A Fatal Failure? : Crime: Teachers and other school officials say they spent thousands of hours trying to turn a 10-year-old boy’s life around. Now he is accused of killing a woman, and they feel a sense of guilt.

Teachers in Barrio Logan returned to school on Monday with a lingering sense of failure.

For more than two years, they had worked without success to turn around the behavior of a 10-year-old boy who fought, vandalized and engaged in other gang-related activity. Despite all their efforts, they learned late last week, he now stands accused of shooting into a neighbor’s home, killing a 25-year-old mother of three.

Schoolteachers, the principal, the nurse, the psychologist and counselors at Perkins Elementary School say they had put in thousands of staff hours over a two-year period to prepare the child for a special class that might handle his emotional problems better.

Their counterparts at nearby King Elementary attempted the same procedures after the boy was transferred to a special class there last summer. They even worked up a home-study plan after the boy repeatedly ran out on his new school.

Yet in the face of his apparent incorrigibility--and his mother’s admitted inability to exercise any control over her son--the educators now feel devastated by their failure to turn the child around.

“When something like this happens, everyone feels some type of guilt, of failure,” Perkins Principal Marco Curiel said Monday. “At the elementary school level, we see ourselves as very nurturing; we have the mind-set of saviors.”

“It’s been a real emotional week. We knew that we had lost a Perkins parent. But we never thought that we’d have to confront the suspect side of the issue as well.”

Added Dennis Doyle, principal at King: “Any failure cuts to the quick for us as educators, especially where there’s a life lost in the process.”

The boy was charged on Friday with murder in the March 8 death of Manuela Garcia de la Rosa, who was shot in the head while tucking her 8-year-old son into bed. The boy admitted firing bullets into the wall of the trailer where the victim lived with her family, the youth’s mother told The Times last week, but said he was only trying to shoot out a light and not kill anyone.

The boy’s mother--struggling to raise seven children as a single mother on public assistance--said her son had been in constant trouble at school and with police for roaming the downtrodden neighborhood late at night, tagging walls with graffiti and for mouthing profanities at his mother, at teachers and at community workers. Teachers also worry about what will happen to the boy’s siblings, three of whom attended Perkins. In fact, his older sister, a sixth-grader at Perkins, was “adopted” on Monday by her teacher. The teacher has permission from Curiel to pick up the girl each morning, take her to school, and then return her home in the afternoon, each school day until June so that she can graduate with the rest of her class.

The family received an eviction notice on Thursday, the day after the boy was arrested for Garcia’s death. The family began moving its meager possessions to a house in National City over the weekend, putting the children outside the San Diego Unified School District boundaries.

“The teacher was willing to make a personal commitment” to keep the girl’s education going at Perkins, Curiel said.

Since his arrest, the boy’s mother said, he calls her several times a day from Juvenile Hall, where he is being held, tearfully telling her that he wants to come home.

The mother told The Times last week that while she listens to his plea, she will not tell her son her real feelings about the matter.

“I’ve told the police that I don’t want him to come home,” she said. “He needs discipline to help him turn his life around . . . he needs to be in a place where someone can have some control over him. You know, he’s only 10.”