Most Calif. Classrooms Lack Phones So Crucial in Colo.

Telephones were crucial lifelines during the Columbine High School shooting tragedy, linking students and teachers with police and parents. But if such a crisis were to arise at a California public school, they likely would play a smaller role.

Not only are student cellular phones banned on campus by state law, but public school teachers, officials and state legislators say most classrooms lack a phone that would connect teachers directly with the outside world in case of an emergency.

“I’ve worked for the L.A. school district for 20 years now and I’ve never, ever had a room with a telephone,” said Dolane Larson, a teacher at North Hollywood High. “What the teachers do at my school is buy our own cell phones. The teachers call it life insurance.”

The provision in the state Education Code that prohibits students from possessing any electronic signaling devices on campus was adopted in 1988 by legislators grappling with the explosion of drugs in schools. Its primary target was pagers, which some students used to carry out drug deals, but it also covers cell phones, said Doug Stone, a spokesman for the State Department of Education.

Students at many schools face suspension if they are caught with cell phones. While that doesn’t dissuade all students from bringing them onto campus, it cuts into the number who do, Stone said.

“This is a law that’s likely enforced depending on a school’s needs,” Stone said. “Some schools really clamp down on it; some of them probably consider it not to be that big of an issue on their campus and they might not do much.”

At Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, officials confiscate cellular phones if students have them on obvious display and later return them to parents, Vice Principal Michael Vossen said.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District, however, is in the process of installing a new telephone system in its 29 schools that will allow teachers to dial out of school from the classroom.

Installation at the high school is underway, and half the classrooms now have dial-out capability.

“The rule of thumb is that kids are not to bring cell phones,” Vossen said. “But it’s certainly a point that with the tragedy in Colorado, the cell phones were the link with the police and the outside world.”

In the wake of the Colorado shootings, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin and others have called for changing the law.

As for classroom phones, although no statewide statistics are kept, teachers in many districts rely on aging intercoms or phones that link them only to the main office, Eastin says. A significant number of those systems, she added, do not work.

The dearth of phones is “a monumental problem, especially important after seeing what went on in Colorado,” said Eastin, who was pressing the issue as far back as 1990. As a member of the Assembly, she sponsored a bill calling for a public vote on a bond measure that would have steered $25 million toward schools for installation of a phone in every classroom, as well as other electronic safety equipment. It was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson, who cited a lack of local control.

“It’s paramount for safety that each teacher have a phone and be able to call directly to 911 in an emergency,” Eastin said.

Legislation to require phones in all new classrooms, introduced before the Colorado shootings, was approved by an Assembly education committee last week--one day after the Colorado attack.

Eastin said she considers telephones that link a teacher only to a main office to be inadequate. “If a student is getting violently out of hand or having a medical emergency, an asthma attack, for example, being able to bypass the main switchboard and dial 911 direct can save valuable minutes and save us from lots of trouble,” she said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which is struggling under the burden of an aging and immense infrastructure, in many cases has communications systems that date back to the 1960s. Currently, just over 10% of district classrooms have telephones, and only about half of those allow direct outside calls, said Terryl Hedrich, the district’s director of information technology. Officials could not say for sure how much it would cost to install phones in each classroom, but say they intend to solve the problem by 2002, using money from the $2.4-billion Proposition BB school improvement bond measure, which passed in 1997.

The problem in Los Angeles has been magnified by the reliance on portable bungalows to accommodate class-size reductions, said Bev Cook, a vice president with United Teachers Los Angeles, the district teachers’ union.

Assembly Bill 1136, sponsored by Virginia Strom-Martin (D-Duncans Mills), would mandate a phone in every classroom for all schools built after 2000, and require all schools seeking money for new construction after that date also to install phones.