Violence on School Campus Eludes Solutions : Safety: Students are reminded of the threat daily. Officials and politicians address the issue, but ‘without money, it’s a tough one,’ L.A. superintendent says.

The memory of rushing her son off to school last Feb. 22 still haunts Margaret Ensley.

“He was so slow, he just moved so slowly,” she recalled. “I kept after him: ‘Hurry up, you’ll miss the school bus.’ . . . I hurried him to his death.”

At 10:10 that morning, Michael Ensley was shot dead during a snack break at Reseda High School--the second Los Angeles Unified School District student to die from campus gunfire in a month. One year later, the tragedy haunts his mother as well as school officials struggling to reduce campus violence.

The school system has expelled a record number of students for bringing guns and knives on campus and has begun using metal detectors to search students for weapons. But students continue to bring weapons to school in large numbers. Supt. Sid Thompson acknowledges that school officials remain unable to ensure the safety of the district’s 640,000 students.

“I can’t do anything that’s absolutely going to guarantee the safety of kids,” Thompson said in an interview. “If I had a magic wand, I’d get additional funding for more police officers. I’d put 300 additional campus aides to assist in supervision on our campuses.

“Without money, it’s a tough one,” Thompson said.

In the year since Ensley died, school violence has become a hot political topic. Both Gov. Pete Wilson’s crime summit and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s education summit had panels on the subject. Two mothers of students killed on campuses--including Margaret Ensley--have formed a group to keep the issue alive.

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On campus, students are reminded of the threat of school violence by the metal detectors used at every high school and middle school and signs proclaiming that bringing a gun to school can get you expelled--and advertising a phone number for students to turn in their classmates. Teachers, for the first time, are being told when violent students are transferred to their classrooms. And principals have been directed to keep campuses secure and gates locked.

Students say there is a climate of fear on some campuses and that they are reminded of the problem continuously.

“I think everyone worries about it,” said Glenn Browne Jr., who was shot and critically wounded at Dorsey High in September and has transferred to a new campus. “I know I do and my friends all do.”

The problem has escalated so high that many students believe they must arm themselves for protection and there is little shock at seeing a weapon on campus, said school district police chief Wes Mitchell.

“It has become an informal social norm that kids need to protect themselves, so why not carry the tools to protect themselves?” said Mitchell, who added that the district should provide more education about guns and violence. “There are no short-term solutions to this problem. The only real solution is to change attitudes. In our society, it’s as normal to shoot someone now as it was to punch someone 10 years ago. When is this going to change in our kids?”

The Board of Education toughened its expulsion policy after last year’s shootings and has kicked out a record number of students for bringing weapons to school. In the 1992-93 school year, the board expelled 241 students compared to 95 the previous year, records show.

But expulsion records also suggest that the number of students bringing weapons to school has not dropped. In the 1992-93 school year, 592 students were recommended for expulsion for weapons compared to 504 the previous year. Some students were sent to alternative schools or were not expelled for a variety of reasons.

The shooting incidents last year struck campuses across the district. Because the cases were not isolated in one section of the city, parents and students throughout the system were forced to confront the problem. Ironically, two of the shooting victims were attending schools they believed were safer than campuses in their neighborhoods.

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Ensley was bused to Reseda from his home in South-Central Los Angeles because his mother believed the school was safe. She said she would have done anything to give her son a secure school atmosphere.

“It wasn’t like he was out robbing someone,” Margaret Ensley said. “The law says I have to send my son to school. So I sent him to a school I thought was safe. It wasn’t like he was in the wrong place.”

Ensley was shot by a 15-year-old classmate, Robert Heard, who ran sobbing across the campus and was arrested in a nearby doughnut shop. Heard is awaiting trial on murder charges.

Ensley’s violent death came a month after another fatal shooting on a Los Angeles campus. Demetrius Rice, a 16-year-old student at Fairfax High, was shot to death by a classmate who accidentally fired a .357 magnum during an English class.

