Social Ills Spilling Into Schools : High Marks for Efforts to Train Educators in Crisis Response

In simpler times, crisis on a high school campus was a pop quiz from a tyrannical teacher. At worst, it was a student in trouble for fighting on the playground.

Unfortunately, the face of crisis lately too often has resembled the incident this month at a high school in Placentia, where two alleged gang members fired shots into the parking lot while aiming at rival gang members. In Newport Beach, a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of brandishing a gun at two students during what police said was an argument over a skateboard.

The changes in society and in the schools have required administrators to formulate new responses. Wisely, the schools have done so. The county Department of Education, for example, convened a crisis response program a year and a half ago. The session drew representatives from each of the county’s 28 school districts, who then were able to train other employees in those districts.

An important part of the crisis responses has been communication, a welcome recognition that students and teachers should be told what happened and encouraged to discuss their responses. Problems such as racial attacks and attempted suicides do not go away because they are ignored; teachers and principals can help pupils increase their understanding of extraordinary problems by talking them over just as they help them understand history or a mathematical formula.

Incidents off the campus can reverberate inside the classroom as well. When Elizabeth Novack was principal of Cypress High two years ago, she astutely briefed students and parents on an attack on African American students at a local restaurant by skinheads, including some students at the school.

Novack also contacted the Orange County Human Relations Commission, which has done good work for years in calming racial and ethnic tensions by getting individuals from different groups to talk to each other.

The days when schools simply could teach reading, writing and arithmetic unfortunately are long gone. Educators are forced to confront society’s problems in the classroom and on the playground. Marshaling as many regional resources as possible, with teachers trained to respond to crises, is a wise course.