Parents Push for Improved School Safety : Violence: The slaying of one student in Simi Valley and wounding of three in Thousand Oaks prompt demands for added security.

In the wake of two incidents of after-school violence that left one student dead in Simi Valley and three wounded in Thousand Oaks this past week, alarmed parents and students are crying out for new measures to boost school safety.

Simi Valley officials are rushing to form a task force that will suggest new safety measures for the district and particularly Valley View Junior High, where police said 14-year-old Chad Hubbard was stabbed to death Tuesday by 13-year-old Phillip Hernandez.

And Thousand Oaks officials are responding to the shooting of three Westlake High students in a melee Thursday by pushing ahead with the recommendations of recently formed school safety committees.

Stricter discipline, additional security cameras, an increased parent presence at the schools, and even tougher dress codes are among the new approaches being considered in the two cities.

As Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks school officials grapple with possible solutions to school violence, they are tracing steps covered by officials at western Ventura County schools, which have a longer history of schoolyard shootings and stabbings.

Campus violence prompted Oxnard last year to use hand-held metal detectors for random searches of high school students, and Ventura educators set up a telephone hot line for students to anonymously report on classmates carrying weapons.

By expelling dozens of students caught with knives and guns over the past two years, school administrators in Ventura and Oxnard have put pupils on notice about the consequences of carrying weapons.

Experts on school safety say Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks have lagged behind the west county in aggressively working to avert school violence.

“We have the perception that we don’t have the problem here,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, a federally funded agency based in Westlake. “It’s a denial-type mode.”

The denial was fed, Stephens said, by Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks being named in recent years as two of the safest U. S. cities with populations of more than 100,000.

But the stunning news of the stabbing death at a Simi Valley junior high sobered many parents, who turned hostile when school officials sought to defuse concern by repeatedly referring to the slaying as “an isolated incident.”

At a public forum Thursday night crammed with hundreds of agitated parents, Simi Valley Supt. Mary Beth Wolford and other school officials were shouted down by residents demanding action from the district.

And parent Glenn Woodbury announced Friday that he and other residents are forming a group called Safety for Our Students that will work separately from the district’s task force. “We want something that parents can have control over,” Woodbury said.

Simi Valley school officials acknowledged last week that educators and parents shared a complacency about the threat of big-city violence reaching their school grounds.

Last year, after a student at Reseda High School in the San Fernando Valley was killed on campus, some parents in eastern Simi Valley briefly became anxious that the violence would spill into their city, Parks said.

But when Simi Valley High School responded to the concerns by holding a meeting on school safety, only about five people showed up, Parks said. “That’s a good example of denial.”

In Thousand Oaks, school officials disagreed with Stephens’ contention that the community has ignored the threat of campus violence.

“The district is well aware of violence within our community,” said Richard Simpson, assistant superintendent of the Conejo Valley Unified School District. “We’ve seen increasing violence in our community coming for some time.”

Simpson noted the shooting of the Westlake High students occurred off campus and after school. Students David Behling, Scott Smith and Jarad Kline were shot at noon Thursday just outside Thousand Oaks’ North Ranch Park, where the three youths and about a dozen friends had gathered to watch a planned fistfight between a junior football player and a sophomore at the school.

Police said the violence occurred after the sophomore arrived with several carloads of older youths, one of whom then opened fire on friends of the football player. Police said Friday that many of the youths in the cars were not Westlake High students.

Before the shooting, the Conejo Valley school district had formed school safety committees at each of the district’s 26 schools, Simpson said.

Some of the committees have already made recommendations for improving security on school grounds, including purchasing new camcorders and portable telephones for use by school officials.

But Simpson said he does not see that school officials could have done anything differently to avert Thursday’s violence.

School officials had already tried to end the long-running feud between the sophomore and junior Curtis Simmons, whose planned fistfight led to the bloodshed.

Both boys were suspended after a fistfight last year. When rumors circulated recently that the two were planning to face off again, officials called the students into the school office and warned them against violence.

School administrators also searched both boys’ lockers when they heard rumors that one had obtained a gun. But the searches turned up nothing.

Simpson said parents can help educators curb violence on campus by taking a more active role in their children’s activities. “What we need is a much more aggressive response from our community and from parents,” he said.

Parents and community members also were called upon to get more involved in Ventura schools last year after Ventura High School football player Jesse Strobel was knifed to death in downtown Ventura on a Friday evening.

Like the shooting of the Westlake High School students, Strobel’s slaying occurred off campus and after school hours.

But Ventura school officials, nevertheless, treated the incident as a school issue.

Ventura educators cracked down on students carrying weapons, expelling 13 students in the first five months of the program.

In January, a new state law began requiring schools to expel students caught with weapons. Ventura has pursued the policy aggressively, setting up a telephone hot line for anonymous tips and encouraging students to help look out for campus safety.

Ventura officials said they believe their strict approach has caught the attention of students. So far this school year, the district has expelled three students for possessing weapons and four other cases are pending.

Ventura school officials also added new security guards to each of the high school campuses. And this year, Ventura school Supt. Joseph Spirito has launched a sweeping character-development program to teach moral values such as tolerance and patience.

Despite these measures, an 18-year-old Buena High School student was stabbed by a 17-year-old classmate in a scuffle in the school parking lot a few months after Strobel’s death.

Buena High School Principal Jaime Castellanos said when he heard about the Westlake High School shooting he was reminded of past violence at his school.

“I got to thinking again, ‘My God. That’s the kind of thing that can happen anytime, anywhere, anyplace,’ ” he said.

The Oxnard Union High School District has come down even harder than Ventura on students who carry weapons to campus.

In addition to expelling students caught with knives or guns, the district’s five high schools in Oxnard and Camarillo use metal detectors to conduct random weapons searches in two classes per school each day.

Oxnard High School Principal Rick Rezinas credited the weapons searches with helping to reduce violence among students and creating a more secure atmosphere on campus.

“The key difference is that we’re trying to solve problems before they happen,” he said. “The metal detectors are part of that. The kids feel that someone cares about their safety.”

Oxnard High School has not always been peaceful.

In 1991, the school was rocked by a riot when dozens of black and Latino students at the school, some wielding chains and pipes, came to blows.

And another Oxnard district school--Channel Islands High--was the last site of a schoolyard slaying before the stabbing in Simi Valley last week. In November, 1989, Manuel (Deadeye) Rodriguez shouted gang slogans outside the high school and was shot to death by Arnel Salagubang, a member of a rival gang.

Despite the success of weapons searches at Oxnard schools, most other county school districts are reluctant to go to that length to combat violence.

Thousand Oaks officials said they already have metal detectors on high school campuses but use them only when they have reason to believe a student is carrying a knife or gun.

And Simi Valley officials did not include the use of metal detectors among the list of safety measures they are considering for their schools.