A Campus Oasis Amid the Violence

Three blocks east of the 101 in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, Fremont High School sits on a street of indifferent looking motels, burger stands and stray dogs. Across the corner from a self-service laundry where police say truants buy and sell drugs, the school is nearly hidden behind a $475,000 fence of curving iron spears and a metal screened wall that serves as the entrance. A friendly guard waves bewildered visitors over to a gate. After the first bell at 7:40 a.m., it is the only way in or out.

Inside, two armed school police officers and 18 security guards patrol a flowering oasis of lawn, shrubs and twittering birds. A county probation officer oversees the 50 or so probationers among the school’s several thousand students.

The high security has led some students to nickname the school “Fremont Pen.” But all things considered, said expelled student Gerardo Gomez, “I’d rather be in there than out here. There’s too much gangbanging out here.” At lunch last week, Gomez, 17, had been unable to persuade the guard that he should enter, so he talked through the screen to a friend inside. Gomez, his head fuzzed with stubble, said that he had been kicked out for fighting and for hitting a teacher with a stick but that he hoped to be readmitted some day.

Unlike suburban schools shocked by campus shooting sprees, Fremont is a sort of sanctuary amid an ambient presence of violence. The neighborhood is home to four major street gangs and has the city’s highest rates of poverty, homicide and foster care. Nearly every student knows someone who’s been shot.

Interviews with about 20 students revealed: a 16-year-old girl whose 14-year-old brother was shot and killed in September by unknown assailants; a 19-year-old paralyzed in a drive-by shooting who has lost five friends and relatives to gunshots since September; and a 20-year-old whose first love, a 16-year-old girl, died in his arms after a drive-by shooting.

Some, like student body president Kathy Rosado, 17, live with a constant low-level fear that they may get caught in cross fire. Kathy said she never feels completely safe, even at home, at school, or at quincean~era parties where she’s seen people brandish guns they had packed in their fancy clothes. “You’re not safe anywhere, not even if you’re sitting in church,” said Kathy, a lively girl in a T-shirt labeled “Princess” in rhinestones.

As a child, Kathy said, she used to be frightened at the sight of police squads pointing rifles at homes of suspected drug dealers in her neighborhood. Now, she said, “it’s just something I’ve gotten used to. It’s become normal to me.”

So have the routines in and around Fremont’s fence. The security staff and administrators use walkie-talkies to monitor students’ movements and speak in code (“Fremont One to Charlie Four.”) A patrol car assigned to the school cruises the perimeter, as the security staff call it, and checks for truants, tardies and any problem that might cause students trouble.

If serious fights break out, perpetrators are read their Miranda rights, handcuffed, taken to the school police office, then turned over to police. Administrators periodically use a metal detector to check students in a randomly chosen classroom.

But the emphasis on physical safety at school is costly, and it can obscure other unexplored issues. The money spent on safety equipment may generally diminish mental health or academic efforts; the school’s image can discourage more experienced educators from teaching there. Security is as much about people as equipment, authorities say. Despite mixed reviews of the fence, which went up last year, students and teachers said they feel protected in part by a sense of family and community, by knowing others and being known by them. The unspoken code, they said, is that people don’t shoot at strangers or people they know for no reason; they shoot only at perceived enemies.

The safest place for a student, authorities said, is one with the most adults who are responsible and care about them. At Fremont, many students said, those adults are often the guards who pay attention to them and hold them accountable.

Enrollment of 4,400 Students

Fremont is a large school with 4,400 students on three tracks, no more than two-thirds of them on campus at one time. Nearly 90% of the students are Latino, including a large number of immigrants, and 10% are African American.

The campus is as safe as any middle-class suburban high school in the district, said Wesley Mitchell, chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s police department, which assigns at least one armed officer to each of its 49 high schools and most of its middle schools.

In the most recently measured six-month period, Fremont High has seen its crime reports cut nearly in half to 59, and most of them were related to property, school police said. Fremont had 13 cases of weapons possession last year, the highest in the district. But longtime teachers recall only one shooting on campus, more than 10 years ago. Said Mat Taylor, “One kid came to school the next day with his head bandaged up. The bullet skimmed off his head and he wanted to come to school and walk around, like, ‘Oh look, I got shot,”’ Taylor said. “I had to send him home.”

As such stories recede into memory, however, the school’s strict measures seem like overkill to some students.

