Learning to Increase Peace : Schools: Counselors and support groups are trying to help youths transcend the constant threat of gang violence. Their tools are solace and a new game plan for life.

An emotional wrestling match goes on at Washington Preparatory High School in South-Central Los Angeles.

Seven months after a semester that saw three students and a recent graduate killed, there is an air of resilience on campus. Hallways buzz with laughter, gum popping and lively noise. Students and teachers say they are waging a campaign of optimism and self-healing. There is a Peace Club on campus, as well as a grief support group and a “male responsibility counselor.”

All the while, though, the school remains haunted by the growing roster of students killed by gunfire.

Antonio D. Lewis, a star basketball player, was killed in May outside a party when he stood up to gang members who were harassing him. His classmate, Michael Nasir, a talented young rapper with dreams of fame, was shot and killed after leaving his girlfriend’s house in April. Also dead are Sam Canady and recent graduate Wallace Dumas, who was killed while working on his car outside his home.

The murders of high school students usually draw attention when they occur on campus. Yet the off-campus killings, which are far more numerous, hit the students’ home school just as hard.

“Thirteen of my friends have been killed in the last three years,” says Michael Walters, a member of Washington’s Black Student Union, shaking his head.

Students such as Walters have become hardened by the increasingly common deaths among their friends. LaJoy Bullard, a recent Washington graduate who had dated two of the young men killed earlier this year, said moving on--not wasting tears--is important.

“Why cry?” she asked, her voice strained by weary sadness. “I have cried all that I could cry. . . . There was a time when we were going to three funerals a month for our friends.”

Many children at Washington--like students everywhere from South-Central to the San Fernando Valley--live each day as if they are senior citizens: Death is not welcomed, but it is accepted. They exist in a world of “strapped” (gun-wielding) teen-agers, in which the fear of getting shot is a daily weight and guns become the negotiator, the only means of resolving a dispute.

Groping to transcend the stereotypes of a largely black high school plagued by violence, Washington has revamped its approach to education: Under stricter dress codes, students whose pants sag must pull them up and young men cannot wear earrings or potential gang attire, such as Raiders football shirts. This year’s schoolwide theme, “Increase the Peace at the Prep,” is being paired with the Monday meetings of the Peace Club. There are noontime forums for students to address their concerns about the school and safety.

*

Desperate to deal with the emotional aftermath of shootings, school officials have installed a variety of unusual support programs.

In the school’s group counseling office, the emphasis is on the endangered status of young black men, who made up the majority of the high school-age youths killed this year, according to county Sheriff’s Department statistics.

On a recent day, about 10 students shared stories as they sat in a circle around Vance Howard, Washington’s male responsibility counselor, a position created to help young men feel that they have a big brother. He is there to feel their anger, help them talk through the pain of a friend’s death or just listen. It is his job, according to program coordinator Henrietta Smith, “to give the boys permission to grieve.”

A greater number of young black men have been coming to Smith’s office seeking emotional support for themselves or friends. Young men’s machismo resistance to counseling is wearing off as they see the value of talking about their emotions, she said.

Her assistant, Elizabeth Felton, oversees the “grief group,” a year-round support group dealing with everything from students’ emotions about suicide to slain classmates.

Even Washington’s student leaders, usually the least likely to be involved in violence, are struggling with spilled blood.

“At first, we didn’t cherish our friends,” said Washington’s student body president, Jasmine Brown. “Now I’m like: I don’t want to say anything bad to my friends or other students, because I may never see them again.”

Brown beams as she talks about how her school is changing after last semester’s horrors. Her long, thin black braids bop with optimism as she details how bridging the gap between teachers and students has built trust, how opposing sides are constantly communicating whenever there is even a slight possibility of gunfire or conflict between gang factions.

*

Yet officials acknowledge that policies can make only a small dent in problems such as poverty and gang violence when about 1 in 20 students in the United States carry guns to school and gunfire is the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 19.

Donald Bakeer, an English teacher at Washington and the author of “Crips,” a fictional history of the black street gang, attributes the alarming number of gun killings of Washington students to a generational shift for African Americans. Black children of today, he said, don’t have the same type of moral obligations or codes that their parents had.

“Cliches and slogans won’t solve the problems with violence,” Bakeer said. “We need a national movement like Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace (a campaign founded by black leaders in the late 1980s) that mobilizes young people to stop killing each other.”

At Reseda High School in the San Fernando Valley and at Hollywood High School, students and teachers are grappling with the same concerns.

Since September, two Hollywood High students have been killed, one right outside the school’s steel gates on Sunset Boulevard.

Immediately after 17-year-old Rolando Ruiz was shot during midday traffic in September by gunmen who abandoned their cars and ran, administrators scrambled to put in place a team of community volunteers, parents and school officials who would be ready whenever a crisis occurred.

“By the time they get to high school, even if they try to stop their negative behavior, they often aren’t able to,” said instructor Lorraine Bradley, former Mayor Tom Bradley’s daughter, who coordinates Hollywood High’s crisis intervention program.

Some of the students who saw Ruiz’s bloody body lying on the concrete at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue outside the school said the image is still forged in their minds every time a fight or the sound of gunfire erupts.

Assistant Principal Jerry Massey said Hollywood High was recently given an award by school board officials for its crisis intervention program, but he sees that as much as an omen as a blessing.

“We were recognized for being prepared for death when we should be ready for life,” he said.

In February, 1993, in the crowded hallways at Reseda High School, football player Robert Heard whipped out a gun in the school’s science building, shot Michael Ensley one time in the chest, and fled the campus weeping.

Three months later, Reseda honor roll student and basketball player Nikki Foley was shot and killed while standing outside her apartment building in Panorama City. The 16-year-old and her family had moved there to escape the crime and violence of Los Angeles.

*

After Ensley’s death, English teacher Jay Shaffer rounded up some students and started an anti-violence program called WARN (Weapons Are Removed Now). It won them a trip to New York to appear on Phil Donahue’s TV show in April. Members of WARN visit the elementary and junior high schools that feed Reseda High, warning younger children about guns and violence.

“We want to get to the young people when they are still very impressionable,” Shaffer said.

WARN President Debbie Carlos, a senior, said she got involved because the death of students from her campus brought the issue closer to home. “We all thought Reseda was such a safe school,” Carlos said. “I didn’t think it could happen in the suburbs.”

The students at Reseda said metal detectors, which have been the remedy for most schools across the country, won’t work.

“If someone wants to get a gun into our school then they will,” said WARN member Jayme Rebbeck. “No matter what devices they have.”

More important, said Reseda student Pedram Torbati, is breaking through a mental block.

“Kids don’t understand the finality of death,” he said. “They accept it so easily.”