Shock Wave of School Violence Reaching Out to Suburbs, Rural Areas : Education: Some districts use metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, ID cards and video cameras to try to keep the peace.

At a guard shack outside Mount View High School, three teen-agers who had been unruly on a school bus stopped for inspection recently.

The guard wrote down their names and ran a hand-held metal detector over each youth. They turned on command and raised their arms over their heads.

“Check my hat,” one teased. “Maybe I’ve got a gun in my hat.”

He didn’t.

But it was just another day at Mount View High School, where students must enter through airport-like metal detectors and are monitored all day by more than 30 video cameras.

Fortress Mount View isn’t an inner-city school. Its 1,000 students attend class in a secluded building perched high on a hill overlooking an Appalachian town of fewer than 4,000 people, with the West Virginia coal fields beyond.

Principal Barbara Hairston calls the security a success. But some students say it hurts morale and doesn’t work: In November, two students were suspended for having a gun at the school.

Metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs and locker searches are becoming more common in American schools as educators try to curb “an epidemic of violence,” according to a National School Boards Assn. report issued in January.

Eighty-two percent of 729 school districts responding to an association survey said violence in schools has increased in the last five years. Fifteen percent said they use metal detectors to screen for weapons.

At Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., starting times for 1,500 students are staggered over 2 1/2 hours so they don’t have to wait in line more than 15 minutes to be scanned through the metal detectors and X-ray machines, said Assistant Principal Frieda Homer.

The school began using the machines after three students were killed and a teacher injured in two separate shootings in 1991, she said.

“It’s winding up in a lot of schools and a lot of institutions around the country. You can’t get into a courthouse anymore without going through a metal detector,” she said.

“If you listen to the news, no matter where you travel, and I travel around the country quite a bit, the first item on every news report is who was killed, who was robbed and how many guns were involved. Until that stops being the lead item on the news and in our lives, I don’t think anyone should anticipate this going away,” Homer said.

But Mount View High School freshman Chastity Hamilton, 15, said her school is taking security to extremes.

“It feels like a prison here,” she said. “The older kids don’t care because they’ve gotten used to it. But the younger ones like me are coming from schools where you’re still playing with blocks.”

Hamilton said she sometimes skips classes and part of the reason is because she feels pressured by all the security devices. She said school officials ought to trust the students.

The tight security followed years of violence stemming from school rivalries dating back before consolidation into Mount View in 1979.

On Jan. 17, 1992, a 17-year-old student pulled out a .25-caliber handgun and wounded Clayton Hightower, 18, during a special education class.

The next day, outraged parents protested by keeping their children home from school. They demanded the resignation of McDowell County school officials if they didn’t tighten security.

Within weeks, the school board provided two security guards, two walk-through metal detectors, a camera-surveillance system, a guard shelter outside and an identification card system for anyone entering the school.

Hairston, a warm, charismatic woman, started as principal in August.

“I came into this job hoping to make a difference,” she said. “We’re here for the kids, not in spite of the kids.”

Hairston downplayed the security measures and said students mostly ignore them. “It’s a normal routine that’s making a safe environment for learning,” she said. “It’s like any other rule, like no talking in class. When you come in the gate, you are scanned. It’s just another fact of life.”

The metal detectors are manned by four teachers, a security guard and the assistant principal, Hairston said.

All other entrances to the building are locked, she said, so students must go through the detectors. Backpacks, purses and packages also are examined, she said.

She refused to let a reporter and photographer watch students coming in through the detectors.

Asked how the teen-agers smuggled the gun past the detectors in November, Hairston demurred. “No one has said they smuggled it in. We don’t know that. There are a lot of entrances, and they could have come in at night,” Hairston said before changing the subject.

Tim Butler, 16, said he believed one youth brought the gun, then asked the other to carry it. A third student alerted school officials.

Butler, a vocational student studying masonry, said he liked school better before the security measures.

“It was better when they didn’t search you every day,” Butler said. “And with all the video cameras, it feels like you’re always being spied on.”

Bob O’Brien, spokesman for the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the issue “one of the more problematic matters to come up in recent years.”

“We don’t want our schools to be armed fortresses and yet we want our children to be safe,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien said he didn’t consider the “aberrant behavior” of one youth justification for the security devices.

“Unless there is substantial evidence of children doing things that would destroy the security of the school, it would seem to me this is going overboard,” O’Brien said. “This is the wrong atmosphere for an educational institution.”

But Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village, Calif., said security helps students concentrate on academics.

“The kids who aren’t bringing the guns to school appreciate the additional measures being taken,” Stephens said.

The center was established in 1984 by a mandate from President Ronald Reagan to analyze and help decrease violence in schools. It is a partnership of the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education and Pepperdine University.

The Mount View teen-ager who teased the security guard into checking his hat said the security measures don’t work. The teen, who did not give his name, showed a photographer a can of Mace and said, “You can get anything past the guards.”