Volunteers Join Police to Offer ‘Safe Corridors’

The neighborhood in central Santa Ana measures just one-half of a square mile, but it’s been riddled with blight the size of whole cities.

It’s better than it was, now that police have eradicated the open-air drug markets and stemmed car thefts. But the area still provokes fear in some of its youngest residents, who are afraid to walk to school.

“People watch you and they give you creepy looks,” said Rocio Vides, an eighth-grader at Carr Intermediate School, one of eight neighborhood campuses.

Or worse. Jewelry has been snatched, lunch money stolen and gang memberships extended to elementary, middle and high school students.

“We are close to a liquor store and we have a lot of people hanging out there all day,” said Andree Oscoff, the principal at Immaculate Heart of Mary, a Catholic grade school in the area. “We walk [our students] to the corner.”

Across the nation, communities are trying to preserve the basic right of all children to walk to and from school without the specter of crime and fear. Beginning next month, Santa Ana will too.

The city’s Safe Corridors program unites parents, police and school officials in the neighborhood bounded loosely by 1st, Raitt and Fairview streets and Edinger Avenue.

Financed with $21,200 in federal grants and additional corporate donations, organizers said they expect to roll out the crime-prevention and security measures April 1.

Pairs of parent patrols, armed with orange vests and cell phones programmed to reach the school, police and fire dispatch, will stroll the neighborhood in the morning and at the end of the school day, even escorting students inside the schoolhouse door. Other residents will open their houses, identified by a flag or placard, for threatened kids to duck into.

Crossing guards in the neighborhood have undergone extra training to learn how to spot crimes and report them, including keeping a diary of suspicious activity.

As part of the program, lessons on conflict resolution will be given in every school and at all grade levels.

The program, similar to dozens of others nationwide, has a strategy that a national expert says is bound to work: “The physical presence of a responsible adult in the immediate vicinity,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village. “That is the single most effective way to make schools and [their surrounding areas] safe.”

About 10,000 students attend the one private and seven public schools in the area targeted for enhanced security. Those schools are Carr Intermediate, Diamond Elementary, Harvey Elementary, Immaculate Heart of Mary, Abraham Lincoln Elementary, Monte Vista Elementary, Spurgeon Intermediate and Valley High School.

“There are many things that keep kids from coming to school,” said Lucinda Clear, principal of Carr Intermediate. “Safety is one of them.”

One of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in Santa Ana, the area has been helped by $850,000 in federal grant money for a community policing program that has reduced crime overall by 41% in six years, said Lt. Michael Foote of the Santa Ana Police Department.

But the noisy car and truck traffic that pounds the streets and the loiterers who line the sidewalks contribute to an aura of fear, said Foote, who pushed to extend crime-cutting efforts to reach the neighborhood schoolchildren.

“There is a perception on their part that they are not safe,” he said, “regardless of how much crime we have eliminated.”

He hopes to have volunteers, either on foot or in their houses, on every block within a two-block radius of each neighborhood school. Applications for volunteers, who must undergo background checks, have already topped 100.

Most students feel safe at home and on campus, said Jane Russo, an area administrator at Santa Ana Unified. “It’s getting between the two that we’re worried about,” she said.