San Clemente High Students Stage Walkout : Demonstration: About 75 march to City Hall to protest violence, attack on Steve Woods.

Defying their principal’s warnings, about 75 San Clemente High School students walked off the campus and marched to City Hall on Tuesday morning to help protest rising violence in their community and show support for injured schoolmate Steve Woods.

Those who participated in the 8:30 a.m. demonstration carried placards that read, “Zero Tolerance to Youth Violence.” They joined about 35 other people, including some parents, in their peaceful, three-mile march to City Hall. There, an impromptu meeting was held with Mayor Truman Benedict.

“It does show there is genuine concern about the problem,” Benedict said afterward. “A lot of our kids are looking for peaceful means of resolving the situation.”

City Council members praised the march as a positive sign of community awareness, but they did not agree with the students’ decision to leave campus during school hours, a violation of school truancy regulations.

Upon the students’ return to school, administrators immediately reported them as truant and told most of the participants they must report to the school’s Center for Special Instruction as part of a one-day, on-campus suspension, administrators said.

Woods, 17, was gravely injured the night of Oct. 15 when a group of young men and teen-agers stood at the exit of Calafia Beach County Park and pelted four carloads of students with rocks and bottles as the youths attempted to drive away.

Amid the confusion and shattering of car windows, someone plunged a metal rod from a paint roller through the skull of Woods, a popular high school senior who had gone to Calafia to relax with his friends after a football game.

Woods’ older sister, Shellie Woods, who helped organize Tuesday’s march, said the students wanted some means of expressing their concern and support for her brother and to take part in some sort of community response.

Woods, who was among a group of people who stood across from the high school and urged them to join the rally, expressed discontent with the disciplinary action against those who participated.

“This is the same kind of intimidation used by the gangs,” Woods said. “It’s terrible.”

Carrie Schlegel, 17, a copy editor for the school newspaper, The Triton, was among the majority of students who remained on campus.

“I personally thought that it took unnecessary class time,” Schlegel said.

But she added that emotions have run high among students since Steve Woods was attacked. Many students have been grappling with how to express their opinions, she said.

“It’s hard, because whatever you say when you do give your opinion, you tend to offend someone,” she said.

The day before the demonstration, Principal Christopher Cairns said he read a prepared statement in which he encouraged the school’s 2,100 students of the “need to pull together now as one student body” and seek an alternative means of protesting and remain on campus.

Cairns offered at least 10 alternatives that included participating in classroom discussions, fund-raising activities for Steve Woods and his family, and attending today’s 7 p.m. City Council meeting, where the issue of Woods’ attack is on the agenda.

“Our main purpose is education,” Cairns said. “We’re also partners with the community. I feel we need to address this collectively as a community.”

Those who participated in Tuesday’s walkout were given clear warning that they would be considered truant, Cairns said.

“We knew about it in advance, and had spoken to our students the past couple of days to give them positive alternatives instead of an unauthorized kind of demonstration,” Cairns said. “When they left the campus, they knew they were facing disciplinary procedures and they had been alerted in advance that if they took part in something like this during school hours, they would face the consequences for being truant, defying authority or being disruptive to the school environment.”

During the demonstration, passing motorists honked their horns as students and other residents stood on Avenida Pico. In all, the march lasted about 90 minutes. When they returned, most of the students quietly re-entered their classrooms.

However, about 10 to 15 students disrupted classes by yelling and running through the hallways, Cairns said. These students have been suspended for two days, Cairns said. In addition, they will have to attend a one-day, on-campus suspension in the Center for Special Instruction.

School administrators said they did not know who organized the march.

The mayor, who said he was glad he happened to be at City Hall for the meeting with the group, talked with the students for five to 10 minutes. Afterward, the students “lined right up and marched back to school,” Benedict added.

“I supported their peaceful, positive approach to resolving the problems,” said Benedict, who has lived in the community for 44 years.

But Benedict, a former superintendent of the Capistrano Unified School District, said he also supports the disciplinary measures being taken by the school.

Other City Council members echoed the mayor’s sentiments.

School administrators “have their policies and they need to be evenhanded on how they administer these policies,” Councilman Thomas Lorch said. “But these teens obviously feel very strongly about the threat to their quality of life.. . . They want to see some improvement. Maybe a lot of improvement.”

Councilman Joseph Anderson said: “I don’t want to appear insensitive, but I wonder why they didn’t do this after school. It’s still daylight and they can get people after work too.”

The City Council will meet tonight to talk about possible solutions to youth and gang violence in the community. “We need to hear from the teen-agers about the intimidation and fear they have felt,” Lorch said.

City officials and citizens in San Clemente have called for a variety of possible solutions to the city’s rising youth violence, from strong enforcement measures to social and sports programs designed to keep youths off the street.

“There is a lot of sympathy for Steve Woods and his family,” said Marlene Draper, president of the Capistrano Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees. “I feel a great deal of remorse for what has happened. It’s a very tragic event . . . but it’s a community issue, and it is not a school issue.”

Draper said she supported the actions of Principal Cairns specifically because he had warned the students before they left the campus. “He even offered an invitation to discuss it and come up with a plan that could meet their goals,” Draper said.

“I wish more of our community would come together as a group and lobby the Legislature for more restrictive penalties for criminals,” Draper said.

District Trustee Crystal Kochendorfer said the students’ actions were inappropriate “given the principal’s warnings.”

“We realize we have a problem here and we want to make it better in our community,” Kochendorfer said. “But not to encourage our students to walk out of classrooms.”