A Tough Time to Be a Kid

She has been summoned to Washington by President Clinton to speak on the causes and prevention of school violence. She has advised the Board of Education in Kobe, Japan, on coping with the social and psychological impacts of the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

She serves as a member of the National Assessment Team convened by the U.S. Department of Education, has coordinated crisis intervention plans for 30,000 teachers and 900 campuses in Los Angeles, and assessed recovery needs after racially charged riots in St. Petersburg, Fla.

But when Marleen Wong was dispatched by the U.S. Department of Education to Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., even she was unprepared for the extent of the schoolyard carnage.

“On that day, April 20, I was helping with plans for an anniversary event at Springfield, Ore., where two teenagers were fatally shot and more than 20 people were hurt when a 15-year-old opened fire on them,” she recalled. “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that happening. But it had.”

Wong, who is director of mental health, crisis intervention teams and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District, is now leading development of the nation’s first “student threat assessment team” to identify and treat children and teenagers at risk for violent behavior.

“Recent research shows that early intervention offers the best hope for breaking cycles of violence,” she said. “But it also shows that the only valid predictor of violent behavior is a past act of violence. So we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

In an interview last week at her San Fernando Valley office, the nationally recognized expert in treating children traumatized by catastrophe strongly urged changes in strategies to curb schoolyard violence.

Question: Is this a tough time to be a kid?

Answer: Yes. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, children are at risk for a variety of reasons. One is poverty and the stresses than can mean for a child. Another is a mom and dad preoccupied with survival issues that don’t leave time for developing crucial warm relations with their children. Many children have no one at school they can relate to, even a class they are doing well in. Or they have poor social skills and can’t make or keep friends.

So who do these children hang with? People and peers who may be a negative influence and are themselves at risk for school failure, violent behavior, drug use and gang activity.

You can’t separate a school from the community surrounding it.

Q: What are the lingering impacts of exposure to violence?

A: New studies show that for four days after such exposure, children are unable to concentrate in class because fear releases stress hormones that make it hard to process new information. These hormones also affect the ability to control emotions and the brain’s centers for language.

What does that say about children who are exposed to violence day after day? About 75% of a child’s encounters with violence are at home. These are challenges that go far beyond the problems of teaching a child to read and write. It’s not easy for teachers to provide these kids with the tools they need to compete.

Right now, about 10% of all children have some kind of diagnosis--anxiety, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression--serious enough to require professional mental health services. In [the Los Angeles Unified School District], that translates to 70,000 children who may need extra support. Yet fewer than one in five of these children gets help.

Q: As the nation grapples with shooting rampages in public schools in Colorado, Oregon and Arkansas, the question on everyone’s mind is this: How do we spot and treat a potentially violent, mentally ill student?

A: We hope to develop student threat assessment teams that would deploy experts in response to reports of any student who is judged to be a danger to himself or others. These groups would be trained by the Los Angeles Police Department’s own threat assessment teams and be positioned at each of the district’s 27 clusters.

Our goal is to enable any administrator or teacher to call a team into play if a student is in possession of a firearm or other weapon, or has made a threat to do harm to another student or staff member. If called, the team would review the student’s juvenile justice record, evaluate their mental health status and education records, then make strong recommendations for treatment.

We’re going to start training people this summer and some teams could be in place by September.

The U.S. Department of Education says it would be the first program of its kind in public schools. They are already considering making it a requirement--along with crisis response teams--at every school district in the nation.

Q: Won’t this new team only exacerbate the ongoing controversy in schools over intrusion of government issues?

A: We have to be able to say, “Stop. This child must be evaluated.” There are a lot of parents who make excuses for their children’s behavior. That’s not surprising. The hardest thing in the world for a parent to do is to accept that there is something wrong with their child.

But I recently talked to the middle-class parents of a very bright young boy who threatened, “I’m going to take a girl, tie her to a post and gut her.” They said, “Oh, he just had a real bad day. He flunked a test. He didn’t mean it.”

Excuse me, but real smart kids who have real bad days don’t fantasize things like that. We must be able to say, “Stop. This is not normal. This child needs help before he can return to class.”

Q: Is there more we can do when things start to go seriously wrong for children?

A: Our mental health services are still in the dark ages. Too often we respond with ever harsher forms of discipline or law enforcement.

A few weeks ago, I attended a town hall meeting at Fairfax High School led by Mr. and Mrs. Albert Gore. At one point, Mr. Gore asked the students in the audience, “How many of you know someone having problems so serious they have thought about suicide?” There was a hush. Then, every other kid in the audience raised their hand.

Mrs. Gore asked me, “What do we need to do to meet the need we just saw in this room?” I responded, “We need a professional mental health counselor in every school in the nation.”

Right now, we have school psychologists at each of the city’s campuses. But they are required by law to spend nearly all of their time assessing and placing special education students. So there is no one on call to talk to kids with antisocial behaviors or problems such as substance abuse or severe depression or to help kids who are suffering abuse at home.

The definition of school mental health is the ability to love, work and learn. That means parents and children, teachers and students having unobstructed pathways to relationships and friendships that are respectful, positive and constructive.

We’re not there yet. First, we must debunk the myths about mental illness, learn to recognize the warning signs of children in trouble and invest in the support they need.

Q: If we don’t?

A: Then these children will get stuck in their fear, trauma or loss. The cost to society will be that those problems will fester and be dealt with later in the law enforcement arena.