Plan to Reward Youths for School Crime Tips Debated : Education: Critics say L.A. students should not be paid to do the right thing. Backers want whatever works.

Margaret Ensley’s son Michael was killed by gunfire at Reseda High School two years ago, and she is in favor of just about anything that would reduce the number of weapons in Los Angeles public schools.

To Ensley and others like her who are fighting school violence, a plan to reward students for turning in classmates who bring guns or drugs to campus poses no dilemma. They say whatever works--whatever stops a drug deal or pulls a gun out of a student’s hand--is fine with them.

“It might have saved Mike’s life,” she said. “There’s no price to put on life.”

But for others--including policy-makers in the nation’s second-largest school district--the notion of paying youngsters to turn in their classmates raises knotty ethical questions.

A plan under consideration by the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education would offer students $75 in gifts and other prizes for tipping off authorities about weapons, narcotics or serious acts of vandalism at school.

School police support the proposal, but among educators it has become the focus of pointed debate. Some suggest it is wrong to pay children to do the right thing, and that doing so might interfere with a child’s development into a responsible and moral adult.

“It’s really a competition between one good thing--safety in schools--and other good things: development of civic responsibility and a sense of trust among people,” said Lynn Beck, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA who specializes in ethics and school leadership. “It becomes a very tough issue.”

The proposal--which had its first public airing last week before the school board’s safety committee, but has yet to go before the full board--comes as reward fever is sweeping the nation, with prizes and cash for crime tips increasingly targeted at children, not just adults.

A nonprofit group called Crime Stoppers International has initiated 500 school-based reward programs in the United States and Canada. Locally, three Ventura County school districts are considering adopting reward programs, and the Antelope Valley Union High School District started one in November.

When aimed at adults, rewards are popular because they provide an incentive for otherwise apathetic citizens to participate in the fight against crime.

But, critics say, such incentives are not appropriate for children.

“I’m against rewarding adolescents when I think we should be teaching them responsibility,” said Alex Rascon, director of the San Diego Unified School District’s police department. Rascon said three San Diego schools experimented with rewards, then abandoned the idea.

“I think adolescents need to understand that they have a responsibility to get involved,” he said.

Setting up a reward program would create an atmosphere of mistrust on school campuses, and could interfere with students’ moral development, said B. David Brooks, president of the Jefferson Center for Character Education in Pasadena.

Instead of feeling safe on campus, Brooks said, students would worry that others were spying on them. Students could also misuse the program, with drug dealers turning in competitors, or rivals falsely accusing each other.

And, he said, rewarding children for doing the right thing is particularly bad for adolescents, who are at a time in their lives when they are supposed to be learning how to behave correctly based on their own knowledge of right and wrong.

“I think it could be detrimental to the overall development of character,” Brooks said.

When it comes to behavior that can endanger others--such as bringing weapons on campus--students should be taught to respond out of a desire to protect themselves and others, rather than to win clothing or movie passes, some say.

Paying rewards sends “the wrong message in terms of what the issue of guns and threatening behavior mean to a school community,” said Steven Marans, who teaches child psychoanalysis and studies violence among youth at Yale University.

“Being a snitch who gets paid money to inform on a student is a very different thing from having a sense within an entire community that certain kinds of behaviors are dangerous,” Marans said.

The reward programs, he said, are little more than placebos, lulling adults into thinking--falsely--that they have taken action against the difficult problem of school violence.

None of this matters to Larry Hill, supervisor of security for the Memphis City School District in Tennessee. The Memphis schools have offered rewards since 1993 and have netted 60 guns and 102 other weapons.

“I don’t get into the moral ethics of it,” Hill said. “I am looking to get those guns off of my campuses.”

Los Angeles school board President Mark Slavkin, the plan’s most vocal supporter on the board, sees no problem with the reward concept.

“Adults are constantly offered cash rewards by law enforcement,” Slavkin said. “No one says people should just do that because they’re good people.” Expecting students to adhere to a higher standard than adults is hypocritical, Slavkin said.

Los Angeles Unified Police Chief Wes Mitchell said the rewards should be viewed as “an enhancement to what we teach kids.”

Not only are rewards not harmful, Mitchell said, but they are part of the way children learn. “How do we frame children except through consequences and rewards?” asked Mitchell, whose department developed the reward proposal.

