Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : District Tentatively OKs Use of Metal Detector : Education: Trustees back random searches at a middle school. A stricter dress code, locker searches and a hot line for tips are also planned.

Trustees of the Castaic Union School District have tentatively agreed to use a metal detector to conduct random searches of students attending Castaic Middle School--the same method used at Los Angeles city schools to check for weapons.

“The random searches send a message to students that if you are carrying something, you can be caught at any time,” said board member Gloria Mercado, who uses a metal detector in her job as vice principal of Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles.

At a meeting Tuesday, the Castaic school board directed its staff to draft a policy to govern use of the district’s newly purchased metal detector.

The 1,600-student Castaic district--which has two elementary schools and one middle school--would be the first small, non-urban school district in the state to use a metal detector to search students, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office said.

The hand-held devices are now used in six other school districts that are located in urban areas of Los Angeles County, as well as San Bernardino and Oakland.

The board decided to buy the $130 metal detector after Castaic Middle School officials in February found an unloaded gun in a student’s locker. The student, who was later expelled, had brought his parents’ gun to school to impress his friends, said Principal Beverly Silsbee.

Initially, school officials wanted to use the metal detector only when they suspected a student of carrying a weapon, Silsbee said. But at a meeting last month, parents called for random searches.

“The parents encouraged us to go that next step,” Silsbee said. “They wanted the notice sent out that, at any point and at any time, students could be searched.”

Along with the metal detector, which the school received last week, the district plans to make its dress code more restrictive, conduct searches of student lockers at random and install a telephone hot line for students to relay anonymous tips.

The dress code changes would ban gang-related clothes from the schools, such as sports hats and jackets.

But deciding what constitutes gang wear is a distinction that even board members concede could be difficult to make.

“There’s a fine line between fashion and what is really gang-oriented,” Mercado said.

Periodic locker searches have always been part of the districts’s policies, even though they have never been conducted, Mercado said. The hot line, which will be set up by the end of the month, is similar to one used at schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

School officials say the policy changes at Castaic Union are meant as precautions to head off student violence.

“I don’t want something like what happened at Reseda High to happen here,” Silsbee said, referring to the shooting death of a 17-year-old boy by a fellow student last month. “I couldn’t live with myself if that happened and I hadn’t done everything I could to prevent it.”

Silsbee said the increased security measures do not mark Castaic as a violent community, but are a response to a more violent society at large.

“I don’t think that Castaic is any worse off than any other place,” she said.