Elections: Prop. 187: The Anger and Angst : Student Walkout Inquiry Is Urged : Protests: Initiative backers say school officials encouraged youths to leave classes. Administrators deny charge.

Backers of Proposition 187 accused school officials Friday of encouraging thousands of students to walk out of class in recent weeks, while opponents of the measure said its passage would throw hundreds of thousands more out of school permanently.

In a last-chance appeal for voters to defeat the controversial initiative, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and top prosecutors from Los Angeles and San Francisco charged that barring up to 400,000 undocumented students from school--as the measure calls for--would result in a substantial crime increase.

“The truth is that crime prevention means keeping kids in school,” Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said at a news conference. “The law enforcement community is standing shoulder to shoulder saying, ‘For us as professionals, Proposition 187 is not the way to go.’ ”

Meanwhile, sponsors of the ballot measure held their own news conference Friday morning outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters, urging that Garcetti investigate allegations that teachers and administrators encouraged and in some cases assisted angry students to plan and execute the walkouts.

To support their claims, they quoted a news report of Granada Hills High School teachers helping map a march route earlier this week. They also distributed letters from the Long Beach and Los Angeles unified school districts advising parents about possible consequences of Proposition 187.

“We are outraged and we believe that taxpayers should be outraged that dollars for education . . . seem to be being channeled into a political campaign,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), a major backer of the proposition. “We are also upset that teachers and administrators seem to be inciting the students to go out into the streets to ditch classes.”

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A spokeswoman for Garcetti said the district attorney’s office had not received a formal request to investigate the alleged school misconduct.

Los Angeles unified officials defended the mailing of letters to parents, saying they were providing only factual information. They also said they would look into specific reports of teachers or administrators getting involved in walkouts.

“Those people will be disciplined should those allegations prove true,” Board of Education President Mark Slavkin said.

Granada Hills High School Principal Kathleen Rattay said reports of teacher participation in a march Wednesday were grossly distorted. She and other school officials advised the 300 students only how to safely conduct their march--remaining on sidewalks and obeying traffic lights--after spending more than two hours trying to dissuade them from leaving the campus, she said.

“We asked them to plan safely and they ran a few things by us,” Rattay said.

Similarly, a parent leader said the Parent Teacher Student Assn. has received no complaints of official complicity in the walkouts, the kind of concern that would ordinarily stir up the group’s members.

“Although we are opposed to Proposition 187, if we had any information that administrators were encouraging or behind the student walkouts, we’d be down at the Board of Administration protesting also,” said Harriet Sculley, who heads the PTSA in the San Fernando Valley.

Scattered walkouts continued Friday, with more than 3,500 students leaving schools around the county. About 500 South-Central Los Angeles high school students gathered at Exposition Park in the morning. Three people were arrested there--two on charges of battery on an officer and one on charges of vandalism.

In the San Fernando Valley, about 250 Taft High School students walked from their Woodland Hills campus to Cleveland High School in Reseda, where they were briefly joined by another 250 demonstrators. The protest ended peacefully when the Taft youths boarded buses bound for their home campus.

Calm also governed a protest involving 300 students who trekked from Glendale High and Roosevelt Middle schools to the steps of Glendale City Hall--which was empty because it is closed on alternate Fridays.

Around noon, what began as a peaceful demonstration by about 200 Gardena High School students turned into a racial standoff and fistfight among African American and Latino students from Gardena and Leuzinger high schools. Sheriff’s officials made about a dozen arrests.

Reflecting on the continued walkouts, Los Angeles Unified School Board Member Leticia Quezada said she thought the public had “underestimated the fear that the proposition was going to incite among young people.

“People have this simplistic reaction that ‘Why isn’t the school stopping them?’ ” she said. “Some of these things aren’t stoppable.”

At their morning news conference, Garcetti, Block, Los Angeles City Atty. James Hahn and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith asked voters to vote no on Proposition 187 on Tuesday.

“Please dig down deep inside,” Garcetti said. “The reason the (proponents of the measure) want the case to go to the United States Supreme Court is because they’re hoping that the court will change the law. If that happens, are you going to feel good?”

Block agreed that passage of the measure would have a large impact on youngsters and crime. “Not only will many of them get into mischief,” said Block, who was one of the first public figures to come out against the measure, “but many of them will become victims of crime.”

In addition to barring illegal immigrant children from public school and non-emergency health care, the measure calls for educators and public health administrators to report suspects to federal authorities. In this manner, the measure’s supporters say, illegal immigrants can be deported.

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But Block raised questions about the likelihood of such deportations--considering that federal authorities already have trouble keeping up with deportation cases at the County Jail alone.

If Proposition 187 is approved, the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service would be hard-pressed to begin checking the long lists of suspects that, according to the measure, it would begin receiving from hospitals, clinics and schools, said INS spokesman Richard Kenney.

Block also said that the student walkouts “are really undercutting” the efforts to defeat the measure: “The critical voter base is going to be those who are yet undecided and they can be pushed in either direction.”

In a printed statement, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony joined those opposing the walkouts, commending students for “their passionate interest in this election,” but asking them to work against Proposition 187 after school. Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, in a noontime appearance at Montebello High School, also implored students not to leave school next week.

Since the walkouts began a month ago, Los Angeles Unified administrators have publicly asked students to remain at school, but they also made it easy for them to return if they chose to leave. Administrators and teachers have walked with students, sometimes providing bullhorns; school buses have been provided to return protesters to school, and few students have been disciplined for leaving campus.

After Taft students had returned to their campus Friday, Principal Ron Berz discussed the fine line school officials must walk as they try to encourage free expression without appearing to take sides, and keep marchers safe without provoking even more demonstrations.

There have been more basic obstacles, too, Berz said. Only a third of Taft’s 32-acre campus is fenced in, yet the school on busy Ventura Boulevard has 27 entrances and exits, he noted.

And physically restraining otherwise peaceful demonstrators has been out of the question because of the potential for injury, for escalating confrontations with authorities, and because of the size of Taft’s student body, 3,000 students.

“We don’t have the logistics to keep them inside,” said Berz.

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who represents the southwestern San Fernando Valley, called Friday for teachers and administrators to “enforce consequences” on truant students, such as putting students in detention or notifying their parents.

“I am not tolerant of children being out of school unless they are sick or have some other appropriate reason,” Chick said.

University High School did just that, assigning six hours of detention to more than 700 students who skipped two classes to demonstrate at the Federal Building in Westwood on Wednesday morning.

Districtwide, however, most schools have followed the district’s policy to punish only those who do not return to school after the march or who cause problems, such as vandalism, while off campus.

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Tina Daunt, Paul Feldman, Isaac Guzman, Timothy Williams and special correspondents Leslie Berestein, Scott Collins, Jon Garcia, Mary Moore and Simon Romero.