Since those incidents, a student was wounded at Dorsey High while waiting in a registration line on the first day of school in September. Another student was critically injured at Chatsworth High while waiting for his mother to pick him up.

Ensley and the father of the Dorsey student sued the district in the past week, charging that the schools failed to provide adequate safety and supervision.

Glenn Browne Sr., whose son was shot Sept. 7, said the district should have provided more supervision and never should have allowed outsiders on the campus. His son was shot by an 18-year-old gang member who was looking for someone else, officials said. Bryant Boyd has been arraigned and is awaiting trial on attempted murder charges.

“Something like this should have never happened,” Browne said. “When I send my kids to school, I expect them to be safe. I enrolled them at Dorsey for a reason.”

Glenn Browne Jr. lost a kidney and will never again participate in sports. His younger brother, Deon, was at his side when the shooting occurred.

“I’m scared--I’m still scared,” said Glenn Jr. “I’m scared that they will come back and get me. I think about my body (and) how messed up I am. I can’t play football or any sports at all. I can’t really do nothing.”

Two months ago, 17-year-old Gabriel Gettleson was shot at Chatsworth High when he refused to give his backpack to two boys. Gettleson was waiting for his mother to pick him up and take him to his job.

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After weeks in the intensive care unit at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, the Gettleson family moved from Northridge to an undisclosed location, school officials said. “After the earthquake, it was too much and they moved,” said Donna Smith, principal at Chatsworth High.

The shootings at Fairfax and Reseda brought two mothers together to fight for school safety. Mildred Hillard, whose son Demetrius Rice was killed at Fairfax on Jan. 21, 1993, formed Mothers Against Violence in Schools with Ensley. They have appeared on panels, met with politicians and say they will never let their children be forgotten.

“It’s been a year and we’re just now talking about protecting our children,” Hillard said. “How many more children are going to die? How many more lives will it take before they start acting faster?”

The district spends $25 million of its $3.9-billion budget on its police force and Thompson said he will not spend more. “I could have bought a lot of books with that,” he said. “I’m just not willing to cut jobs from one place to add to another.”

School crime reports show that district police took 774 reports of weapons-related incidents in 1993 and 895 reports in 1992. The school police recovered 127 guns in 1993 and 168 guns in 1992.

The district’s metal detector program, which randomly screens about 25 students per day at each high school and middle school, has failed to turn up any weapons. An anonymous tip hot line received about 20 calls a day at its height last fall but dropped to about three by December. Almost none have come in since the Jan. 17 earthquake.

The district has made some cosmetic changes: Police cars are being painted white with a bright blue “police” logo and officers now are in uniform on campuses.

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A task force created by school board member Mark Slavkin in the wake of a rash of school violence came up with some new safety measures but anything that costs money has been tabled. The panel proposed training teachers and other school staff members in gang prevention methods and using school psychologists to intervene with problem students.

Thompson said he has been studying the recommendations and plans to announce his new proposals for better security next month. They will include requiring every school to have a safety plan and better coordination between agencies and services that deal with the problem.

Now, the district’s 292 police officers patrol the 400 elementary schools and are stationed on all but 22 junior high and high school campuses. Thompson said he would like every secondary school to have a police officer on campus but that he probably will not have the money.

At the campuses where the shootings occurred--Fairfax, Reseda, Dorsey and Chatsworth--administrators say there is a renewed effort to focus on school security. They say they are working on new programs to increase students’ awareness of the problem.

At Reseda, students are producing skits about weapons and breaking the code of silence that exists among them about guns. The students also follow a dress code that bans clothing that could be viewed as gang attire.

The impact of the shootings has been deep for students and staff on those campuses.

“As I was going through that experience on January 21st, I knew that no matter what I did in this school district--good or bad--nothing would ever equal what I was doing that morning,” said Michael Bennett, the principal at Fairfax. “It was 8:15 in the morning and boom, the history of this school changed with that heartbeat.”