“They always overreact; it’s not fair to us,” said Tier Thomas, 17, during a break, moments after school police had intervened in a confrontation between two boys based on a misinterpreted gesture. “Just because people in other schools are shooting each other, we’re caged in here like animals. Look at the bars on the windows! We’re not animals. We don’t deserve to be treated like animals.”

Sometimes, though, the complaining sounded suspiciously like bragging. Maria Salazar, 17, a student in the school’s math-science magnet program, said, “They’re being too tough on a school where nothing’s wrong.” But she understands the adults are trying only to keep them safe. When she attended Franklin High School, she said, she ditched almost every day. “That’s how easy it was. It wasn’t like here,” she said with a hint of pride. “The truth is, if they [the guards] weren’t here, we would be out on the streets.”

Maria hangs out every day after school in the quad with a group of friends, including gang members and ordinary “school kids.” It’s safer at school and less boring than home, they said, plus the school police are cool.

Everyone likes “Smokey,” school police officer Art Darden, who got his nickname from the ranger hat he sometimes wears. Smokey, they said, understands when they’re sick or hungry and will give them money or let them call home. Though he expects them to follow the rules, he also respects them, they said.

Darden said the kids often confide in him with their problems. “I treat them like humans,” he said. “Even the worst gang members will give you respect if you talk to them, laugh with them.”

Even gang members who don’t want to be expelled will secretly tell him when a rival gang member has challenged him to a fight, he said. They ask Darden to call them in so they won’t have to fight. “So that way, they keep their pride. I stop the fight, I don’t have to make an arrest, yet I neutralize the situation,” he said.

A High Price for Safety?

For as much as students gain from the efforts of adults such as Darden, some authorities believe schools pay a high price for the emphasis on physical safety, especially at places such as Fremont, which have such wide-ranging needs.

Nearly 40% of the school’s teachers are not fully credentialed. The school has had high administrative turnover and dismal test scores. The senior class is about a third the size of lower classes. Resources are limited, and the students’ needs are vast.

Some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that bought guards, handcuffs and metal detectors might have paid for teachers’ salaries, books, pencils, or field trips, Mitchell said. Yet, there was no dissent over funding for the fence, recalled Walter Flores, former assistant principal at Fremont. “The results were marvelous. Everybody but the students appreciated the fence,” he said.

Mitchell and others believe the appearance of safety is paramount. “Kids will not learn, teachers will not teach where they do not feel safe,” he said. “In communities that have an image of being unsafe, you will have to do more to create a climate that overcomes that image at school.”

Yet it’s not just things like fences that make a school secure, Mitchell said. A well-functioning administration can have a significant impact on school safety. At Fremont, the new school administration that arrived in the fall is addressing issues such as the teacher shortage that’s drawn student protests in recent years.

“Roughly 95% of students in urban Los Angeles schools say they feel safe at school, he said. “When you ask why, the answers vary, but it usually goes back to the fact that there are adults there they can turn to for all kinds of issues.”

Like most urban areas, Mitchell said, the Fremont neighborhood is a place “where you are very likely to have a kid victimized on the street and because of the fear people live in on a day-to-day basis from gangs, they [adults] won’t personally intervene.”

Despite state allocations of $101 million since Columbine for safety measures, no one knows how effective physical safety measures alone can be in protecting students. “It’s an open question what that kind of contribution can make,” said Jack Riley, director of the criminal justice program at RAND. “Some of the campuses are absolutely enormous. We’ve got lots of anecdotal stories about individuals who pass through a metal detector, then go pick up a weapon they’d dropped inside a fence.”

Need for Mental Health Workers

Some psychologists suggest that as school districts budget more than ever for security, some of that money would be better spent in mental health services. Although the state has helped school districts expand their counseling staffs in the two years since Columbine, California still ranks last in the country, with a student-to-counselor ratio of 979 to 1. At Fremont, there are only two mental health professionals at the school.

Exposure to violence can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Lisa Murphy, a clinical psychologist for the Lenox School District, near Inglewood. “It makes children very edgy. They can act out easily, either homicidal or suicidal,” she said. And not surprisingly, they lose their ability to concentrate on schoolwork.

“It’s a whole discussion we’re not having now,” said Mitchell, “the readiness of kids to learn after a tremendous exposure to violence.”

