Pupils Sent Home Fast in Gang Alert

Principal Bruce Farr welcomes his students at Culver City Middle School as long as school is in session. But when the bell rings at 2:25 p.m., he wants them to skedaddle.

While black-and-white Culver City police cars circled the campus last week, students were told to “move as quickly home as possible, move away from any street activity . . . (and) don’t stand around and loiter.”

These actions came as a result of a spate of gang-related Westside shootings the week before in which two people were killed in Venice, one was wounded in Mar Vista and another was wounded at his home in Culver City, about half a mile from the school. Farr also cited a shooting last Tuesday outside Venice High School in which no one was injured.

The targets in the Venice High School incident are said to be Venice gang members, and the gunmen purportedly belong to the rival Culver City Boys, based at the Mar Vista Gardens project, said Culver City police Lt. Ellis Smith. Some residents of the project attend Culver City schools, so it was rumored that their Venice rivals would come looking for revenge, he said.

Farr said that possibility worried him because the middle school, at Elenda Street and Farragut Drive, sits next door to Culver City High School, and the two “are hard to distinguish because they look like the same building.” The schools share a cafeteria and a library building.

“We can’t stick our head in the sand and say (a drive-by shooting) won’t happen,” Farr said.

But Culver City High Principal Glenn Cook said his school had not taken any extraordinary security measures. “We hear many rumors,” he said.

“We have security people vigilant all the time,” Cook said. “We have to be careful not to overreact, but not to under-react. . . . If we’re always overreacting, it’s like the ‘cry wolf’ thing.”

The high school has seven unarmed security aides and the middle school has four, on various shifts, the principals said. Both they and police said they did not know of any shootings on or near the schools’ grounds.

During the last school year, crimes reported on and off campus included the abduction of a high school student who was walking to school late, the gang-related killing of a high school student at his home, and incidents of indecent exposure, Farr said.

Fences Repaired

In response, a security supervisor was hired this year, and fencing was repaired and installed at both schools. Last spring, the student dress code was tightened to prohibit baseball caps and sagging pants, symbols of “toughness and gang activity,” he said.

Some middle school students said that 5% to 10% of their classmates are gang members but that there are more at the high school. One eighth-grade girl, dressed in olive green, black and brown, said she worries about “(wearing) the wrong color.”

Starting last Wednesday, two to three police cars patrolled the campus in the afternoon in addition to the one regularly assigned to the neighborhood, Smith said.

About 15 teachers, administrators and security aides from the middle school told students to go home if they were not heading to the library or after-school programs, Farr said.

Parents were directed to pick up their children in a back parking lot off the street or in the library, rather than in front of the school, Farr said.

Parents Warned

Previously, he said, about 10 students would be waiting as long as an hour and a half. The tardy parents were told to be prompt. If they continue to be late, Farr said, they will be sent letters and, if that doesn’t get results, the school will file charges of child neglect with Child Protective Services.

But the rumors of a drive-by shooting held fascination for some students.

“Everybody wants to see . . . a drive-by or a scrap (fight),” said an eighth-grade boy. He said he waits for his high school friends to get out at 3 p.m., and then they play paddle tennis. Last Tuesday, he said, he hung around across the street from the school, where authorities “couldn’t do anything because it’s not school property.”

Other small school districts, such as Culver City’s, have relatively informal security systems and rely on city police forces. Santa Monica High School has not received any recent threats of violence, said Don Steere, a former athletic director at the school who works with the assistant principal. The school has five unarmed security officers and the advantage of being near police headquarters, he said.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District has four unarmed guards at the high school and playground aides at the other schools, said Assistant Supt. Sol Levine.

Armed Officers

In contrast, the Los Angeles Unified School District, with about 825 schools and centers, has 300 armed police officers, supervisors and detectives in the field, said Wesley Mitchell, chief of the L.A. Unified district police. Each high school, including Venice, has one or two plainclothes officers carrying revolvers and an incapacitating spray, he said.

Venice High School Principal Andrea Natker said the shooting outside her school was not a school-related incident. “We’re providing the same safe and secure campus that we always do,” she said, adding: “We don’t need to do anything in addition.”

But Farr said last Thursday that the new procedures at Culver City Middle School would continue at least though the week “to raise people’s awareness.”

“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said.