Teachers Learn to Face Risks, Fears

For Laurie Woerfel, time has helped soften the stark terror she felt two years ago after receiving a threatening letter from a student. “Ms. Awful,” the letter read, “you love to play games with your students. . . . Let’s play the game of who lives and who dies.” On the back, it read, “KILL KILL KILL.”

“The school basically can’t do anything to protect you,” said Woerfel, a veteran Huntington Park High School physical education teacher. “It was very scary. It took a long time to get over being fearful that somebody was going to pour some bullets into my front window.”

The rapes of two young kindergarten teachers Monday in a classroom at 99th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles have brought back painful memories to teachers like Woerfel, who have been the victims of violent crimes or threats. And they have sharpened others’ fears of vengeful students or intruders bent on mayhem.

Urban educators are fond of describing their campuses as safe havens in a rough-edged world, and statistics back up the notion that schools are much less crime-riddled than the neighborhoods that surround them.

“Crime rates on our campuses are low,” said Mary Weaver, assistant superintendent for education support systems at the California Department of Education. “If you compare what’s going on in their communities, schools are very safe places.”

She acknowledged, however, that when someone on a campus has been victimized, the experience has an understandably stunning effect on the teacher and, often, on his or her peers.

George Pozdnyakov vividly recalls the punch from a student that split open his lip and left his mouth full of blood three years ago at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. Pozdnyakov, a science and math teacher who immigrated in 1989 from the Soviet Union, finished out the school year at Crenshaw, but found unbearable the rigors of traveling daily to four different classrooms.

That fall, he moved to Daniel Murphy High School, a Catholic school in Los Angeles, where, he said, “it was much better. Nobody would attack you, no way.”

Pozdnyakov, 64, left teaching after that and has been grading statewide exams. He hopes to return to the public school system soon.

Woerfel stayed put. She remains at Huntington Park High, despite urgings by union and school officials that she transfer to another campus.

She decided to hang tough, even though her car, parked in the faculty lot at the school, was twice scratched so badly with a car key that she had to have it repainted. In one instance, three windows were smashed.

A student two weeks shy of his 18th birthday was detained after Woerfel showed that his hand-writing matched that on the letter. The student, whom Woerfel had earlier put on probation in physical education class, was ordered to spend time in a juvenile facility and to take an anger-management class.

“I’m so glad I stayed,” she said. “I felt like I was getting punished to have to move.”

Sometimes the threats or the violence come from parents.

Two weeks ago, a teacher at a year-round elementary school in Los Angeles reported that she was verbally threatened in her classroom by an angry mother who spouted vulgarities in front of 19 third-grade pupils. The teacher attempted to ring an intercom buzzer in her room, but it was broken and no one could hear her.

“I’ve taught for 20 years, and I’ve experienced nothing like it before,” said the teacher, who asked that her name not be used. “I think I’ll seek therapy at some point to deal with it.”

The teacher, who said she has always kept her door partly open, now shuts it solidly. She keeps a walkie-talkie close at hand. Her pupils use a knocking signal to gain admittance.

“I feel extremely unsafe,” she said. “It’s a new feeling.”

Data from the National Center on Education Statistics show that teachers nationwide were the targets of violence nearly 670,000 times over the five years from 1994 to 1998. The crimes included rape or sexual assault, robbery, and assaults with and without weapons. Four of every 1,000 teachers were victims of such crimes.

Urban teachers were more likely to be victims of violent crimes than were rural and suburban teachers, with 40 violent crimes per 1,000 for city teachers and 24 per 1,000 for teachers in outlying areas. Middle and high school teachers were far more likely than elementary teachers to be attacked by students.

But no one is immune. Antwon Marshall, the 19-year-old Los Angeles man suspected in the rapes at 99th Street school, apparently was able to stroll on to the campus through a gate left open for a community event. Meanwhile, the two teachers, who were on campus days before the start of school to set up their classroom, had left the room’s door open.

Marshall faces arraignment next month on charges of 11 felonies, among them rape, forcible oral copulation and robbery.

Recent high-profile cases show that teachers sometimes risk--and lose--their lives in the classroom.

Two teachers--Dave Sanders at Columbine High School in Colorado and Barry Grunow in Lake Worth, Fla.--were shot to death by students.

Because of those cases, the National Education Assn. this year instituted a new type of insurance protection to cover “unlawful homicide.” If a member teacher is slain on the job, survivors would receive $150,000, rather than the $50,000 paid out in the event of other types of accidental deaths.

The benefit comes at no extra cost to the association because, said spokeswoman Kathleen Lyons, “the insurance company believes it to be so rare.”

Even on campuses where no one can remember a violent incident, teachers say they take safety precautions very seriously.

Diane Barnes, in her second year of teaching at Mount Washington Elementary School, said she always locks her classroom door when she is in the room alone. Barnes said the school’s location at the top of a hill with winding roads would delay a police response to an emergency call. And she would be unable to make such a call, because her classroom has no phone.

“I have a two-way radio I share with another teacher, and sometimes it doesn’t work,” Barnes said. “I worry about safety. When you’re a new teacher, you tend to get the room farthest away from the main building,” said Barnes, who teaches third grade.

“We’re a small school, with no security guards and no male teachers,” she said.

Barnes said measures such as gating the campus “would be excessive at our school.” But she thinks discussions about safety and planning for emergencies are important. Barnes said she and other new teachers were told to take precautions such as locking doors and calling to check in with the Los Angeles Police Department station when working on weekends.

When Lydia Ramos tells friends she is starting her new career as an English teacher this fall at Banning High School, their response is often disbelief.

The Wilmington neighborhood where Ramos will teach “is known as a pretty tough area,” she said, and others think she is risking her safety to pursue her passion.

Indeed, Ramos’ preparations for the start of school included spending an hour and a half this week scrubbing gang graffiti off chairs in her classroom, assisted by her 11-year-old cousin. And Ramos, who attended Banning herself, remembers a shooting at a football game when she was a student.

But Ramos said she was never deterred by safety concerns. “I share common experiences with my students. I wanted to teach at a school that needed someone like me,” she said.

Ramos said it is important to prepare for violent situations. At her teacher orientation, she and others were told of the rapes last Monday and discussed the importance of precautions and calling the office to check in if working late.

While Ramos thinks everyone should be careful, she said it is also important to remember that schools, even in high crime areas, are usually safe.

“You have to be on the lookout for problems, but people have to live, teachers have to teach, and students need to learn.”