School Erecting 10-Foot-High Wall to Deflect Bullets

In an extraordinary attempt to protect teachers and students from flying bullets, Long Beach school administrators are erecting a 10-foot-high concrete wall alongside a junior high school, where recreation is periodically interrupted by the sound of gunfire.

“It’s really sad that something like this has to be done,” Lindbergh Jr. High School Principal Max Fraley said. “But it’s needed in today’s society.”

Physical education teachers at Lindbergh, where the recreation fields abut one side of a low-income housing project, say the 900-foot-long wall, is long overdue.

The sounds of gunshots, mingled with the noise of children playing, average every six to eight weeks, according to teachers and students. Last week, students were evacuated from the fields twice after reports of nearby gunfire. Two years ago, in the only incident where someone was hurt, a student playing basketball after school was hit in the chest by a stray bullet and nearly died.

‘Got Angry’

After a while, said physical education teacher Trish Ryan, “We got angry. This is ridiculous. This is enough, we said. We’re taking our classes out there and we have to convince the kids that it’s OK, when (we) are not sure it’s OK.”

Construction of the wall, which will cost $160,000 and will be financed by the school district and the county, is scheduled to begin this week. Once it is completed, Ryan said she will celebrate by hanging a sign on it that reads, “The Great Wall of Lindbergh.”

And that concept bothers some of the people who live on the other side.

There are already three chain-link fences and a small flood-control channel separating the school from the 713-unit Carmelitos Housing Project, which is home to about 2,000 people. Some residents acknowledge that they have a crime problem, and they understand school officials’ concerns. But many worry about the symbolism of the wall and argue that it will solve little in the fairly well-kept, color-coordinated complex where two-story homes have the look of moderately priced townhouses.

“Anything for the safety of the kids,” Carmelitos resident Ray Fox, 28, said. “But I think that $160,000 in law enforcement would do more to ease crime.”

‘Band-Aid’ Solution

Resident Rhonda Neal, 31, also argued that the money could be better spent. The district’s solution is “like putting a Band-Aid on a deep wound.”

“They’re keeping the people in Carmelitos in and the outside world away as if we were all bad guys,” Neal said. “Overall, (the project) gets a bad rap. There are a lot of nice people who live in the project. There are a lot of intelligent people who live in the project. They’re just poor.”

Police Sgt. Don Field worked the North Long Beach area that includes Carmelitos for nine years. Yes, there is a crime problem, he said. But they have a bigger problem with their image, he continued.

While Carmelitos experienced a 4.7% increase in the number of crimes reported in 1988--up from 341 in 1987 to 357 in 1988--the city had a 6.4% increase, according to Dwight Tompkins, the Police Department’s senior crime analyst. Most of the crimes involved robbery and burglary, according to officials who could not provide a precise breakdown.

Police Sgt. Bob Gillissie, who works in Chief Lawrence Binkley’s office, said “we’re there all the time” because of drugs and gang-related activities. But Gillissie said he could not characterize the area as one of the city’s worst spots. “It’s hard to say. It depends what’s going on,” he said.

Diane McNeel, an official with the county’s Community Development Commission, which oversees public housing, was not ambivalent when asked the same question.

Face-Lift for Complex

“It really has a lot more to do with perception than with reality,” McNeel said of the residential community the county Housing Authority touts as a showplace. The county in recent years has pumped $24 million into Carmelitos, giving the sprawling complex a face-lift that includes a new community center and a new complex for the elderly.

McNeel questioned whether a wall is needed, saying: “The faculty at the junior high assumes when they hear a gunshot that it’s coming from public housing.”

Long Beach school board member Jerry Shultz, who said that someone shot at him with a BB gun while he was inspecting the school last fall, defended the wall project.

“It’s more than image. They have a problem,” said Shultz, a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. If the wall hurts people’s feelings, he said, “so be it. What if a child gets killed? I’m willing to fight for a wall if it saves a child’s life.”

Wesley C. Mitchell, chief of police for the Los Angeles Unified School District, called the wall “a novel idea, but I don’t know if it is the solution to the problem.” Officials with the county Office of Education and the Los Angeles school system said they were unaware of any walls built at their schools for a similar purpose.

Disturbing Incidents

Judy Wade, a physical education teacher at Lindbergh for 25 years, said that through the years she has seen beer bottles and even bicycle handlebars tossed at students. But “now, it’s not what they’re throwing but what they’re shooting,” she said.

Wade said her biggest scare came a few years ago when she spotted a man aiming his gun at her and her students from behind a tree. She quickly got everyone into the gymnasium. “I was scared,” Wade said. “I felt, wow, I could be shot at right now.”

Many students are also scared. Track team members Christine Vasquez and Emilie Wichert said that beer-toting men often hang out on the Carmelitos’ side of the fence watching them run laps on the field after school. Mudy Ea, 15, said she too is glad that the wall is “finally going to be built.”

Carmelitos resident Dorothy McAleavey, who had four children graduate from Lindbergh, said she sympathizes with the school’s teachers and students. But like others, she takes exception to the school’s solution. “The whole idea of rehabbing Carmelitos was to open us up, to communicate with our neighbors,” she said. “Now, they’re walling us off.”