Fostering a Sense of Social Responsibility : * Recent O.C. Cases Emphasize the Need for Programs Stressing Leadership, Ethics

This year in Orange County, a former school administrator and a doctor have acknowledged very painful, public lessons. The word remorse has been much in the news.

We are all responsible for our own actions ultimately, but the stories of Stephen A. Wagner, the jailed former chief financial officer of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, and Dr. Ronald J. Allen of Laguna Beach, facing two second-degree murder charges for the deaths of a couple in a car accident, bring to mind a point.

A sense of responsibility can’t be imposed, but society can better prepare its leading citizens to assume those roles in more than titles or job descriptions. Programs designed to emphasize leadership, responsibility and ethics are very much worth having. Irvine Unified School District, for example, last year adopted a list of values it wants schools to emphasize. And later on, in the professional schools and in the professions, better peer review and oversight may help.

Allen and Wagner lived very different lives and entered the spotlight for different reasons. But their stories were linked by the thread of hurt inflicted on others, and by their own recognition, when it was too late, of overlooked responsibilities.

In a recent interview with The Times, Allen acknowledged that he is tormented by the results of his own actions, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol on a July night in an attempt to cope with the pain of his father’s death hours earlier.

Wagner was sentenced to six years in prison for stealing $3.5 million from his district, and said in the sentencing report that he had disgraced his family. Such expressions will not bring back lost millions, or in Allen’s case, lost lives. For some they will not be enough. But, in the future, if such realizations of a larger social responsibility can come for even one individual before it is too late, society’s efforts to foster values and concern for others will not be wasted.