Leaders Gather for Summit on School Violence

Shaken by a wave of youth violence, school, law enforcement and community leaders from across Ventura County gathered Thursday to find ways to make campuses safer.

This county’s schools are still among the state’s safest, educators said, but a recent string of violent campus crimes shows that the situation is shifting.

“You see this occurring everywhere--in Ventura, Oxnard and the Thousand Oaks area,” said Bill Studt, superintendent of the Oxnard Union High School District. “There’s an increased presence of gangs, and in the past it’s been contained in each of the cities. Now, things are between gangs in different cities. It’s escalated.”

Prompted by a series of campus attacks since late February--many of them gang-related--Thursday’s meeting drew more than 100 school officials, sheriff’s representatives, probation agents and church leaders to the county schools headquarters in Camarillo.

They traded ideas on how schools can prevent violent incidents, such as expanding anti-violence programs like those run by Oxnard police and making it easier for school officials to expel violent students.

The effort comes on the heels of several increasingly brazen assaults. Among them:

* A report Tuesday of vandalism and a death threat against Westlake High School Assistant Principal Joe Pawlick, who thinks the matter may be linked to his breaking up an assault by three young men on high school students at a bus stop.

Officials at the forum also mentioned last fall’s hazing incidents among the Westlake wrestling team, which led to seven athlete suspensions, as an example of troublesome violence.

* A March 9 knife attack at Rio Mesa High School that sent two students to the hospital. Two youths suspected in the attack have been arrested, officials said.

* A Feb. 25 attack on a Ventura school bus leaving Buena High School. Police are still looking for several youths, apparently Montalvo gang members, who tried to smash their way on board with a baseball bat.

In addition, Camarillo Heights Elementary School officials disclosed two weeks ago that a 15-year-old girl accused of posing as a teacher’s aide and molesting a girl apparently returned to the campus, luring another female student away and also molesting her.

Meanwhile, police in Ventura and Oxnard have been struggling to defuse tensions between gangs in the two cities. A feud earlier this year left one youth dead and another critically wounded. Those incidents did not occur at schools, but such problems are finding their way onto campuses, officials said Thursday.

“This is a starting point for a countywide effort to reduce school violence,” said county schools Supt. Charles Weis, who is running for reelection in June. “These are the local incidents we’ve experienced in the last month and a half. There are also the other things that are happening in the nation that have the potential to happen here, like Jonesboro. None of us are immune to kids that are hurting people.”

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Hoping to appease anxious community members, school officials Thursday outlined steps they have taken recently to head off further violence. Studt, for instance, said that Rio Mesa officials have stationed campus supervisors at both the main entrance and at an east campus gate, which attackers apparently climbed over to sneak onto campus. Also, a door inside the school now has an electronic lock, allowing a receptionist to screen visitors.

Those new measures complement the school’s policy of random daily weapons searches done with hand-held metal detectors. School officials typically find about five students per year carrying weapons, Studt said.

With violence spreading, officials said they need to look countywide for solutions. Some suggested that schools work more closely with the Partners in Prevention Coalition, a county-funded group that fights teen drinking. The coalition has several offices from Newbury Park to Ventura.

Others said one model for curbing youth violence is Oxnard’s Police Activities League, a program that pairs police and teens in sports, counseling and other activities.

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However, some officials at the forum said the key is tougher penalties for teen criminals. Joseph Spirito, superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District, said current state law requires him to find a problem student a new school before he can be expelled. Those kinds of regulations make it difficult to mete out punishment, he said.

The call for stiffer penalties was echoed by Calvin Remington, director of the county probation agency. Remington said that 86% of all youths in county Juvenile Hall are there for violent offenses or come from violent backgrounds.

In the past year, 50 county probation workers were injured while breaking up fights, he said. Remington urged those at the meeting to support the construction of a new juvenile detention facility to ensure teen offenders spend time in jail.

“Often the impact of what they’ve done doesn’t hit them until they have been incarcerated,” Remington said.

Area leaders attending the forum included county Supervisor Kathy Long, Superior Court Judge Steven Perren and Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McGee.

“The stabbing at Rio Mesa got people interested,” said Camarillo High senior Jeff Spivak, one of several students attending the forum. “It could happen at Camarillo High School. It’s obviously a risk.”