Teacher Was Dedicated to Urban Youths, Friends Say

The stray bullet that shattered the morning calm of an elementary school library on Thursday morning cut down a bright young teacher whose career was beginning to take off, someone who considered work in the inner city his mission.

Bilingual, hard-working and athletic, Alfredo Perez, 30, had spent the past two years in a flurry of activity: marrying his college sweetheart, buying his first house and studying to be a school principal.

“He wanted to run his own school . . . make a difference for the children,” said Frank Sanchez, a colleague and close friend at Figueroa Street Elementary School.

But as the fifth-grade teacher clung to life Thursday after a bullet sliced through his brain, the tragedy embodied the greatest fear of many Los Angeles public school teachers--the threat of random violence.

More than fears of the familiar--the irate parent, the pistol-packing student, the possibility of student riots--it is the idea of the errant bullet whistling through their window or the attacker walking through their door that truly terrifies them.

“The thing that always scared me was not the bullet with my name on it, it was one of those to-whom-it-may-concerns,” said Tom Marshall, an auto mechanics teacher at Marshall High who previously worked at Locke High School in South-Central Los Angeles.

Although most teachers and school administrators were quick to point out that the shooting could have happened anywhere, they also acknowledged that those who teach in rougher neighborhoods feel more vulnerable.

“When we heard the news, there were the immediate tears and then the shock,” said Matthew Horowitz, a first-grade teacher who works with Perez’s wife at Walnut Park School in Huntington Park. “Then at lunch, teachers began saying, ‘Are we safe? Could it happen to anyone?’ ”

To some teachers, taking a job at an urban school is combat duty that sometimes brings combat pay--a bilingual stipend, a bonus for after-school tutoring or counseling duties.

On the job, they quickly map out escape routes: a closet to hide in, a back exit to slip through, a desk to dive under. They come to school later and leave before dark. They teach their students to duck and cover at the sound of gunfire.

The clearest distinction between the safe schools and the unsafe schools, teachers say, is whether the classroom doors are locked or not.

Horowitz said Perez’s wife, Virginia, was called out of her second-grade classroom Thursday morning and then rushed to the hospital while a teacher on vacation came in to take her place.

Colleagues’ descriptions of Virginia Perez closely matched those of her husband: energetic, committed, hard-working.

“They were very level-headed people,” said Horowitz. After meeting while students at UCLA, they waited to get married until October 1994, when they both had secure teaching jobs. Several months ago they bought a house with a picket fence in a gated community on the border of Torrance and Harbor City.

Alfredo Perez had not sought to add danger to the demands of the teaching profession when he joined the Los Angeles Unified School District five years ago. But neither did he shy away, according to Sanchez, who had talked to Perez just moments before the shooting.

The inner city is where the jobs are, especially for bilingual teachers like Perez and his wife, who use their Spanish with the burgeoning population of new Latino immigrants.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez grew up in Oxnard and had come to urban Los Angeles with the hopes of giving his students better opportunities, Sanchez said.

“He wanted to work in urban schools to show children anything is possible,” Sanchez said, adding that Perez pushed his students to excel, filling his classroom with charts documenting their achievements.

“We never felt we were in danger here,” Sanchez said. “Our campus is a very safe campus.”

In fact, the relative safety of school campuses is what makes the shooting so frightening, said teachers union President Helen Bernstein.

“He could’ve been sitting on a bus bench, in a coffee shop, in his own home,” Bernstein said. “But there’s something more horrifying about it happening at a school. We grow up thinking these places are bulletproof, that they are safe havens, and that is not true anymore.”

No teacher has ever been killed on the job in the Los Angeles school district, although 10 were assaulted with deadly weapons last year and 15 the year before.

Nationwide there were 12 violent deaths of teachers or school staff members during the 1992 and 1993 school years, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“If violence has encroached on our schools . . . we know we must do something now to protect them,” says an executive summary of a report on campus violence due out soon from the agency.

Across the nation, teachers are becoming more militant about their safety, demanding protection from habitually disruptive or threatening students and abusive parents. Fran Cook, a Spanish teacher in Alexandria, Ky., won a court judgment of $33,000 last fall against an 18-year-old student who she charged had repeatedly taunted and threatened her.

One in 11 teachers nationwide report that they have been attacked, 95% of them by students, according to a 1994 report by a group called Coalition for America’s Children, and nearly a third of teachers, according to a 1987 federal survey, said they had considered leaving the profession because of fears of violence and intimidation.

In response to such fears, several states, including New York, New Mexico and Indiana, have made assaulting a teacher an automatic felony.

Karen Russell, who teaches science to seventh- and eighth-graders at Warner Middle School in Westminster, knows the singular horror of standing among a group of students in a classroom when it suddenly comes under attack from gunfire.

In 1990, a shootout among gang members left the wall outside her classroom pocked with bullets, inches from the windows. The students reacted as they had been taught, diving to the floor, and were shaken but not injured.

To guard against future attacks, the school district built a 10-foot-high stone barricade along that side of the campus, and local police agencies and apartment building owners mounted a crime cleanup effort.

At Figueroa Street School, plans are in the works to install bulletproof glass.

Yet there is a downside to turning schools into fortresses, said Crystal Gips, associate dean of the School of Education at Cal State Northridge.

“A successful school really requires a participating community around it and . . . if we keep the community out that doesn’t happen,” she said.

And even more worrisome is the chilling effect Thursday’s shooting could have on those studying to be teachers. Gips said, “I would hate to have large numbers of people discouraged from entering what I think is a very important role in society.”