Fremont’s full-time psychiatric social worker, Eliana Sanchez, said she frequently sees children under stress, sometimes pregnant or involved with drugs. She said she also worries about immigrant children who have endured long periods of separation from parents who immigrated first, then sent for their children later. “That creates feelings of abandonment in the immigrant child. Maybe they don’t know their father. It could also be violence that they witness in the home, violence that they live with in their community. Threats of violence at school.”

The levels of violence have simply left some students “anesthetized.” Sanchez recognizes them by their blank stares. “It’s the kids who cannot describe their feelings. The best they can do is say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Intervention may help. Murphy said some research on mental health programs that address symptoms such as hypervigilance shows that children in them feel safer at school, freer to talk to adults, and start testing better. “To keep a kid safe is a way to make a kid smarter,” she said.

Troubled kids, whether in the inner city or the suburbs, share similar feelings of fear and anger, psychologists said. The suburban school shootings have spurred a new dialogue among youth workers about how kids’ responses differ. “Whether it’s anomie or rage, it’s all played out in culturally defined ways,” said social psychologist Jackie Kimbrough, founder and director of the Children’s Collective, a private, nonprofit family support organization that has served the area for 30 years.

In the inner city, the problems are concrete--gang shootings, discrimination, poverty--and elicit a concrete response. In the suburbs, kids perceive problems such as alienation, isolation or rejection as more diffuse and react in more diffuse ways, she said.

“The school to them may represent the embodiment of a hurt,” like the federal building did to Timothy McVeigh, she said. “I think the issue for those children is harder to define and localize than the issue of what’s troubling the kids in the minority community.”

Fremont’s kids know what hurts. That many can adapt to the violence around them doesn’t mean they don’t suffer. Premature death, though common, never feels normal.

“I cry once in a while when I hear a drive-by,” said senior Pascual Garcia. “I get memories and feel angry. I think it’s my fault, that I should have done something about it.” He said he has known at least 20 friends who have died. Joining a gang has such extreme implications, he believes, that membership alone is a form of suicide.

Flor Valle, 16, said she switched schools after her brother was fatally shot because she feared gangsters would come after her. She cannot concentrate on school; sudden thoughts of her brother bring tears. He was 14 when he was killed, but somehow he does not seem dead yet. “He turned 15 on March 7,” she said.

Ronnie Bryant, 19, said he once had a flashback passing the intersection where he was shot and paralyzed. Sometimes, he might be sitting in a car, or at home in his room and think that someone will come by and shoot him through a window. He used to carry a gun, he said, and depending on the neighborhoods he goes to at night with friends, he still might.

Some students said they dream about death; some fantasize about their own funerals. Luchrisia Bell, 17, a member of student leadership and voted most popular girl in the senior class, said she had a dream that she was shot to death. “I tell my friends, don’t even have a funeral. Put me in a box, put me in the ground and have a party.” If there must be a funeral, she wants it held at Hollywood Park.

Learning to Beat the Odds

At Fremont, whose school motto is “Find a path or make one,” the students who have survived seem to have created their own solutions to the sea of problems they face.

“I do think the concrete nature of the adversity develops resiliency,” Kimbrough said. “I get a stronger sense of personal and social integration from a lot of these kids. They have a sense of identity. I think it gives them the ability to proceed and persevere in the face of overwhelming odds.”

Looking ahead, the students said they hope to become actors, dancers, professional ballplayers, nurses, real estate brokers, corporate lawyers, soldiers and police officers. Some hope they can come back and work at the school. Despite its troubles, the school remains for many the last, best hope for a successful life.

Garcia, 20, said he began to affiliate with gang members at 15 after his parents separated. Then his first girlfriend was shot and killed by drive-by bullets meant for him. As she lay dying, Ester Bennitez, 16 and pregnant, told him she had thrown herself between him and the shooters deliberately because he had a better future. “She wanted me to be something,” said Garcia.

When he returned to school bereft, the teachers redirected his goals and made him feel special, he said. “Loved, like a person I never thought I could be.” After graduation, he plans to attend college and hopes to work for the Los Angeles Police Department.

“For me,” he said, “Fremont is my second home.”

Most kids in inner-city schools are survivors, said Fremont basketball coach Sam Sullivan, who graduated from Fremont and has taught at the school 24 years.

“We get a bad rap here at Fremont and most of the inner-city schools,” he said, even though the students really have no control over most events that happen in their neighborhood.

“If they see what is wrong, and they come to school and they learn and they work with others and they get along with everybody, just maybe one of these kids is going to come back 10 years from now and make some changes.”