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Principals Face Grim New Task : Schools: Helping students cope with death and grief is becoming part of the officials’ job as the number of youths involved in accidents and crime rises.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Shortly after the morning bell, Principal Jim Allen retrieved his student photo album and headed for the worst bus crash in Los Angeles school district history.

Minutes later, he boarded the wrecked and bloodied vehicle to examine the still faces of two little boys killed when the piston on a trash truck sliced into the bus like a can opener.

He compared them with the rows of wallet-sized pictures in the photo album, a standard reference these days for city school principals. Later, he confirmed their identities to police.

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“I was trained as an educator,” Allen said later during an interview at Glen Alta Elementary School, his desk covered with Christmas and sympathy cards. “I was trained to prepare kids to live a full life . . . and there I was with the police and the coroner.”

Growing neighborhood violence, added to the usual number of big-city accidents, has thrust an increasingly grim task upon Los Angeles Unified School District principals: facing death and its consequences.

Besides tending to academic and administrative demands, campus leaders say they are spending more and more time with police, counselors and mourning families. They attend funerals and break the news of premature deaths over school public address systems.

Anne Falotico, principal of Los Angeles High School, has attended four funerals for students in the past year.

“This is not the reason people go into education--to look at students in their caskets,” she said. But, she added, “the fact is, grieving faculty and grieving students are another challenge for administrators.”

Most student deaths occur away from school. But their impact is almost immediately felt by students and school employees.

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Falotico recalled that, when she was principal at Granada Hills High, a boy was killed while riding his bike. The next day, classmates who shared the same bus, Falotico said, “got off that bus and just stood there in a line. They couldn’t go to class, they were just so upset.”

School administrators receive no formal training in dealing with student deaths. But they have collected some practical wisdom they share among themselves.

They frequently organize collections to pay funeral costs. At Glen Alta, for example, the school received more than $7,600 in donations, much of it from other campuses. The financial collections help students deal with their grief, say administrators. By giving money, students are contributing to the burial process and to the memory of their classmates.

“It is a new phenomenon--more and more of our school personnel find themselves in the role of healer,” said Ruben Zacarias, Los Angeles Unified’s deputy superintendent. “It’s not out of duty or responsibility. It’s a bond that school personnel feel with their communities.”

The school district does not keep a tally of the number of students killed in off-campus murders and accidents.

But homicide is the leading cause of preventable death of children and teenagers, exceeding the combined total of the other top causes, which include car accidents, suicides and drownings, according to a study by Children Now, a nonprofit advocacy group.

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Increases in the number of gang-related homicides over the past 15 years account for many of the grisly tasks assigned school principals, according to county statistics.

Of the 5,351 gang slayings recorded in Los Angeles County between 1979 and 1994, nearly 39%--or 2,084--of the victims were 19 or younger, according to a recent study of gang violence published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

In 1993, half of the juveniles killed with guns in California were from Los Angeles County--even though they make up only a quarter of the state’s share of children and teenagers, county records show. That year, nearly 60% of the county’s 2,027 homicide victims were 18 or younger.

“What happens to you every week at Hollywood or at many other high schools doesn’t happen to other principals in a lifetime, but you just keep going,” said Jeanne Hon, principal of Hollywood High School, who has attended five funerals this year.

Last year, she saw a student shot to death after school. A car full of alleged gang members stopped outside the campus and one walked up to the boy and fired point-blank.

But “I love these kids and I love my job,” Hon said.

Those sentiments are echoed by administrators--who at times are overwhelmed by the student grief and shock that follows a campus death.

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“There’s nothing written down that tells you what to do in these situations,” said Eli Brent, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles and a former principal of the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. “In a time of crisis, we just forget we’re UTLA [United Teachers-Los Angeles, the teachers’ union] or . . . black, white, whatever. We’re teachers and we care about our students.”

Principals generally give the first news of a death over the school’s public-address system during morning classes. Some of them assemble groups of school nurses and psychologists to be available for counseling.

Particularly tough, administrators say, are the unexpected deaths of popular students.

At Manual Arts High, for example, a baseball player died after accidentally shooting himself after school last year. Students at the South-Central Los Angeles campus were upset for months afterward.

“As tragedy strikes your family, it also strikes your school,” said Wendell Greer Jr., principal of Manual Arts, who has attended 10 funerals in the last five years. “More and more of our schools are dealing with it. Besides teaching reading and writing, there are so many different aspects of life we are exposing students to.”

Greer said he routinely watches TV news and reads newspapers to see if any of his students have become victims. About half the time, he said, parents or siblings call the school to report a student’s death.

Carolyn Ellner, dean of the School of Education at Cal State Northridge, said grief, death and violence “are realities of life that administrators have to deal with. Sometimes the curriculum, the schedules, the staffing problems have to be set aside by the reality of the urban schools and their students.”

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Marleen Wong, director of mental health services for the Los Angeles Unified School District, agrees: “There’s a moment when you need to put down the school books and let students express themselves. Sometimes these schools go into shock. . . . We really provide public health intervention.”

Memorials--replacing class periods--are frequently held on campus. At Glen Alta, for example, the students planted a tree in the memory of Francisco Mata and Brian Serrano, the 8-year-olds killed in the bus crash, and classmates brought flowers to the ceremony.

Generally, classwork is set aside and time is spent writing, drawing or talking about the death. Notes are sometimes sent home informing parents about available psychological help.

Teachers, particularly those who have had the students in their classes, are offered substitutes while they attend funerals or receive counseling.

Even school yearbooks reflect the new campus realities. Reseda’s Cleveland High School yearbook last year had six pictures of dead students.

At Washington Preparatory High School, three students and a recent graduate were shot to death last year. Marguerite La Motte, the school principal, said at the time she was drained by the emotional toll on campus and that the school was left “traumatized.”

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Administrators say they have had to learn to give students and employees time to mourn, and then prod them back to school routines.

“You have to pace yourself and be able to respond to the grieving and then go on about the business of education,” said Los Angeles High principal Falotico. “There are 3,500 other students here getting an education. And they need you.”

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