In Antelope Valley, administrators credit the rewards with the arrests of 38 students from November through January.

But success elsewhere has been spotty. Most schools combine their reward programs with violence reduction measures and citizenship classes, and it is hard to tell whether arrests are linked to the financial incentives or crime prevention education.

In Washington, a reward program that targets schoolchildren as well as residents has netted fewer then a dozen guns since it began in August.

“Here’s what they’re going to encounter” if a program is started in Los Angeles, said Stephen E. Rickman, director of the Washington Office of Emergency Preparedness and vice chairman of the Community Prevention Partnership. “The kids are not going to believe that the program is going to remain confidential. The kids do not trust adults. They don’t think we can protect them.”

In addition, he said, there is a powerful code of silence among teen-agers that would probably keep many from informing, even without the threat of retaliation.

Indeed, a number of students said they feared retaliation if word got out that they had turned someone in.

“People find out,” said Mike Ferver, 18, a senior at Reseda High School. “They can always find out who snitched.”

Offering a reward can endanger youths in several ways, said Sandy Kress, president of the Dallas, Tex., school board, which three years ago wrestled with the issue and decided to set up a hot line without reward incentives.

A child could be too naive to realize that telling friends about his or her reward could be dangerous, Kress said. Or a child might be prodded by the prospect of a reward to ignore danger and turn in a particularly well-connected and violent fellow student, who might retaliate.

The Dallas program, which combines the hot line with other anti-violence approaches, netted about 160 weapons the first year, but only a small number were reported through the hot line.

In Los Angeles schools, a weapons hot line set up two years ago has led to the discovery of only one gun. But administrators confiscated 112 guns last year through other means, including independent school police investigations and students who discreetly offered information to trusted teachers and administrators.

A highly publicized campaign to deter students from bringing guns to school through random searches with metal detectors has uncovered some knives, but no guns.

For several school board members, a decision to support the reward plan would be based not on the belief that it would be a roaring success, but on a sense of resignation that anything that might help is worth a try.

“Even if it’s 10 guns, it’s 10 guns that didn’t end up harming someone,” said board member Julie Korenstein, who has not decided whether to support the plan.

Korenstein and board members Leticia Quezada, Warren Furutani and Barbara Boudreaux said they would only support the proposal if they could be assured that tipsters would remain anonymous.

Some Los Angeles Unified schools have their own programs for students to report campus crimes. At Jordan High School in South-Central Los Angeles, Assistant Principal Michael Perez carries a pager for students to alert him to campus crimes. But he said he has had no calls this year and that only two students paged him--for no reason--last year.

Reseda High School offers $25 cash rewards to students who report vandalism or other crimes on campus. Administrators have paid students $125 this year for information.

But all the talk about rewards misses the point, some say, because it places too much responsibility for fixing the problem of youth violence on children.

Leaders of the Los Angeles school district need to pay more attention to the reasons why a student would bring a weapon on campus, said Mildred Hilliard, the mother of Demetrius Rice, who was shot to death in a classroom at Fairfax High School in January, 1993.

“I’m not opposed to the school district trying anything that would help get weapons off school campuses,” Hilliard said. “(But) they need to get to the root of the problem. . . . They should provide counseling in every school from first grade on to let students know the consequences of bringing weapons to school.”

But individual students may or may not be up to the task, regardless of reward incentives.

Several students at Reseda High School knew that Robert Heard (who has been convicted in the killing) had a gun the day he shot Michael Ensley, said Michael Piaseczny, an 18-year-old Reseda High senior. They had the best reward in the world--their own safety--at stake and did not tell then, he said, and they probably would not tell now.

“If life isn’t incentive enough,” he asked, “what is?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BACKGROUND

The Los Angeles Unified School District is considering a proposal that would reward students who turn in their classmates for carrying weapons, dealing drugs or vandalizing campuses. Students would report violators anonymously on a telephone hot line and be assigned identification numbers to use in claiming their rewards. They would receive up to $75 in gift certificates and merchandise--including concert tickets, compact discs, clothing and shoes--if an arrest is made. The plan was developed by the district’s police department and the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Safari Club International, a nonprofit sport hunting group that agreed to give the district $15,000 to fund the program over the next year.