Drop the Fiction of ‘Safe Schools’ : Community Comment: As the state curriculum is overhauled, add a moral component to stem violence.

I said goodby to my last interview subject of the day, stretched out my hand and wished her good luck. Her handshake was limp, her smile fleeting. Then she was gone, headed back to her cell. Fifteen, she is serving a long sentence for murder. With her bare hands and a broken bottle, she had killed another girl. She said she had been enraged because the girl insulted her. Both were 13, students at the same school.

The surge of electricity hummed as the guard at the control center pushed the button to let me out. Automatically, I turned around and backed into the heavy steel door, a precaution I practice since I painfully jammed my wrist trying to open it.

Outside, I felt the warm rays of the afternoon sun and stopped to let them spill over me. Gradually, I began to relax. As I started walking through the parking lot to my car, I heard and saw a school bus approaching. Inside were teen-agers, school kids. Their shouts and raucous laughter exploded through the open windows of the bus as it screeched to a halt in the loading zone.

They tumbled out of the bus and began to cavort on the sidewalk. They were visitors to this youth prison, participants in a diversion program that gives at-risk urban students an opportunity to hear the horrifying life stories of kids who have killed other kids.

Though frolicking now, within minutes these visiting students would be spellbound, even terrified. Their incarcerated contemporaries would spare no details and would warn and beg them not to imitate their lifestyles and mistakes.

As I drove down the winding road toward the highway that was miles away from the prison, I turned on my radio. Over the all-news station I heard the story of the killing of Shazeb Andleeb on the campus at Narbonne High School in Harbor City. As he was assaulted and beaten down, other students reportedly watched. They did not, for whatever reason, stop the beating. And so Shazeb Andleeb died.

A school board member promised to personally investigate the killing because Narbonne “is an otherwise quiet school.” But school board members and educators everywhere need to drop the fiction that student killings are solely an inner-city, urban school problem; that their students are safer because they are better than those across town; and that their well-manicured neighborhood school zones and the families that live inside them are simply too civilized to be violent.

California has begun, once again, the daunting task of restructuring its academic curriculum for schools, an urgent mandate from state schools chief Delaine Eastin, and a result of this state’s embarrassment at scoring above only next-to-last-place Mississippi on reading and mathematics tests. But who is testing our school kids’ violence aptitudes--appetites?

Homicide is the No. 1 killer of males under age 18. In our era of violence, it is urgent that, as we restructure our state school curriculum, we design moral, ethical, philosophical and legal frameworks that encourage students to develop higher order (as in moral order) thinking skills, to contemplate causes and consequences, to cultivate a respect and reverence for life. Saving students academically is not enough. Our kids must learn the peaceful conflict-resolution skills that will protect and save them. Otherwise the youth prisons will simply continue to fill up.