Mothers Fighting Hurt and Loss With Hope : Violence: Two women whose sons were killed at school launch a group aimed at stemming an epidemic of crime on the nation’s campuses.

Mildred Hillard of Inglewood saw her son off to school one day earlier this year, never to see him again. Demetrius Rice, 16, was shot and killed while sitting in English class at Fairfax High School, by a child his age whose gun accidentally went off.

“You send them to school thinking they’re safe and it turns out it’s a battleground,” Hillard said.

This week, she and the mother of a teen-ager killed recently in a Los Angeles high school joined forces with two state senators to announce the creation of MAVIS, or Mothers Against Violence in Schools.

The nonprofit group’s goals include counseling teen-agers, parents, teachers and school officials about the growing epidemic of violence in schools, and lobbying for legislative ways to combat such threats to the physical and emotional well-being of the nation’s schoolchildren.

“I think if the children start communicating more (instead) of trying to settle everything with guns, it would be different,” Hillard said, stressing that the real work has to be done at home. Youngsters need to learn ways in which to resolve differences and disputes, she said.

Hillard’s partner in the effort is Margaret Ensley, whose 17-year-old son Micheal was shot to death in the hallway of Reseda High School in February by a teen-ager carrying a .22-caliber derringer. Ensley, 45, bused her son an hour each way to the San Fernando Valley to help him escape the dangers of inner-city life, only to learn he was gunned down in the hallway between classes.

“I miss him so much, I’ll cry for an hour,” Ensley recalled. “But when I stop I know there will be no change. He still is gone. And there is nothing I can do physically to bring him back.”

Ensley says that MAVIS is her way of helping other children and their parents so that they may never have to suffer as she has. Or if they must suffer, she wants them to at least find solace in sharing their grief with others who have dealt with trauma and loss.

A quiet, dignified woman who works as a sales manager for AT&T;, Ensley said she began setting up the group over the past few months because she fears there is no escape from the violence that claimed her son. Even the tree-lined campuses of schools like Reseda, that were once considered safe and suburban, offer no respite.

The two mothers, who are being joined in the effort by state Sens. Teresa P. Hughes (D-Inglewood) and Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), said they will visit local schools to speak on the subject of school violence.

They also will lobby for passage of a host of legislative reform measures designed to raise $85 million to improve safety and educational programs at schools, and other bills that would require some juveniles as young as 14 be tried as adults when committing murder.

Ronald Grigg, a lawyer who acts as a consultant to MAVIS, said the group will continue to testify at congressional hearings and anywhere else to raise awareness of the need for more safety measures at schools, such as metal detectors, and for the need to increase funding for school-based anti-violence programs and curricula.

“We need to address the long-term problems, the lack of funding that has helped in the degeneration of public schools,” said Grigg. “We have a president who has his child in private school, for instance. I think that is significant.”

The two mothers also have set up a toll-free hot line, (800) ACT-HEAL, offering guidance about school-related violence and counseling.

Hillard says she or Ensley will personally return each call because they are the only ones who can respond adequately to a distraught parent on the other end of the line. “No one,” Hillard said, “can understand if a parent calls except another parent who has lost a child.”

Hillard moved this spring from Los Angeles to Inglewood, and has found some solace in the birth of her first grandson, born to her daughter. The baby boy is named Demetrius, after the son Hillard lost.

There have been other mothers spurred into temporary activism by spasms of grief and loss. But Ensley and Hillard pledged to do something more lasting.

“We’ve come to realize this is a lifelong commitment we have to our children,” said Hillard, 36, a state employment agency worker. “With the lives we are trying to save, this will turn into a full-time job . . . Something should have been done a long time ago.”

Hughes, the chairwoman of the newly created Senate subcommittee on school violence, agreed. She said only a multitiered effort to get government, parents and communities to work together will help solve the problem.

“Kids leaving for school today have become soldiers going off to war,” Hughes said after outlining a litany of disturbing statistics about violence at schools. “School violence has become an epidemic.”

“When mothers stand at the door as they wave goodby to their kids,” Hughes said, “they don’t know whether they are ever coming back again.”

According to various studies, the number of schoolchildren bringing guns and other weapons to school is indeed alarming; in one report, one in five students nationwide in grades six through 12 carried a weapon to school within the last month. The Center for the Prevention of Handgun Violence reported--from newspaper accounts alone--that 65 students were killed and another 186 wounded by guns used in or around schools between the 1986-87 and 1990-91 school years.

And all indications are that things have gotten much worse since then.

“People don’t realize how many students go to school in fear for their lives,” Ensley said. “They are afraid. And who can they turn to? Teachers don’t understand. And security is lax. My goal is to make it so no child has to say that they are afraid. I don’t ever want to hear those words again.”

For Ensley, who lives in the Athens section of South-Central Los Angeles, there are personal ghosts she also wants to banish.

“This is my way of telling Micheal that I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” she said after a news conference Monday to announce the formation of MAVIS. “It is a debt that I feel I will spend the rest of my life paying. But he didn’t deserve to die that way. No child does.”

Staff writer Michele Fuetsch contributed to this story.