Black, White Students Try to Learn From One Another : Education: They exchange views for the first time since violence erupted over the King case. Sometimes walls remained.

For Jerry Benjamin, a black South Los Angeles youth who returned Monday to his Woodland Hills campus for the first time since last week’s riots, going back to school was a personal relief, a reassuring reversion to normalcy.

But his presence also carried a tacit message for his fellow students who witnessed the mayhem and pillaging from the comfort of their suburban San Fernando Valley living rooms.

“To let them see us come back, they’ll know that it’s not our fault,” said Jerry, 17, a senior who is bused in daily to Taft High School with dozens of other teen-agers from the inner city. “Letting us come back shows we’re still on friendly terms.”

It was one of many important messages given and received on campuses throughout Los Angeles on Monday as schools resumed their normal schedules after nights of violence that rocked the city to its core.

But because many schools in the Valley boast of large numbers of students who are bused in from South Los Angeles, it was also the first chance for black and white students to air their opinions together, struggling to explain their feelings and to understand the views of others.

Sometimes ethnic divides could not be bridged.

“There’s a wall,” Jerry said. “You can break through the wall, but it takes time.”

He and his friend Aaron McKinney said no racial tension simmered on their campus, but it was difficult for them to explain, for example, why blacks were so outraged by the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial and what the sting of prejudice felt like.

“We know what it’s like to be persecuted because of our skin color, and they don’t,” said McKinney, 18, also a senior at Taft, where about a quarter of the 3,200 students are bused in.

Several of his white classmates, he said, had sided with the not guilty verdicts in the case, making him so upset that he abruptly left his desk and sat down in the back of the classroom.

Discussions at high school campuses sprang up in classes from drama to Spanish. At elementary schools, teachers suspended their spelling tests, carefully guided their young charges in baring emotions and experiences of the past week--and found that a weekly “anger management lesson” suddenly assumed new significance.

In Bonnie Kliger’s first-grade class at Calvert Street School in Woodland Hills, it was the youngsters themselves who requested the lesson, which teaches children to deal with anger by breathing deeply, counting backward from five and thinking “nice thoughts.”

“What’s our nice thought for the day?” Kliger asked her class.

“Ice cream!” they shouted back. “And Disneyland!”

They were happy anchors for several young minds that had absorbed images of terror and anarchy over the weekend. Imprinted on first-grader Steven Holmes’ brain was the picture of looted stores in his South Los Angeles neighborhood.

“They broke into the ice cream store; they broke into the 99-Cent store,” he said. “The police had long guns. They were down on the ground and up on the roof.”

The racial element that marked much of the rampage also didn’t escape the 6-year-old’s notice. “They burnt down all the white stores,” he said matter-of-factly. “They didn’t burn down the black stores because they said, ‘Black-owned.’ ”

The looting also came up down the street at Taft--uncomfortably so for McKinney, who was ribbed about whether he had taken part in the rampage.

“They said, ‘Look what you did, man,’ and I’d say, ‘I didn’t do that!’ ” McKinney said. “We’ve been stereotyped because of our skin color; they think anyone black’s been looting. They say it jokingly, but I’m the kind of person who thinks, ‘If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.’ ”

Farhad Heidari, 16, acknowledged that living in Woodland Hills--which was untouched by violence--made it difficult to empathize with his black classmates. But it didn’t translate into indifference, he said.

“It’s difficult for a lot of us to relate to them,” he said. “But we’re concerned about how their communities are being torn apart.”