RIOT AFTERMATH : Schools Cope With Impact of Riots on Youth : Effects: Most students are confused by the unrest. Many denounce the violence, but know someone who took part in looting.

The routine is a little different at area schools in the aftermath of the Los Angeles-area riots. In class after class, the science books remained closed and the polynomials unfactored.

The street violence became the text, complete with illustrations of burned, looted and boarded-up businesses that students passed on their way to school.

Students spoke of anger, excitement, fear and hurt. Teachers, psychologists and law enforcement officers pondered the long-term effects of the unrest on the children and helped them cope as best they could using therapy, writing assignments, rallies, discussions and songs.

“Externally people see the damage, the buildings burned or destroyed,” said Eugene Ray, a psychologist with the Compton Unified School District. “They can’t see the damage to a child’s belief system. . . . Beliefs in government, school, the police. That’s the struggle, to rebuild those beliefs.”

After the April 29 verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial, history became something for which students could close their books and peer into the streets outside homes in Compton, Huntington Park, Long Beach, Lynwood and South Gate.

Fourteen-year-old Melvin Gold of Compton and his family had to water down their roof to put out sparks from a burning business.

Kong Be, 11, of Signal Hill, saw his parents’ market torn apart and looted. “My parents lost a lot of money,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is not right.’ You’ve got to use your own money to buy stuff. I’m sad now because we’re planning on moving away, and I’m really going to miss a lot of my friends.”

Students did not have to suffer personal loss, however, to be filled with anxiety and grief from the sights of fires, looting and M-16-toting soldiers, and the ashy smell of smoke.

“I was scared to go back to school because I thought they were going to bomb it,” said Marcus Mayers, 11, who goes to Alvarado Elementary in Signal Hill.

For Compton eighth-grader Nancy Del Toro, the fear evolved to anger. “It made me feel ashamed of my own race,” said the Latina teen-ager. “And to think of Koreans and whites looking at us looting through the cameras. . . . It’s going to make our future harder.”

Classmate Darrel Sims had no electricity in his home for two days as a result of riot damage. “I don’t understand it at all,” he said of the violence. “It makes no sense to burn up the community.”

Criticism of the rioting did not diminish the anger that youths felt when a jury in Simi Valley found four white police officers not guilty of the videotaped beating of black motorist King.

“I felt like we were riding on the back of the bus,” said Adrian Chaney, 18, at a Long Beach church forum held last week to let young people vent anger and frustration. “I felt like going into a white neighborhood and shooting some white people.”

About 300 teen-agers and young adults were among the crowd on May 4 that crammed into the Gospel Memorial Church of God in Christ for the forum, which ended at 6:45 p.m. so participants could get home before curfew.

Some anger spilled onto school grounds, although officials are reluctant to discuss it. Many schools had student fights with racial overtones, although there were no reports of serious injuries. At Wilson High in Long Beach, a confrontation that may have begun as a joke got out of hand when black and Latino students reportedly chased white students during lunchtime the day after the verdict. At least six students were treated for cuts and bruises.

An arsonist poured gasoline on the back door of the administration building at Norwalk High, but the fire was extinguished before it did significant damage. In Compton, vandals broke 20 windows at Whaley Middle School and started fires in the teachers’ lounge at Kelly Elementary and an administration building at Vanguard Middle School. School police said the total damage was about $100,000, but officials are not certain the incidents were riot-related.

The Friday after the verdict, about 100 Santa Fe High students left campus for a nearby commercial plaza at the corner of Florence Avenue and Orr & Day Road. “They were chanting, ‘Let’s riot. Let’s loot,’ ” said Fred Latham, the assistant city manager of Santa Fe Springs. Sheriff’s deputies steered the students back to campus.

All districts contacted said they beefed up security, and several closed for a day or two. Most districts also had psychologists on call to help students.

At Wilson High, the staff met at 7 a.m. the day school restarted to discuss how to cope. Custodians removed trash bins so they would not be targets for fires. Four police cars parked at the school. Teachers were told to have students record their feelings in journals and to organize students in racially mixed discussion groups. Parent volunteers greeted students at the start of the day and spoke with them at lunchtime.

Many officials were relieved at how little street chaos seeped onto campuses. Beyond the school grounds, however, children and teen-agers played an unmistakable role in the unrest.

In riot-torn areas, every hand goes up when children are asked if they know people who participated in looting. The hundreds arrested for looting in Compton include an 11-year-old.

In Huntington Park, police arrested about 13 juveniles on suspicion of looting. More than half of the 227 alleged curfew violators also were under 18. Police charged five youths with riot-related felonies. Long Beach police booked 152 juveniles on criminal charges during the unrest.

“My cousin invited me,” a 13-year-old Paramount boy said of the looting. “It’s running away from the cops that’s fun.”

A 12-year-old from Paramount went looting with his brothers. He said that, at one point, a gang of white youths from Long Beach broke the windows of their car. One older brother was left behind in Compton when the family car was too full of looted merchandise to take everybody back home. Soon after, a bullet grazed his head.

A 10-year-old girl went to a police-sponsored picnic in Signal Hill on Saturday wearing tennis shoes stolen by her sister’s boyfriend.

“It was wrong what he did, but I really needed new shoes,” the girl said.

In Compton, 16-year-old Shayla Clarke, like most students, condemned the looting. “I think people were caught up in the commotion,” she said. “It was like a fever and everybody was catching it.”

Nearly all students interviewed spoke of uneasiness, if not hostility, toward police, even in an honors class of college-bound juniors and seniors at Centennial High in Compton.

“It’s hard to say that you respect the police,” said Marshell Greene, 16. “Everybody says they’re here to protect us, but if someone chases you down the street, we’re more scared of the police than of them, and it shouldn’t be so.”

Compton Police Lt. Steve Roller said tensions are high between youths and officers in the streets. “As soon as the Rodney King tape hit the airwaves, we were confronted with, ‘What are you going to do? Beat me like Rodney?’ ”

The riots also stripped the veneer of calm masking racial tensions. In Compton, 13-year-old Amarlyn Houston disliked the riots but said it’s also wrong when Korean merchants come into her neighborhood and open businesses with loans that she said banks would never give blacks or Latinos.

Most students want to get along and chafe under community prejudices.

A 12-year-old girl who asked not to be named was crossing the road to school in Paramount recently when a white woman taunted her with a racial slur and made an obscene gesture. “I was crying and crying,” she said.

The black girl has friends of many races, so she is also hurt by the attitudes of her aunt. “She always says stuff about white people because of what they did. When she sees a white person, she says, ‘Yuck.’ ”

Despite the tensions, many students see the unrest as a challenge to make lasting changes. Centennial and other Compton schools launched a food and clothing drive to help riot victims, collecting about 2,000 pounds of food in four days. In Long Beach, Marshall Middle School donated $680 in pennies that students had collected for sports equipment to a fund for baby food and diapers.

Compton psychologist Ray is heartened by the attention now focused on his community’s problems, but he also is wary. “I saw the same optimism the kids had, the same coming together of gang members after the Watts riots.”

Centennial’s Manuel Hernandez hopes his classmates can break the cycle. “We’re the next generation, and we don’t want the same thing to happen again,” said the 17-year-old. “So we’re going to try harder.”

Times staff writer Gerald Faris contributed to this story, along with community correspondents Sarah M. Brown, Mimi Ko, Suzan Schill and Julia A. Wilson.