Schools Try New Ways to Stop Violence : Education: Rather than crack down on students who fight, administrators say children must learn to mediate conflicts.

After recent violence at schools from Simi Valley to Ventura, worried parents have demanded stiffer campus security, stricter student discipline and other traditional tactics for dealing with unruly students.

And school officials are heeding those demands. In Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, for example, committees are examining proposals for tougher dress codes to discourage gangs, additional electronic equipment for security guards, and closer links between school officials and police.

But officials in several school districts are trying alternative approaches to combatting school violence.

Instead of simply cracking down on students prone to fighting, some educators say, schools must teach children how to settle conflicts before they turn physical.

“We’ve got to teach kids how to resolve their differences other than by violence,” said Jerry Gross, superintendent of the Conejo Valley Unified School District in Thousand Oaks.

An after-school shooting in Thousand Oaks that left three students wounded has prompted the Conejo Valley district to consider training high school students to mediate between hostile classmates.

Similarly, the fatal stabbing of a Simi Valley junior high school student by a classmate has led school officials there to consider training all of the district’s teachers in how to help children resolve conflicts peacefully.

Oxnard elementary school officials plan to begin teaching conflict resolution to students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Called “Working Toward Peace,” the new curriculum aims to help children manage anger and end disputes peacefully.

Teaching conflict-resolution skills at school has become more urgent, educators say, as fights among children turn lethal.

“There have always been fights at schools,” said Ileene Gershon, an assistant principal at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard. “In an earlier time, when kids had confrontations with each other and couldn’t resolve their conflicts, they would use their fists, they would push, they would swear.”

These days, Gershon said: “The violence has escalated because there’s weapons involved.”

Among Ventura County school districts, Ventura Unified so far has the most extensive conflict-resolution program.

Last fall, a handful of Ventura middle schools and elementary schools began to train some students to act as mediators with their classmates. Recent race-related fights among Ventura High School students prompted the district to extend the program to the high schools.

The traditional method of suspending students who are fighting usually fails to end the dispute, Ventura Supt. Joseph Spirito said.

“When they come back two days or three days later, they’re still angry,” he said. “It’s not resolved. As a matter of fact, they’re probably angrier.”

By contrast, using student mediators to resolve conflicts defuses the underlying tensions, Spirito said. “It works. It’s unbelievable.”

At Anacapa Middle School in Ventura, officials credit their 33 student mediators with helping to reduce suspensions by 80% since the program was established in the fall.

“We told students, ‘We can help you solve little problems before they become big problems,’ ” Anacapa counselor Roanna Bostwick said. “And they are flocking in here.”

One recent morning, 14-year-old Karla Hernandez came to Bostwick to complain about a boy who would not stop calling her names. When Bostwick suggested calling in student mediators, Karla agreed. “They understand better than principals,” she said later.

Bostwick assigned two peer helpers to help resolve this dispute. About noon, in a meeting room near the school office, mediators Olympia McCurtis and Vincent Badilla took their places around a table with Karla and the boy she had complained about, seventh-grader Andy Ayala. No school officials were present.

After kicking off the session with introductions and handshakes around the table, Olympia and Vincent--both eighth-graders--ran through a printed list of questions aimed at helping Karla and Andy come to an understanding.

The mediators eventually learned that Andy had begun calling Karla names after her older brother started calling him names. Karla had responded to Andy’s torments by hurling epithets of her own.

“You didn’t like it when she called you names,” Vincent said to Andy. “So do you think she liked it when you called her names?”

In the end, Andy and Karla both signed a sheet of paper agreeing to solve their conflict by staying away from each other.

And to make sure they abided by their pledge, Olympia reminded the two students that pupils who fail to solve their conflicts through mediation face possible discipline from Anacapa Principal Charlotte McElroy.

“You don’t want to end up with Miss McElroy,” Olympia warned. “She won’t be nice.”

The entire mediation session lasted half an hour.

Mediation works, said conflict-resolution specialist Judith Rubenstein, because “it sets a mutual safe place where people can start to talk to each other.”

The two people having the dispute gradually see that they share the same feelings of anger, fear and distrust, said Rubenstein, who has contracted with the Ventura school district to launch a student mediation program at the high schools.

“By sitting across the table and hearing someone else, you see their basic humanity and who they are,” Rubenstein said. “They’re no longer the enemy.”

In some districts, teachers or administrators may also act as mediators between students. But student mediation programs have the advantage of allowing children who are embroiled in conflict to seek help from their peers instead of adults.

Children feel less ashamed about turning to classmates for help than to authority figures, educators say.

“If you can make it socially acceptable to solve problems in a nonviolent manner, that’s what everybody wants,” said Susan Parks, assistant superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District. “That’s what a schoolwide program does. Then kids don’t have to be bold and not back down.”

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Although some Simi Valley elementary schools use student mediators to help children resolve disputes on the playground, none of the district’s schools have formal, schoolwide programs aimed at teaching conflict resolution.

Simi Valley officials had scheduled a training session on conflict resolution for a group of elementary school teachers, but it was postponed after the Jan. 17 earthquake damaged several schools.

Two weeks later, 14-year-old Chad Hubbard was stabbed to death at Valley View Junior High following a long-running dispute with a classmate that began, some students said, when the two boys gave each other funny looks in a school hallway.

The incident has led Simi Valley school officials to consider training all of the district’s teachers, not just those in elementary schools, to help students learn to avoid violence.

“We need some sort of systematic training,” Parks said.

In Thousand Oaks, high school students who volunteer as peer counselors are sometimes called to school offices to talk to classmates involved in a dispute. But the peer counselors have no formal training in mediation and rarely meet with both sides in a dispute.

The recent shooting of three Westlake High School students has led district officials to consider expanding the high school peer counseling programs to include mediation.

The melee occurred after school and was sparked by racial animosity, according to attorneys involved in the case. A junior football player, who is white, and a sophomore Asian American were supposed to have a fistfight. But the sophomore was accompanied by five carloads of associates who attacked the football player and some of his friends with baseball bats, sticks--and bullets, police said.

Three students were wounded. Four 16-year-old Asian American boys have been charged.

Westlake High officials had tried traditional means to avert the confrontation between the junior and sophomore, who had a history of animosity. In addition to suspending the boys last year for fighting, officials had warned them this year that they would be punished again if they came to blows.

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The students simply moved the fight to a park off campus.

Conejo Valley Supt. Gross said he believes that using student mediators on the high school campuses may help defuse racial conflicts as well as other types of disputes.

Instead of using mediators, some districts are taking the Oxnard Elementary district’s approach, using prepackaged curricula aimed at teaching students to settle conflicts without violence.

Such course work on conflict resolution techniques is useful, experts say. But teachers need to ensure that students put the skills into practice.

“The more curriculum the better in conflict resolution,” Rubenstein said. “Every kid should be exposed to these ideas: When is it appropriate to avoid (conflict)? When is it appropriate to try to talk about it and do something about it? And how do you talk about it?”

But, she said, “conflict resolution is about how we talk to each other, the way we talk. The only way to learn that is by practicing it.”