Board Shelved Report on Averting Violence : Safety: Because of friction among its members, the school district panel did not act on a 1990 study that predicted campus killings, task force members say. Some of the recommendations are being hastily instituted in the wake of two fatal shootings.

The Los Angeles school board--divided by personality conflicts and philosophical differences--shelved a report three years ago recommending a host of school safety measures, some of which are being hastily put in place after two students were killed on campuses in the last five weeks.

“What we presented could have prevented future deaths,” said Alfred Moore, a retired school district assistant superintendent who coordinated the 65-member school safety task force. “Now they are trying to implement some of the recommendations in a foolish, piecemeal way.”

Moore and others say they are especially angry about the district’s failure to pursue the measures in light of Monday’s fatal shooting of 17-year-old Michael Shean Ensley at Reseda High School. A 15-year-old Reseda high sophomore, Robert Heard, is being held at Sylmar Juvenile Hall in connection with the shooting.

Among the recommendations presented to the school board in March, 1990, was a pilot metal detector program, a hot line to report weapons on campus, mandatory expulsion of students carrying guns and the elimination of “opportunity transfers,” in which thousands of troubled youngsters are transferred from school to school each year.

“I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but we were recommending all this already,” said Edgar Cowan, a retired teacher who served as a teachers union representative on the task force.

The report, written during the 1989-90 school year, included a warning to school board members that “the potential for murder is real.”

The task force, formed after a student stabbed a junior high school English teacher in 1989, urged the board to give immediate attention to the problem of school violence “lest we witness rival youth gangs shooting it out” on school grounds.

Financial problems were said to be the reason that many of the recommendations were not followed.

The report, for example, called for the creation of special schools for students prone to violence, a proposal that would cost the financially ailing Los Angeles Unified School District millions of dollars.

But there were other roadblocks as well.

“The report wasn’t politically correct and it was buried,” said Wayne Johnson, who was president of United Teachers-Los Angeles at the time and supported the report’s recommendations. “Had the board moved at the time, maybe those two kids who were killed might still be alive.”

One district administrator familiar with the report and the reaction of the school board said, “The majority believed that admitting there was a problem would create a panic among parents.” He asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation by his employers.

San Fernando Valley school representative Julie Korenstein, who formed the task force, said she was unable to marshal support for the report’s recommendations because of opposition spearheaded by former school board member Rita Walters and current board President Leticia Quezada. Personality conflicts among the three added to the difficulty of reaching an agreement on school issues at the time.

“You had a board majority in 1990 who didn’t want to even look at the report for one second,” Korenstein said. “We had to cancel one of the public hearings on the report because board members refused to come out.”

Korenstein said the board majority considered the report’s recommendations to be too harsh. The recommendations included automatic expulsion for serious assaults and possession of guns.

Walters, who represented South Los Angeles residents, at one point publicly ridiculed a suggestion in the report that schools use trained dogs to patrol campuses.

At a hearing on the report, parents and community activists from East and South-Central Los Angeles jeered the recommendation that violence-prone students be transferred to special schools, calling it attempted “warehousing” of minority students.

Neither Walters nor Quezada could be reached for comment Tuesday.

Board member Roberta Weintraub said the report was ignored because her colleagues believed the recommendations were “too radical and because at the time on the board there was really no support for it. There wasn’t the support until Fairfax.”

Since the Jan. 21 fatal shooting of a student at Fairfax High School, however, the board has made its expulsion policy stricter and has implemented a metal detector program.

Former school district administrator Moore said escalating violence--predicted by the parents, district officials, teachers and law enforcement representatives who wrote the report--has finally forced the board to pay attention.

For example, metal detectors that were considered too costly at the time of the report will become standard equipment at all 50 district high schools.

“When violence becomes a priority, you find the money,” Moore said.

Besides cost, Moore said, there was also reluctance among district officials to admit that there was little being done to counsel violence-prone students.

The task force was especially critical of the district’s continuing practice of transferring thousands of troubled youngsters each year from one school to another in the hope the change will prompt them to shape up.

But as Monday’s shooting at Reseda High revealed, the transfers can also put youngsters in danger. The 17-year-old victim had told friends he wanted to return to Taft High School from Reseda--where he was sent as an opportunity transfer student--because of trouble with rivals. The youth suspected of shooting him was also a transfer student.

The school crime report opposed such transfers and called for beefed-up counseling at the student’s own school, as well as creation of a centralized record system to track violent students.

Reseda High School Principal Robert Kladifko, who helped write the report and agreed with most of its conclusions, said the practice of transferring troubled students is a subject being taken up by parents shaken by Monday’s fatal shooting.

Valley parent David Michel, who served on the task force but resigned after district officials delayed the release of school crime records for nearly a year, remains angry about the reception the board majority gave to the report.

“They filed it in the wastebasket and never gave the slightest hint of attention to it,” Michel said. “They killed it, period. I am still livid with rage.”

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this story.