Reseda Killing Escalates Attacks on L.A. District

For the Los Angeles Unified School District, the fatal on-campus shooting of a Reseda High School student could not have come at a worse time.

In the aftermath of the second campus slaying in a month, the district--already beset by financial difficulties and a threatened teachers strike--has come under renewed fire by critics who maintain that the mammoth system is in disarray and incapable of pulling itself together.

After Monday’s shooting in a Reseda High hallway, outraged parents and other detractors of the nation’s second-largest school system are expressing disgust with a district they describe as gripped by a rigid bureaucracy and slow to act on such paramount concerns as student safety.

“The whole (school) board has lost its credibility,” Peter Chan, father of two Granada Hills High School students, said Tuesday. “It’s real apparent that the people who are on the board now cannot manage this district.”

School officials--aware such incidents fuel rising criticism of the district--moved quickly after Monday’s shooting to begin equipping all schools with metal detectors, stepping up a safety drive that started with random campus weapons checks after a fatal classroom shooting last month at Fairfax High School.

But critics said the decision does too little and comes too late, and called Monday’s death of 17-year-old Michael Ensley proof that the district should be radically changed or dismantled.

“They’re announcing that in three or four weeks we’ll have metal detectors in all our schools. What are we supposed to do before then? How many students are we going to lose?” asked Kevin D. Teasley, leader of a drive to provide state-paid vouchers to allow parents to enroll their children in private or parochial schools.

Supt. Sid Thompson acknowledged Tuesday that the latest tragedy gives ammunition to the district’s opponents. But he insisted that the shooting must be viewed in a broader context.

“You cannot escape from the violence issue,” he said. “If your kids don’t go to our schools, you still have to worry about them going to the mall on Saturday in your own neighborhood. I don’t think this is something you can escape by changing schools, though I’m sure a lot of folks see it that way.”

Indeed, several groups seized on the Reseda High shooting as an opportunity to beat the drum for their causes.

Teasley, executive director of the Excellence Through Choice in Education League, said the latest incident of campus violence is “yet another reason” to support his organization’s 1994 ballot initiative, which would let parents send their children to private and parochial institutions with taxpayer dollars that now fund public schools.

And proponents of a move to dismantle the district argued that schools could better deal with crime on campus--identified as the top problem facing schools by one-third of those surveyed last month in a Los Angeles Times poll--if they had smaller districts, which they believe are more effective at mobilizing community support.

“I won’t blame the violence on the size of the district, but I will say that if there was more community control and a sense of community, we’d have a better shot at being able to curtail this kind of problem,” said Robert L. Scott, a leader of the drive to break up the district. “I don’t think that anyone, given the current structure, can control what’s happening.”

Just hours after Michael Ensley died Monday, the Los Angeles school board voted to convene a task force--with Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and City Atty. James K. Hahn--to find new ways to deal with the growing problem of children and guns.

The group will report in 30 days with recommendations on how the school district can work more closely with police and prosecutors to catch and punish students who carry guns on campus. But that is only part of the problem, they say.

“The issue is broader than weapons in school,” said board member Mark Slavkin, who proposed the joint study. “There’s a sense of the loss of school as a safe haven for every child. But the fact is, whether it’s a death at the school or the playground or in the park makes it no less tragic.”

Some critics cite a drive-by shooting that took the life of a 16-year-old girl just a few blocks from Reseda’s Cleveland High School on Monday as proof that violence is not confined to schoolyards and classrooms. The young woman was killed as she stood on the sidewalk with friends.

“If you really look at it, schools are about the safest place you can be these days, given the problems of the street,” said USC School of Education Dean Guilbert Hentschke. “School is really one of the last safe havens for children, and the fact that (on-campus killings) are so rare is what makes it stop us in our tracks.”

Street shootings have become so commonplace that “we’ve really gotten kind of numb to it,” he said. “But we have this sort of idealized notion of what school is, so we get jarred when that is violated.”

But the fear is real, and growing, among parents, who blame both the combustible mix of students and the lack of campus security measures for the incidents of violence plaguing Los Angeles schools.

“It shouldn’t be an act of courage for a mother or father to send their child to school to an LAUSD campus,” Garcetti said Tuesday. “But if my children were school age, I don’t know if I would be sending them.”

A recent Times poll found that 80% of respondents favor the use of campus metal detectors to check students for weapons. After Monday’s shooting, Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky reiterated his support for the practice of screening students for guns.

“If we can’t make the streets safer, if we can’t make the shopping malls safer, the one damn thing we can do is make the city schools safer,” Yaroslavsky said. “And if the city schools can’t be safe from guns, then this society is in the toilet.”

But board member Jeff Horton and others disputed the ability of metal detectors to prevent campus violence and accused local politicians of trying to score points by bad-mouthing the district.

“How much can metal detectors accomplish? If people think that nothing short of making schools as secure as airports or courtrooms is the answer, we are many, many millions of dollars away from that,” he said.

The campus violence is “a poor reflection on all of society,” Horton said. “I don’t think there’s any government action that can totally prevent shootings. . . . People want quick and easy answers to this, but they’re just not there.

“And I particularly resent the opportunism of City Council members demanding this or that when this is a problem for the City Council, the police and the school board. To point fingers at each other is an extreme irresponsibility. It’s just grandstanding on the backs of this tragedy. That’s insulting.”

Hentschke said using the shootings as a benchmark to judge the school district is misleading and unfair. “I understand people making that leap, but it just honestly doesn’t follow,” he said.

“It seems to me to think of it that way is to say there’s a responsible party out there other than us that’s in charge. It’s the school district or the police or the social service system. . . . Maybe this will start to wake us up a little bit more that them is us. “

Times education writer Larry Gordon contributed to this story.

Weapons on Campus In the 1991-92 school year, 1,403 weapons were confiscated at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 650 schools and other sites. Figures are based on reports from campus administrators.

TYPE OF ELEM. JR. SR. OTHER CHANGE WEAPON HIGH HIGH SITES* FROM ‘90-91 Guns 33 158 182 32 +86 Gun replicas 0 9 3 0 -16 Knives 39 268 214 6 -21 Knife replicas 0 1 0 0 0 Other weapons 38 201 195 24 +39

* District offices, adult schools, special education facilities

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District