A Heroic Struggle to Defuse Tensions : The unsung work of area schools is so needed

The National Education Goals Panel, established five years ago to assess the quality of education in America, now reports that incidents of violence at or near schools are on the decline. However, what we usually hear about--often in great detail--are every disruption of peace at schools and every situation in which strife might occur.

Examples: We’ve been told that 400 Orange County students have been expelled over the last three years for taking weapons to school. In Los Angeles County there have been 11 instances since early 1993 in which students have been wounded or killed or in which shots have been fired near or inside schools. On Wednesday a boy was shot to death near Dorsey High School in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw area. On Tuesday in Van Nuys two Grant High School students were stabbed and a third teen-ager was shot near the campus.

AURA OF FEAR: Problems perhaps could have been predicted at Grant High, where racial tensions between Armenian and Latino students have been escalating for some time. Indeed, the sole L.A. Unified School District police officer at the school requested assistance on Tuesday because he had heard that a fight might erupt. His fears soon were realized in the form of after-school skirmishes involving several dozen students. Later, a student told television news reporters that problems there surely would continue because there were “too many differences between the races.”

More police officers and counselors have been dispatched to Grant High. But what else can be done, now and in the future, to avoid such problems? Some are seeking remedies through legislation. Orange County Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), for example, brought a number of bills to Sacramento including one directing schools to punish students who commit racist hate crimes and another establishing “gun-free zones” around campuses. But some of the best solutions appear to be those that involve students by enlisting their support and establishing a dialogue among them.

EUROPEAN WARNING: Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) and North Hollywood High School officials have worked together to bring a group of Serbians, Croatians and Muslims from war-torn Bosnia to the campus to discuss what happens when racial and religious differences reach their illogical and genocidal extremes. “It’s just normal to be dead in Sarajevo,” one of the visitors told the students.

Reseda High School’s WARN program (which stands for Weapons Are Removed Now) has succeeded in breaking the code of silence among students and enlisting them in reporting peers who take guns onto the campus. And at Inglewood and Morningside high schools in Inglewood, students are using a U.S. Department of Justice conflict resolution program to try to find solutions to conflicts and racial tensions before they grow into violence.

All of these are valuable efforts. They are every bit as worthy of our attention as accounts of the shedding of blood.