Schools Finding Fewer Guns, U.S. Says

Despite the wave of bloody shootings at Columbine High and other schoolyards, a federal report Tuesday indicated that fewer students are bringing firearms into the public schools of California and the rest of the country.

Nationwide, about 30% fewer students were kicked out of school during the 1997-98 academic year for packing pistols, shotguns and other firearms than there were the year before, after a strict federal anti-gun law took effect requiring the expulsions, the U.S. Department of Education reported.

And in California, the dip was even greater--nearly 50%--although the state is second only to Texas in the total number of gun-toting students expelled, the statistics show.

Despite the encouraging sign, Secretary of Education Richard Riley cautioned Tuesday that the statistics are still disconcerting in light of recent campus shootings. And he called on Congress to pass “common-sense” gun safety laws.

“We are starting to move in the right direction,” Riley said at a news conference here. “However, we are all acutely aware of the tragedies of the last two years. I don’t think any one of us rests easy today.”

Riley was flanked by a phalanx of school security officials, including Wesley Mitchell, chief of police for the Los Angeles Unified School District. He and others echoed Riley’s sentiments but said schools continue to be the safest places for students.

“Columbine was an aberration,” Mitchell said of the Colorado shootings earlier this year in which two

students in trench coats killed 15 people, including themselves. “It’s actually getting better. Schools are still the safest places in the neighborhood.”

The figures released Tuesday were compiled under the federal Gun-Free Schools Act, which was enacted in 1994 and mandates a one-year expulsion for any student caught with a firearm in a public school. The first tally, for the 1996-97 academic year, showed that 5,724 students were expelled under the new law.

Tuesday’s figures showed a nationwide dip to 3,930--a 31% decline--in 1997-98, the most recent academic year for which statistics were available.

California’s drop was even greater, from 723 to 382 firearms-related expulsions--a 47% decline.

Although the state had one of the highest totals, its expulsions per student population were average. Students in South Dakota were among the most likely to be found with guns, while those in North Dakota and Wyoming were the least, the numbers showed.

State and local officials in California cautioned against reading too much into the good news, however. They said initial confusion over how to report expulsions may have unintentionally inflated the first year’s numbers, making California’s decline look more impressive than it should.

Yet they said the numbers are in line with a general trend that finds fewer students bringing dangerous objects to school. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that school violence had declined between 1991 and 1997 and that the number of youths who said they had carried a weapon to school had fallen by 30%.

Jerry Hartenberg, a state education official who tracks weapons-related expulsions, acknowledged the trend, adding, “I think it’s consistent nationwide.”

In Orange County, the number of weapon-possession reports on campuses plunged by 25% in the 1996-97 school year and has remained steady since.

Measured as a rate of incidents per 1,000 students, the county had 0.92 weapon possessions by students in 1995-96; the rate dropped to 0.63 in 1996-97 and inched up to 0.67 in the 1997-98 school year.

“There is a strong feeling that we’re getting the message across to kids that there is zero tolerance for drugs and guns and knives,” said William Habermehl, associate superintendent of instruction for the Orange County Department of Education. “When you draw the line in the sand and stay firm--and board members in Orange County have stayed very, very firm--that’s when change happens.”

Habermehl also credited peer mediation programs and anti-drug activities with giving students the skills to intervene themselves when trouble surfaces and the resources to turn to when they need help.

“If you think of Columbine, there were a lot of kids [the shooters] were talking to about shooting other kids, but they didn’t know where to go with that information,” Habermehl said. “But thousands of students throughout Orange County are involved in drug-free programs, and they’re in the pipeline--they know when a student is heading for trouble and they know what to do.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the number of firearms-based expulsions plunged from 50 to 26. Officials of the 700,000-student district, the state’s largest, attributed it to the “cumulative effect” of persistent warnings against bringing guns to school and a growing willingness of students to turn in classmates who carry weapons.

In Orange County, there were eight expulsions in Santa Ana Unified, nine in Garden Grove Unified, two in Anaheim City High School District and none in Huntington Beach.

Times staff writer Lisa Richardson contributed to this report.

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Guns in Schools

Federal statistics released Tuesday show that California ranks second in the number of students expelled for bringing firearms to public school. But California is about average among the 50 states in expulsons on a per-student basis.

Gun-related expulsions, 1997-98 by school level

Junior high school: 33%

High school: 57%

Elementary: school 10%

Gun-related expulsions, by type of weapon

Other*: 32%

Handgun: 62%

Rifle/Shotgun: 7%

Note: Michigan, Oregon and Tennessee could not provide a statistical breakdown.

* Includes bombs, grenades, starter pisols and rockets

Note: Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina and Tennessee could not provide a statistical breakdown. Figures do not total 100 because of rounding.

Source: U.S. Department of Education’s Gun-Free Schools Act report