WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : Frowns Turned Upside Down : Smiles are prevalent again at Broadway Elementary in Venice after a truce that ended a long, bloody gang war in the area. ‘We survived, persevered and have learned from the experience,’ the school’s principal says.

Early on Monday mornings, before classes begin, the students at Broadway Elementary School in Oakwood line up in perfect formation on their playground for a weekly awards ceremony.

As festive parents, teachers, siblings and grandparents look on, the school principal--megaphone in hand--blares out the names of the previous week’s highest-achieving students. Pupils, ranging from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, march forward to receive a special pencil and a pat on the back to the sound of spirited applause.

What a difference a year makes.

Only a few months ago, students and teachers often lay sprawled across the same schoolyard, ducking gunfire that crackled nearby. Games of hopscotch would be interrupted by police helicopters and sirens. And parents frequently swarmed the school to take their children home after neighborhood shootings.

The cause of last year’s chaos was a deadly war between black and Latino gangs. In nine months of tit-for-tat shootings, 17 people died--in many cases innocents who became random targets--and 55 were wounded.

The violence traumatized Oakwood, a close-knit community of about 10,000 residents in Venice. And perhaps nowhere was its fallout so apparent as at the elementary school, long an island of calm in the one-square-mile community.

But then came a gang cease-fire, which was negotiated in June by gang members with the help of probation officers and that remains in effect today. Now, Oakwood residents once again frequent local recreation centers, stroll in the neighborhood and hold outdoor barbecues.

And at Broadway Elementary, students, teachers and administrators are enjoying an atmosphere of calm and security that many other schools take for granted.

“We’re seeing more smiles, and (students) are not as anxious,” said Jeannie Gutierrez, a psychologist at the school. “They’re just happy, silly kids who are glad to have had a summer of peace--to go to the beach, the boardwalk and the parks.”

“This year I can walk around by myself and play outside,” said one 10-year-old student, who asked not to be identified. “Last year I felt closed in, like I was in a jail. It was always hot in my house. Now I can feel a breeze.”

Such stability is also important for the Oakwood community at large. Broadway Elementary has stood as a sanctuary of trust, a place where children are not only educated but fed and given psychological help. It’s a place where parents take English-language and citizenship classes, seek advice and meet with neighbors during a crisis.

In communities hit by violence, local schools often serve as a refuge--an important reason, experts say, that such schools must remain safe.

“Many of these (inner-city) environments are more lethal than most war zones in the world’s headlines,” said Jim Garbarino, author of “Children in Danger: Coping with the Consequences of Community Violence.” “In these American war zones, there is a breakdown of a meaningful adult structure, and kids realize that their parents are not in control and cannot protect them.”

Added Garbarino, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University: “School becomes a potential safe zone, physically and emotionally, and a critical place for a child’s safety, security and advocacy.”

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For Broadway’s principal, Ed Romotsky, providing safe schooling in a climate of violence became an obsession last year.

The veteran administrator began his job in September, 1993, after a six-year stint as an assistant vice principal at Weemes Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. In South-Central, he gained plenty of experience in talking with irate parents, setting up large school events and dealing with physical attacks against teachers and other dangers--including investigating a bomb threat.

When Romotsky arrived at Broadway, he found a surreal atmosphere in which he was forced to search for solutions to a daunting mix of problems that at times seemed beyond his control.

Children were coming to school after witnessing shootings. Some of their relatives had been killed. Others spoke of bullets shattering windows at home, even lodging in their refrigerators. To be safe from gunfire, parents put babies to sleep in bathtubs and had children eat dinner while lying on the floor.

“My daughter had to cross the chalk (police) markings on the street after a shooting,” said the mother of one Broadway Elementary student. “She was bewildered. She asked, ‘What does this mean, are we all going to die?’ To explain (it) to her was very difficult.”

In one case, a gang shootout occurred on a street beside the school while Broadway Elementary was in session. In another instance, gunfire nearby caused students to stampede into the schoolyard bathrooms. And on a third occasion, a shell casing was found in the school’s parking lot.

None of Broadway’s students were shot or wounded, but Romotsky brought in a team of counselors to deal with the psychological effects of the violence on students.

Some of them suffered from insomnia, depression, hyper-vigilance and an inability to concentrate. Others had an exaggeratedly startled response to loud noises, constant irritability or physical ailments such as chronic headaches, stomachaches and fatigue.

Because of the dangers, many couldn’t play outside after school, making matters even worse.

“Many of them were being kept home and had no release for their nervous energy,” said Robin Kay, a director at the Didi Hirsch Community Health Center, which provided counseling for children in the area. “Many of them had been deprived of the social interaction that they were accustomed to.”

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The school’s staff and teachers were devastated by the effects of the violence on the children and by the deaths--from drug use or gunfire--of young people in the community. Many of of the victims were former Broadway students.

On a wall in Gutierrez’s office hangs a framed series of pictures of six fifth-graders, all classmates in the school seven years ago. They look like a close-knit bunch, arms draped around each other with ear-to-ear smiles.

“They’re all dead,” the school psychologist said of the photos, which she displays to memorialize the youngsters. “They were my little babies. I keep it there to remember.” For decades before last year’s strife, many of Broadway’s black and Latino students forged close ties in the school and as they grew up together on the same parks and playgrounds. Black and Latino parents often picked each others’ children up from school and shared baby-sitting duties.

