Students at O.C. Schools Learning to Talk, Not Fight : Mediation: Trained volunteers help students to settle their differences with words rather than violence.

Jeff Feldman drives into the San Clemente High School parking lot, and the radio-equipped proctors, who patrol the campus on the lookout for trouble, wave him in. They know him as an ally. He’s there every Tuesday.

He sets up in an empty classroom, sitting alone behind a teacher’s desk that faces two empty chairs.

Soon the first pair of students arrive: Tony and Dave, just back from three-day suspensions for fighting. They’re here to try something new on Orange County campuses--mediation. Under a state program, volunteers like Feldman, trained to mediate disputes in courts, neighborhoods and divorces, now are trying to mediate school confrontations as well.

Tony and Dave morosely fill out the forms, then Feldman begins.

You have paper and pencil, he says, because only one of you talks at a time. Write it down and wait your turn. No name-calling or cussing.

Everything’s confidential. This is voluntary; you don’t have to do it. There’s no time limit. We’ll be here as long as it takes.

“What’s that mean?” protests Dave.

“Until we come to an agreement,” Tony tells him. Tony’s been here before.

“Who wants to start?” Feldman asks.

There’s a long silence.

Feldman explains that he’s asking what happened because he really doesn’t know. He’s a volunteer mediator and has nothing to do with the school. He’s there to help them settle their differences.

“I didn’t hit him, really,” says Tony.

“It got blown all out of proportion,” says Dave. “I can’t fight or I’ll get kicked out,” as he was at his previous high school. “I said I’d fight him after school. Then he came at me, and I thought there’d be a fight. I shoved him and he popped me.”

That’s serious business at San Clemente High, where, like many other Orange County high schools, tales from the inner city of guns in lockers and knives in abundance have made suburban school officials jittery about campus violence.

So nip it in the bud. You swing at someone, even in self-defense, and you’re suspended. You bring a weapon and you’re gone for good.

But now you may also go to mediation. School officials hope that in the long run, mediation will prevent confrontations.

Though mediation is new in Orange County, other areas of California have been trying it since 1986. That year the state Legislature created a system by which part of the fee for filing a civil lawsuit would go to train mediators.

The county funnels the money to nonprofit agencies. The agencies--there are five in Orange County--train the mediators, who receive a certificate, the closest thing in California to a mediation license.

The mediators may already be experienced--mediators from other states or retired attorneys--or they may be utter rookies. The one common qualification is free time during business hours. In exchange for the 25 hours of free training, which could lead to a paying mediation job, the new mediators agree to do a specified amount of volunteer work.

Originally sold as a way of settling disputes before they become court-clogging litigation, the idea has been adapted by two agencies to campuses, where conflicts are more basic, such as: You bothered my girlfriend, so I’m going to beat you up.

Such confrontations can lead to real trouble, Feldman said. “A guy tells his friend, the other guy tells his friend, the friends pass it along, boom, that’s how you get gang wars going. They’re fighting because the other guys are mad at each other.

“ ‘You hugged my girlfriend.’ I had that one. Some friends told this guy so-and-so had hugged his girlfriend. He tells them he’s gonna get the other guy. Word gets back to the other guy. He tells his friends. Suddenly you got 30 people pissed off.

“We got the two guys in here, and the other guy says, ‘Hey, I’ve known her since we were little kids. We’re old friends.’ And the boyfriend says--he actually says this--’Oh, that’s what it was.’ And it’s over. They just never talk to each other.

“I have always come to some resolution with kids. They want to get it behind them and get on with things. Adults sometimes have other agendas. Sometimes they can’t agree that they’re on the planet Earth.”

“He said I couldn’t back myself, that I have to have a lot of friends,” Tony says.

“That’s what they told me,” says Dave.

“You said I don’t think I can back myself up.”

“You have a problem with Dave?” Feldman asks.

“Not really. I thought he was a pretty cool guy until then. But when you called me a wimp. . . .”

“I didn’t call you a wimp, dude.” The mediation ends with Tony and Dave agreeing that there’ll be no more trouble if they don’t talk about each other and don’t bring their friends into it. They sign a handwritten agreement and leave. The agreement, which has no legal effect, goes to their parents and into their files.

Problem solved?

“You could tell these guys have been around. You just do what you can,” Feldman said. “You just feel that you are helping. There’s no statistics. You can’t say this many people would have been hurt. You’re defusing bombs. You don’t know whether they would have gone off.”

But Vice Principal Jeffrey Davis said he senses a difference after only eight months. “I believe that it has prevented fights from occurring as well as recurring. The success rate has been phenomenal. We’ve only had one time where we’ve had a problem between the same two kids afterward. Beforehand, we’d have problems recur more frequently.

“We have gangs, but San Clemente is not a gang school. That’s not really what the mediation process is about. More than 90% of the time, it’s between just regular kids who develop differences, and it’s proved to be a great intervention and prevention program to keep acts of violence from occurring. Often we can intervene when it’s just words.”

Feldman’s next pair are girls who giggle nervously and talk full speed and nonstop. “We’re friends, “ one insists.

“You had some sort of problem?” Feldman asks.

“She stole my boyfriend.”

“That was like 20 years ago.”

“I know. We’re so over it.”

“You don’t know why you’re here?” Feldman asks.

“OK, there was a conflict and this girl wanted to beat me up and that was it.”

“We didn’t even touch each other.”

“Maybe a month ago, her boyfriend and I got into it and I stabbed him with a pen ‘cause he kicked me. So he goes, ‘I’m gonna get my girlfriend to beat you up.’ And I go, ‘Oh, I’m scared. ‘ “ It’s all settled, they tell Feldman. They talked it out on the phone.

That, says John P. Biancardi, director of mediation for the nonprofit Community Service Programs of Irvine, is what he hopes will be the long-term effect of mediation on campus--students learning to resolve disputes themselves.

His and the Mediation Center, also in Irvine, are the two organizations dealing with Orange County schools.

Community Service Programs provides adult mediators for the four high schools in the Capistrano Unified School District.

The Mediation Center is concentrating on training students to act as mediators down to the elementary school level, in hopes children will learn that words can settle disputes better than fights can. So far they have been working at Ocean View (Huntington Beach) and Westminster high schools and at Santiago Hills and Vista Verde (Irvine), Monte Vista (Santa Ana) and Fred Moiola (Fountain Valley) elementary schools.

Both agencies report that more schools want the service but that the supply of trained volunteers is still small.

The county administrative office had issued a tentative recommendation that the Board of Supervisors take advantage of a new state law that increases the funding for nonprofit mediation services. If adopted, the five such organizations now in Orange County and their volunteers are likely to multiply. Then, Biancardi predicts, campus mediation will become familiar to students throughout the county.

And after a while mediators won’t be needed for cases like one of Feldman’s favorites, the boy who kiddingly threatened to stab a girl’s boyfriend.

“She goes and tells her boyfriend ‘he wants to stab you,’ and they fight. Boom, I’m there.

“I ask him, ‘Did you ask him about it?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I asked him, he didn’t say anything, so I hit him.’

“We agreed to communicate in the future.”