Where Fear Is Not Just a Fairy Tale : After a school aide’s young son is killed by gang members, teachers use stories to soothe--and educate.

This neighborhood really has changed a lot since I started teaching here. When I first came here, I felt very safe. You could have events late at night and we used to have Halloween programs and Cinco de Mayo programs. Now, people are afraid to come to advisory council meetings or other things at night.

What brought the problems on, I cannot say. The children have changed; the parents have changed. You have to. The fear makes you change.

We wrote the story because in August, when we were coming back after break, a young man who was a school aide’s son was shot by gangs and killed right down here on Cypress Boulevard. A lot of children knew him and this was very upsetting.

Also, there was another boy killed at a McDonald’s for his CD player. It was on television and all the kids knew about it. The kids felt things were very dangerous, so we started talking about gangs and we used the story to (talk) it out, get the fear out of them. We discussed that, to be safe, you should give a gang member what they ask for, and then tell your parents, teacher or principal later.

We told them, “Your mom or dad could buy you a new CD player, but you couldn’t get your life again.” We made these discussions into a story, and to keep it from being so frightening, we placed the story in the past and used dinosaurs as characters.

Our story is about a little boy whose mom made him a new shirt and pants and his grandmother made him new shoes and his father made him a new umbrella. He put on all his new clothes and decided to go for a walk in the jungle and he met a dinosaur who said, “If you don’t take off your new clothes and give them to me, I’m going to eat you up.” So the little boy took off his shirt and gave it to him and the dinosaur was very happy.

He kept meeting dinosaurs until all his new things were taken away. In our story, a hunter comes along and finds the dinosaurs playing and sees the clothes nearby. He realizes the clothes don’t belong to the dinosaurs, so he takes them and returns them to the boy.

The lesson is: Don’t fight back.

You should not try to solve things yourself, but you should get help. The story gives the children a sense of what to do if they are approached by a gang member.

On TV, it looks like all children are going toward gangs, because you see so much gang violence. But I think the story they wrote lets you know that some children don’t want to be gang members and that some children do want to get an education and become good citizens.

The children say they would like to see the violence stopped. They really would like to see it like it was before, when you were free to go out, free to go to the store without feeling afraid.