The school has remained largely peaceful, even as its student body has changed demographically. In the early 1970s, a majority of Broadway’s 1,100 students were black. Now, 87% of the students are Latino, 12% are black and 1% are white.

About 90% of the students are eligible for the federal meal program that provides free or reduced-price meals for needy children. (A family of four qualifies, for instance, if its income is $2,000 a month or less.)

Current enrollment is 365 students, down from 400 last year, a drop officials attribute to last year’s violence and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new open enrollment policy allowing residents to place their children in other schools in the district.

Although Broadway’s students appear to get along, the nine months of gang violence that began last September created an atmosphere of suspicion in the community that sometimes made it difficult for blacks and Latino children to interact off campus, according to counselors who have held therapy sessions for Broadway students.

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Although cash-strapped, Broadway Elementary appears well administered and maintained. No trash mars the schoolyard. Murals, not graffiti, decorate the walls. Attendance rates remain high. The children are well dressed and disciplined. Teachers say there have been few fights--maybe two during the 1993-94 school year.

When the gang troubles erupted last year, Romotsky implemented emergency evacuation procedures and drop drills, in which students and teachers would lie prone in the schoolyard. The drills were put to use at least six times when gunshots rang out near the school, school officials say. Administrators also initiated continuous meetings with parents, teachers and the police.

With the support of his staff, Romotsky strengthened existing academic programs and expanded extracurricular activities. Students were taken on more field trips--to colleges, hospitals and the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, among other places.

Warner Avenue Elementary School in Westwood, a sister school of Broadway, donated food, clothing, computers and peer tutors. Parents worked as volunteers, painting rooms and weeding the schoolyard.

“In the face of all the craziness, we had to emphasize the positive,” Romotsky said. “It was important we had a series of enrichment and nourishment programs in place. If there had been a vacuum, it would have been quite different.”

After the earthquake in January, which hit during the height of gang violence in Oakwood, the school organized a volunteer food drive for victims of the Northridge temblor. Hundreds of boxes of canned food, blankets and baby food were loaded in a rented truck and driven to a Red Cross quake-relief center in the San Fernando Valley.

“Our motto is: Our children are going to be survivors, not victims,” Gutierrez said. “Better to teach children compassion and empathy. There’s always going to be someone worse off than you. By giving kids power and authority, it refocuses their energy.”

Broadway Elementary was also helped by forging close ties with the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. Started in the early 1970s, the popular private school offers a diverse curriculum, including a strong arts program and innovative college preparatory courses.

The school’s principal, Paul Cummins, wanted to help poorly funded local public schools rejuvenate their virtually obsolete art programs. Backed with a $600,000 grant from the Herb Alpert Foundation and small grants from businesses and individuals, the Crossroads Community Foundation was founded in 1991.

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For the past three years, Crossroads has funded a comprehensive curriculum of music, art, dance and theater programs at Broadway, Coeur d’Alene Avenue School in Venice and at the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club. The partnership between a private school and public schools is one of the nation’s first and has begun to be replicated throughout the country.

“The arts allow children to express their feelings in a positive way,” Cummins said. “When kids find success in the arts it has a dramatic impact on their academic success. Art gives them a chance to say, ‘I am. I have some value,’ which is a wonderful way to make that statement instead of bottling it up and having it come out in destructive negative ways like graffiti and guns.”

On a recent day at Broadway, more than a dozen music students sat in a semicircle, imitating the rhythmic beats of their teachers with a series of claps and slaps. A student kept time by banging a drum; some hit gongs, temple blocks and a xylophone. They repeated the words to an Appalachian folk song while working on pitch and echo techniques.

The primary goal is to experience the music through singing, listening and playing, teachers say. Though musical notes are drawn on the board, reading music remains a secondary aim.

“They really develop a sense of ensemble. When one messes up, each helps the other,” said Richard Geere, a teacher of the class. “They’re willing to take risks and participate. The music really takes them to a place of joy. There’s nothing to argue with.”

Many teachers have noticed an increase in attention spans. And the music classes have pulled some students out of what seemed like an incurable lethargy.

“One kid who’s always getting criticized at home just totally came alive in class. He now has this sparkle in his eye,” said Marty Fox, a school music teacher.

The music teachers said such classes have given students an outlet that became particularly important in helping them endure--and recover from--last year’s violence. Children often spend their lunch hours rehearsing. Others use bamboo poles on the playground for rhythm and dance practice.

When Geere and Fox returned for the fall term, they were greeted by a cry from a crowd of students who shouted, “It’s them! It’s them!”

Last May, Broadway Elementary, through its arts program, encouraged students to draw their Heart’s Desire--an illustration of their most fervent wishes--on the sidewalk in front of the school.

The message was clear in the many colored-chalk outlines: an overwhelming desire for peace. There were drawings of hearts, pastoral scenes, hands flashing the peace symbol and of blacks and Latinos painting out graffiti.

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Nearly four months later, the colors of some of those drawings remain visible under the bubble gum stains and dust.

“Last year’s experience was a catalyst that brought many children and others in the community even closer together,” Romotsky said. “We survived, persevered and have learned from the experience. Hopefully, it is a sign that we can keep working together.”