Top L.A. Officials Pledge Unified Effort to Curb Campus Violence : Education: Central to plan is the creation of ‘safe passage corridors,’ including patrols of students’ routes. Pilot programs will be launched at Dorsey High and Lennox Middle School.

In a strong show of unity, several of Los Angeles’ highest-ranking police officials, educators and politicians pledged Monday to devise community plans with local officials to curb violence in and around campuses.

The cornerstone of the plans will be the creation of “safe passage corridors” in which police, community members and school officials will identify and patrol school routes to help ensure that young people are safe as they travel to and from campus.

During a news conference at the Los Angeles Police Academy that was generally short on specifics, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Sid Thompson and top deputies of Mayor Richard Riordan and county Sheriff Sherman Block said that making schools safe will be a priority in their departments in 1994.

“Every child in Los Angeles County should have a corridor of safe passage to school,” Burke said. “We have a responsibility to say to every child: One place you are safe is school.”

Pilot programs will be launched at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles and Lennox Middle School.

None of the officials, however, volunteered additional money or resources. They emphasized that just bringing disparate bureaucracies together was an important first step.

“Many of our children have to travel through neighborhoods and have to enter environments where death, destruction, guns, drugs and gang activity are part of their everyday routes to school,” Williams said. “We are committed to trying to change that.”

Dorsey High School Principal Jerelene Wells said that a series of such interagency meetings has led to a soon-to-be-realized crime deterrent at her school--a fence to keep intruders out.

School safety issues rank among the top concerns of parents and educators in the region. In the past year there have been two fatal shootings on Los Angeles high school campuses and numerous shootings, stabbings and brawls among students just outside school grounds. Countywide, about 1,000 students have been expelled for carrying weapons on campus in the last year.

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On the first day of school in September, a 15-year-old boy was shot and critically wounded at Dorsey High School. Last month, another boy was shot and wounded outside Chatsworth High School.

Capt. Norman L. Rouillier, commander of the Police Department’s Southwest division, which includes Dorsey, said increased police presence before and after school has gone a long way to deter crime around campus since the September shooting.

As part of the pilot program, the duties of one of his officers will include coordinating safe school routes, Rouillier said.

Several parent activists reacted cautiously to the officials’ pronouncements, saying that local authorities have responded slowly to their concerns and that meetings and talk alone will not be enough.

“They need to start putting resources in the schools,” said Ellen Eckard, president of the Parent Teacher Students Assn. at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park. “So much has been taken away from the kids, all their activities. Kids need a place where they can be other than the streets.”

Mildred Hillard, whose son, Demetrius Rice, was fatally shot a year ago at Fairfax High School, said the promises of help are “welcome as long as they commit to follow-through.”

“It’s been almost a year since Demetrius died,” Hillard said. “It has taken his death, Michael Ensley’s death at Reseda High, the injury of Glynn Brown at Dorsey, the incident at Chatsworth to get this far--I’d say that’s a bit slow.”