The Long Journey to June

When a student fight roiled past the school auditorium and on toward the science building one Friday last month at Santa Monica High School, Principal Ilene Straus called in police from Beverly Hills and Culver City as well as Santa Monica to get the school’s 3,400 students back in class and ensure their safety. She also canceled a raft of extracurricular activities scheduled for that afternoon and the weekend. But not a Saturday prep session for Advanced Placement exams, which begin this week.

The story was much the same at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles and at Riverside’s Norte Vista High School, also rocked last month by frightening student brawls and also schools with many students focused on excelling.

We ask the near impossible of principals. Keep children safe. Make sure every student has a textbook and that every restroom has toilet paper. Challenge the most academically inclined students with AP classes, yet keep the ones still struggling to distinguish between “brake” and “break” from dropping out. And do it even if enrollment rises, budgets fall and rain keeps flooding the library.

Some administrators don’t try, waving away reports of incompetent teachers and campus assaults. But principals -- and teachers -- who do try must often feel overwhelmed by the reality that many of the solutions to school violence and poor student achievement sometimes perpetuate those same problems and divisions:

* Suspend or expel the troublemakers, and they may hang around near campus, spoiling for another round.

* Work to raise self-awareness and expand the horizons of Latino and African American students, then (sometimes) see ethnic or racial pride twisted into the group hostility that fueled recent school fights.

* Invite parents to discuss solutions after such incidents, and listen to parents who fear that their children, who were not part of the fighting, will be shortchanged as the school focuses on troublemakers.

There are no easy solutions, and, in any event, the senior proms and league baseball playoffs are fast approaching. Yet for educators with new worries about police response time, keeping the peace during lunch periods and getting students off campus safely in the afternoon, June must seem a long way off.