RIOT AFTERMATH: GETTING BACK TO BUSINESS : Back to School--a Little Wiser : Returning Students Talk of Fear, Debate Morality of Riots

Schools reopened across Los Angeles on Monday, with students--many away from home for the first time in days--trading stories about fear, confusion and anger in the aftermath of last week’s rioting.

In high schools from Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley, the lesson plan was pared down to one simple, but obviously compelling, subject--civics. At many elementary schools, Monday was more like Sunday school, as still-frightened kids talked about right and wrong, good and bad, revenge and forgiveness.

“It was not a very fun weekend, was it?” Principal Randy Ward asked 150 third-graders at Whittier Elementary School in the heart of a hard-hit Long Beach neighborhood.

“No!” they hollered in unison.

“How many of you feel a little scared in your stomachs right now?” Ward continued.

Every hand in the auditorium shot up.

Almost everywhere, attendance Monday was near normal--but little else was. Jittery parents lingered outside front gates after dropping off children. Students skirted gun-toting National Guard members stationed a block from some campuses. Chatter on school buses abruptly halted as charred buildings came in sight.

“You are surrounded by friends, people who love you,” teacher Alan Pinkton reassured fifth-graders at Tujunga’s Plainview Elementary School, a scene repeated throughout the day at schools across the city.

“You know that I love all of you,” Pinkton said. “This is a special class. I wouldn’t let anything happen to us. Maybe I can’t stop everybody from coming in here. But if we work together, we can stop anything. Good ol’ Room 25 is the safest place to be.”

The violence affected students individually, teachers said, making some unusually withdrawn, some unable to concentrate and others anxious to turn it around.

About 200 students at Manual Arts High School in South Los Angeles gave up their lunch hour to talk about rebuilding and healing their devastated community, while others passed time exchanging tales about looted merchandise they were wearing and weapons they had stored at home.

A boy lost his home to fire. A girl saw her uncle beaten. Another girl threw some paper down in front of Principal Robert Barner and when he stopped her, refused to pick it up.

“She told me: ‘This is America and I can do what I want,’ ” said Barner, who was a high school student during the Watts riots in 1965. “Normally, I would have hauled her into the office for talking back. But I let her go. I realize that all the kids are under abnormal strains.”

Outraged members of a Latino club at Inglewood High School draped campus trees with huge yellow ribbons in a call for tranquillity. Miles away in Simi Valley, where the verdicts were reached last week in the trial that set off the riots, some students said attention Monday had turned from the violence in Los Angeles--which they discussed in class last week--to the decision to cancel Simi Valley High School’s prom.

“I was pretty much upset that they canceled it,” said Simi Valley senior Chris Smith. “There probably could’ve been a lot of trouble, but I would’ve gone anyway.”

Eight of the 286 Roman Catholic schools in the Los Angeles archdiocese remained closed because of nagging electrical outages in some hard-hit areas, but officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District reported that all 651 of its schools reopened. School police stepped up security in neighborhoods where rioting occurred, but no unusual discipline problems were reported, a spokesman said.

Incredibly, in a district that suffers millions of dollars in damage each year from arson and vandalism, no damage--not even a broken window--has been reported since the violence erupted Wednesday.

“It is amazing,” district spokesman Patrick Spencer said. “Nothing.”

What the schools did not suffer in physical damage, however, was easily made up in the emotional toll on many of the district’s 640,000 students.

At Taft High School in Woodland Hills, two black seniors from South Los Angeles returned to school for the first time since Wednesday, but they complained that they ran up against a racial divide among their classmates.

“We know what it’s like to be persecuted because of our skin color, and they don’t,” said Aaron McKinney, who became so upset during a discussion in his drama class that he steered himself to the back of the classroom and sat down. Several of his white classmates, he said, had sided with the jury’s not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

Other students even ribbed McKinney about taking part in the looting.

“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.’ ”

In an 11th-grade American history class at Inglewood High, which last week had been studying a textbook chapter called “Intolerance and Conflict,” students were talking about the violence even before the class session began.

“No justice, no peace,” muttered one angry young man repeatedly as he came into the room. “Them police. . . .”

“I don’t like that word--police,” interrupted another youth.

“Hey, I’m going to be a cop, so you just watch what you say,” said a girl.

“Then just don’t beat nobody senseless,” the youth replied.

At Plainview Elementary in Tujunga, Fernando Garcia, a third-grader from Koreatown, told his classmates about the looting, killing and arson in his neighborhood.

Forgiving those responsible for the destruction, he said, is like fighting with his best friend over a toy. “He said something bad to me and I’ll hit him,” Fernando said. “Later, after I think about it, I’ll say that I’m sorry.”

Pressed by his teacher, Fernando admitted that maybe the toy was big enough for both him and his friend. The lesson, teacher Daniel Mulia told Fernando, was that perhaps they should forgive those who killed, looted and set fire to Los Angeles.

Most of the class nodded in silent agreement. But one youngster piped up, “But you can’t forgive when people take things that don’t belong to them.”

That led to a discussion of “little” mistakes, like misbehaving in class, and “big” mistakes, like the violence in South Los Angeles and Koreatown.

“Are people who make mistakes bad people?” the teacher asked.

“No,” the class of 30 replied.

The youngsters came up with suggestions on what to do when anger might get the best of them:

Count to 10. . . . Take three deep breaths. . . . Take some time and think about it. . . . Talk to yourself. . . . Tell yourself why you shouldn’t do bad things when you are mad. . . . Think nice thoughts.

“And if that doesn’t work,” Mulia told his students, “do it again and again and again until you do feel better.”

For some students, the bus ride to and from school was a shocking education in itself.

Each time school bus No. 2159 passed a burned-out business on Olympic Boulevard or Hoover Street, an eerie hush fell, with kids craning their necks to take in the destruction.

“See that?” one kid finally murmured, after looking at a trashed liquor store on Hoover Street near the Temple-Beaudry district. “Yeah,” a friend nodded, “pretty scary, huh?”

In all, the kids on bus No. 2159 saw more than 40 burned-out businesses during the trip to Tujunga, with stops to pick up others in the Temple-Beaudry area and in Echo Park.

Nobody knew what the only Korean child among the 34 riders thought of the mayhem. Ten-year-old Ho Kon, normally a pleasant type, kept to himself, not saying a word to anyone.

Staff writer Dean E. Murphy wrote this story. Contributing were staff writers Janet Rae-Dupree and Henry Chu and correspondent Larry Speer.