Tempers Flare at News Conference on Compton Schools

Shocked by possible shooting attempts this week on high-ranking Compton school officials, state and local politicians came out in force Thursday to denounce the incidents and urge the community not to respond with violence to efforts to turn around the insolvent district.

But the 60 or so adults who attended a news conference called by Assemblywoman Juanita McDonald (D-Carson) answered their public officials back--heckling some and venting frustration over complaints that their constitutional rights were violated when the state took over the school district in July.

McDonald said she convened the news conference because the school problems have created racial tensions between African Americans and Latinos, and as a reaction to three incidents of reported gunplay that marked one of the most difficult weeks yet for the beleaguered 28,500-student district.

Compton police said five shots were fired from a .45-caliber semiautomatic weapon about 6:15 p.m. Tuesday as interim State Administrator Stanley G. Oswalt and newly elected board President Michael Hopwood were walking separately into a school board meeting to discuss the layoffs of 111 employees.

Oswalt, who had received death threats before, was pushed to the ground by a bodyguard and whisked home; Hopwood later told police he felt two bullets pass close to his head.

At the same time, witnesses said another series of shots were fired at the edge of the school administration complex before a car sped away. And after the meeting, Hopwood said, he heard gunfire as he walked from his car to his front door.

Late Thursday, Compton police said their investigation showed no evidence that Oswalt was a target, adding that he apparently was not in the line of fire.

Earlier in the day, more than 20 school district and elected officials joined McDonald in the Compton board room to express shock and contempt for the incidents.

“What kind of madness is that?” said U.S. Rep. Walter R. Tucker III (D-Compton), a graduate of the Compton school system. “What kind of solution is that?

“When the bullet flew the other night, it didn’t just graze (Hopwood’s) head, it grazed all of our heads,” he said. “And it said to all of us that this is a wake-up call for all of us to . . . work these things out like civil, decent human beings that we know we are.”

State Sen. Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood)--who is accompanied by a state-paid bodyguard when she appears at night and weekend meetings in her district, which includes Compton--said she felt a “great sense of disappointment that we cannot be bigger than the hate that exists out there.”

Acknowledging that part of the community’s hysteria came from the fact that the school layoffs were announced just before Christmas, Hughes nonetheless told residents: “You must not threaten. You must meet and confer. You must be rational.”

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The crowd began to talk back, however, when state Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whitter), whose southeast Los Angeles County district lies close to Compton, said that the area’s public officials were as “frustrated as you are frustrated” by the school district’s problems.

When McDonald appealed for order, crowd members yelled, “We are not here to be scolded!” and “You don’t represent us!” McDonald, a rookie legislator, inherited south Compton through legislative redistricting after she was elected.

And audience members applauded enthusiastically when Compton Mayor Omar Bradley discussed one of the community’s grievances: that the state, by appointing Oswalt as district administrator in July, ran roughshod over the constitutional rights of Compton citizens by stripping their elected school board of its authority. The district had to accept Oswalt’s interim appointment as the condition for a state loan.

On Wednesday, the state announced that Jerome Harris, a 62-year-old veteran educator from Brooklyn, N.Y., would become permanent administrator in February.

“The community of Compton has questions,” Bradley said. “Questions that are not black questions. Questions that are not Latino questions. Questions that are American questions. Questions of taxation without representation. . . . Those questions have to be answered before a peaceful solution” can be achieved.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) was scheduled to appear at the meeting but was detained in Sacramento, McDonald said.

Times staff writer Howard Blume contributed to this story.