-like, putting our heads in the sand,” she said. “I think we are making progress.”