At Venice High, sealed lips make rumors fly

It was like a bad game of telephone, the way rumors about last fall’s school shooting began buzzing last month around the Venice High campus.

The shooters had gotten off scot-free, the story went, because the district attorney let the case fall through the cracks. The youths had already returned to campus and begun beating up gang rivals. School district officials refused to expel them because every lost student reduces state funding.

The rumors seemed reasonable to parents and teachers, still nursing complaints that administrators failed to immediately inform the school community when the shooting occurred in November. The teenage shooters were not enrolled at Venice when they fired from a car in the campus parking lot just before school was dismissed for the day. No one was hit, but students were trapped in class while the school was locked down.

“How can these students who used a gun on campus go free and unpunished?” asked the Venice teachers’ union rep Jerie Morrison in an e-mail she and the PTA president sent out recently. “To top it off, these students are still enrolled at LAUSD. Why haven’t they been expelled for weapons possession?”

It took school officials weeks to recognize that these rumors had the force of truth on campus.

On Thursday night, more than 100 parents and teachers turned out for an update on the case from a police officer and a prosecutor. They got some facts but not all of the truth. Explanations but not answers.

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Latanya Lark, whose daughter is a Venice ninth-grader. “I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. But this is my child’s life we’re talking about.”

I’ll bet Deputy District Atty. Brian Schirn is pretty good before a jury. He calmed the audience right away, dismissing the rumors as “mass misinformation hysteria.”

“We all need to take a deep breath,” he said, “and say what is real and what is not.”

He warned that he couldn’t talk about specifics because of privacy provisions protecting juveniles. He did say that four youths were suspected in the shootings. Two were prosecuted. Both were sent to juvenile detention camp to serve terms of nine months or less. One has already been released.

Schirn said the other two suspects weren’t prosecuted because no witness could convincingly identify them. “You need witnesses and you need evidence, and here, there just wasn’t enough.”

But Schirn couldn’t share the information parents wanted: Was the shooting planned or was it random? Was it gang-related? Can the suspects, one of whom has already visited the campus, be banned from the school?

“You don’t have to tell me who they are,” one mother said. “I just want to know if they’re here. Among us.”

In other words, is my child safe on campus?

I understand the concerns about privacy and process. But the meeting left me unsatisfied. Because the most important question I heard all night went unanswered: Could these youths, once they are released, enroll again in an LAUSD school?

Principal Lonnie Wallace, who was not at Venice when the shooting happened, talked about the “various steps that can be taken,” the “procedures in place” to make sure no one’s rights are violated.

Parent Rick Selan put it more bluntly: “It’s my understanding that if a weapon is fired on campus, there is zero tolerance. Is that true or not?”

No reply from the three district officials sitting in the back.

Times reporter Mitchell Landsberg had asked that same question earlier and got this answer from district administrator Lainey Rogers: “I can tell you that appropriate procedures in accordance with the policies will be followed. The district has policies with which to pursue expulsion if it’s warranted and those procedures will be followed.”

That’s the kind of gobbledygook that exasperates parents, allowing rumors to flourish.

When I talked to Rogers after the meeting, she said the school board makes the decision on expulsions and follows a 1994 policy spelled out in a 31-page bulletin -- a bulletin that seems to have been written by the same people who teach district employees how to answer questions from the public.

About the only thing certain in that handbook to me is that district officials have plenty of discretion.

So that’s why no one could answer this question from teacher Marc Elliott, whose classroom is a few doors away from where the shooting happened:

“Every year we have two assemblies . . . to tell the students ‘If you bring a gun on campus, it’s a terrible thing and then you’re out of the district forever.’ Now they see these guys back on campus. . . . So what am I supposed to tell my students?”

Maybe he should tell them that in this district, it might be as difficult to get rid of a student who fires a gun on campus as it is to get rid of a teacher arrested for having sex with a student.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com