Shootouts in The Schools

By Richard N. Ostling

NEW YORK CITY. At P.S. 93, a youngster tells teacher Donald Miller, "Melvin has a toy." Since toys are not allowed in the lunchroom, the teacher confronts five-year-old Melvin and demands that he hand it over. Miller suddenly faces not a toy but a "Saturday-night special" pointed at his chest. The gun turns out to be loaded, cocked and ready for action.

WASHINGTON. A barrage of gunfire erupts just outside Woodrow Wilson High School as classes are dismissed for the day. Four students are shot, but all survive. Later, a teen-age boy who is not enrolled at Wilson is convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. The spark for the mayhem: an argument over a seat in the school cafeteria.

CHICAGO. At Harper High School, two boys enter a math class and start a fight. While students and the teacher try to break it up, one intruder lunges toward Chester Dunbar and stabs him in the back with a knife. As the two boys flee, Dunbar slumps to the classroom floor, fatally wounded.

"If schools ever were islands of safety within otherwise violent neighborhoods, they certainly are no longer," warns a new booklet of advice from the federally funded National School Safety Center at California's Pepperdine University. The center says 3 million crimes a year occur on school grounds, with 183,590 injuries reported in 1987. Another study estimates that on a typical day at least 100,000 U.S. pupils carry guns, and the firepower is getting heavier.

Schools, of course, cannot be isolated from neighborhoods plagued by drugs, gangs, crime and poverty. Says Miller, the teacher who faced a kindergartner's gun: "Whatever is out on the street seeps into the schools." Violence, however, is no longer confined to tough areas. In an affluent part of Tallahassee last month, one janitor shot another to death in front of about 100 grade schoolers. Last year in posh Winnetka, Ill., a woman opened fire in an elementary classroom, killing an eight-year-old. Other recent school slayings have occurred in middle-class areas of Greenwood, S.C.; Largo, Fla.; Little Rock and Virginia Beach.

As a result of all the violence, school administrators across the U.S. are searching through tight budgets to find money to beef up school security. If nothing else, the schools will face legal liability if they have not taken steps to be prepared. The New York City schools now operate the eleventh largest security force in the U.S. Most city schools have locked doors; 15 of them use metal detectors; ten schools allow entry only with computerized ID cards. Cost of all the security: $60 million annually.

The fortress mentality is taken literally at Lindbergh Junior High in Long Beach, Calif. After a bullet zinged past the head of gym teacher Joan Reedy last year, the school spent $160,000 to build a 10-ft. wall to separate the rear boundary from a housing project and its gang gunfights. Reedy, for one, is pleased: "Teaching here is so much more relaxed. It's given us a sense of safety, and you can feel the unity of the school growing and growing."

Other security measures that have been tested include staff training in handling emergencies, patrols by highly visible guards and police vehicles, two-way intercom systems so that trouble can be reported instantly, and cash awards to students who report problems. Along with the usual fire drills, some schools in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland have scheduled "yellow-code alerts" for classes from kindergarten up. "We have to teach students to hit the deck when the bullets fly," explains one preparedness expert.

A backlash against heavy-handed defense measures, however, is starting to develop. "Why call it a school? Let's call it a prison," complains Robert Rubel, who directs the National Alliance for Safe Schools, a nonprofit advisory group based in Bethesda, Md. He argues that it is impossible to prevent random violence. Rubel thinks schools should be diligent in controlling all kinds of disorder, handling violations of their own rules and turning crimes over to the police.

For schools hit by bloodshed, the effects linger long after the police have done their job. In Stockton, Calif. a playground shooting last January left five pupils dead. Fred Busher, the head of the school district's psychology staff, says students "realize now that school is not the safe place it used to be and that something terrible can happen at any instant." The youngsters, he adds, are "dealing with things that we hoped they'd never have to face, or at least not until they were adults." He concedes that healing "will take months, even years."

School psychologists, most of whom are trained in learning disabilities or family problems, often summon specialists to deal with students' "post- traumatic stress syndrome." Teachers and parents, experts say, need to bring fears immediately to the surface after a shooting or other violent episode and allow younger students in particular to act out and talk out the horrors they experienced. Adults are shaken as well. At the Greenwood, S.C., school, Principal Eleanor Rice lost 25 lbs. in the months after a 19-year-old man barged in, shooting at random, killed two pupils and wounded nine other people. To her, the new door locks and limited access to the building are not guarantees against future incidents, but they serve to instill confidence in teachers, pupils and parents. "It has been a rough road," she admits, but "we're going to get better, not bitter."

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, with other bureaus