Screening for Campus Guns to Start : Schools: A phone line to take anonymous tips on weapons will begin operation this week.

Los Angeles school officials will begin using metal detectors to screen students for weapons at two campuses this week, and a phone line to take anonymous tips about the presence of weapons on campus will begin operating today.

The phone line--(800) 954-HELP--will include a recorded message asking callers to give the name and school of anyone seen with a weapon. The phone line will operate 24 hours a day and district police officers will review the recorded messages at least once an hour.

“The people who call will be completely anonymous,” Supt. Sid Thompson said Wednesday. “We’re not going to try to find out who they are, we don’t need them to testify. We just need them to be as specific as possible and we’ll take it from there.”

Thompson said the district hopes to break the “code of silence” that keeps many students from reporting weapons on campus, either because of fear of reprisals or peer pressure.

Tips will be relayed to school administrators, who will work with police officers to track down students carrying weapons. Those who are caught with guns will be arrested and suspended from school, Thompson said. Students found with guns face expulsion for two semesters under a policy approved Monday by the school board.

The phone line is being promoted on signs posted at the district’s 120 junior and senior high schools. In addition, schools will display posters warning students that metal detectors may be used to search for weapons.

The metal detector checks will begin today or Friday, but officials are not releasing the names of the first two schools in the program to guard the privacy of students and ensure the effectiveness of the effort.

The spot checks will be conducted throughout the day. Students will be selected randomly--such as every third student coming through an entrance--and scanned with the hand-held detectors in a private room. The process should take no more than a few minutes for each student, Thompson said.

The weapons screening will be conducted by so-called “scan” teams of male and female school police officers. Principals will help decide how often and where the searches will be conducted.

Although the district has used the hand-held devices to check for weapons at sporting events and dances for three years, this will be the first time they will be used to screen students entering school.

The decision to employ the devices was made last week by Thompson in response to the Jan. 21 fatal classroom shooting of a 16-year-old boy at Fairfax High School. Several other large urban districts, including New York, Detroit and Chicago, have been using metal detectors to screen for weapons at school entrances for the past few years.

The district owns only 15 of the metal wands, which will allow officials to check two schools each day. But Herb Graham, district safety director, said 200 more have been ordered--at $110 each. By June, he said, 10 to 15 schools will be monitored each day.

Howard Friedman, an attorney for the school district, stressed that the screening will be conducted on a random basis only and that the detectors will not be used to follow up on tips received through the anonymous phone line. To do otherwise might violate the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and raise issues of discriminatory tactics.

“Our position is, this is going to be done in an objective, non-selective manner, toward an end of making it totally neutral,” Friedman said. “They’re not going to be directed toward any specific ethnicity or toward boys over girls or toward kids who dress a certain way.”