Taking Aim at Violence

In the wake of recent deadly school shootings, educators have been
takingdrastic actions to increase student safety. But will their efforts
prevent more trouble--or promote it?

Tension in the classroom had been building all year. The English
teacher was fresh out of college and her pupils, about 15 of them, were
seniors on the advanced-placement track at South Fayette High School
outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These stellar students weren't
accustomed to pulling grades below an A, but the teacher was
infuriatingly tough, frequently returning papers marked C and D. "It was
kind of like a little war," says Matt Welch, the class president and one
of the students. "It just seemed like she was out to get us."

If there was one person the teacher really seemed to have it in
for, it was Aaron Leese. A bold 18-year-old with short red hair, Leese
was popular with his classmates, if not exactly your model student.
Police had busted him in the park with a bottle of bourbon. In school, he
had a habit of embarrassing the teacher by asking her questions in front
of the class that she found hard to answer. Leese also didn't take kindly
to low marks on his assignments. Once, he was so riled by a grade that
the teacher asked him to leave. As he was walking out he muttered
something like "troglodyte bitch," which earned him a three-day
suspension.

The relationship between the two became increasingly strained. One
morning in spring, she handed back one of the year's last big
assignments, a 10-page essay on a book of one's choice. Leese had written
his on Thomas Moore's Utopia. He needed an A to pass the class, but he
received a D. "I said, 'Man, if I don't pass this class, I'm going to be
mad enough to kill,'" Leese recalls. "It was something I said out of
frustration. After that the teacher said, 'That could be misinterpreted,
you know?' I said, 'Yeah, my bad. I take it back.'"

The exchange went so quickly that a student who sat directly behind
Leese didn't even catch it. But it made a distinct impression on the
teacher. After class ended, she reported it to the principal, who pulled
Leese into his office and phoned the police. By noon, Leese was being
escorted off school grounds by two officers from the South Fayette
Township Police Department. He was now facing criminal charges. "I was in
tears," Leese says.

Had Leese made his comment just five years ago instead of in spring
1998, it might well have gone unnoticed. But a string of deadly shootings
at schools around the country is radically altering how these
institutions interact with their students. Since February 1996, the
massacres, seven in all, have left a total of 35 students, teachers and
principals dead. In the latest tragedy at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado, two youths killed 13 before taking their own
lives.

Alarmed by such incidents, educators are changing the way they go
about their mission--and the steps some are taking go far beyond a
heightened sensitivity to violent language. They're installing spiked
fences, metal detectors, emergency alert systems. They're hiring security
guards and imposing searches of students' bags, lockers and desks. And
they're insisting that teachers learn skills not included in any
syllabus: how to run lock-down drills, how to strip a student vigilante
of his weapon.

No one would deny that educators have a right make that an
obligation--to do all they can to protect themselves and their charges
from what has become a prime threat to their safety: students themselves.
But worrisome questions have arisen about the effects such measures are
having on the education which is the schools' purpose to provide. More
disturbing still are suggestions that the efforts may not be effectively
preventing trouble and may even be promoting it.

The change most immediately apparent to students has been the move
to punish those who use violent language. It's hard to fault
administrators for paying close attention to such outbursts. Reporters
delving into the lives of the young killers invariably have surfaced with
tales of suspicious remarks made before the carnage. Like Barry
Loukaitis, the 14-year-old who killed two students and a teacher at
Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, Washington, who told a friend how
cool it would be to go on a shooting spree. Or Kip Kinkel, accused of
killing four people at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, who
talked frequently of shooting cats, blowing up cows and building bombs.
And more recently still, Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, who
posted a message on the Internet saying, "You all better hide in your
houses because I'm coming for everyone, and I will shoot to kill and I
will kill everyone."

Remarks like these, recalled with remorse after the fact, have led
principals and teachers to be on the lookout for more of the same. But
when do such comments represent an actual intent to kill, and when are
they merely the product of an active fantasy life?

Robby Stango, for example, was a 15-year-old freshman at Kingston
High School in upstate New York in May 1998 when school officials were
alerted to a poem he had written for a class assignment. Titled "Step to
Oblivion," the poem is about a divorced man who decides one night to jump
off a cliff and end his life. "Here I am/Standing here on this gloomy
night/Minutes away from my horrid fate," the verse begins. The precipice
is only seven feet high, however, and the man survives the fall. "Maybe
my prayer was answered/Or it could have been just luck/But I was given a
second chance at life," the poem concludes.

Despite its positive ending, the verse convinced school officials
that Stango was headed for trouble. Although the teen was seeing a
counselor at the time about problems he was having at home, he didn't
pose a danger to himself or others, according to therapists familiar with
his case. Yet the school discovery of the poem set off a chain of events
that resulted in Stango being forced, against his mother's wishes, into a
rive-night stay in a psychiatric ward. Alice Stango has since filed a
lawsuit against the school district and the county.

It was also writing assignments for English class that got
eighth-grader Troy Foley, from the California coastal town of Half Moon
Bay, in trouble. In an essay titled "The Riot," Foley, then 14, wrote of
a kid who is so enraged with school rules, especially the ones forbidding
him to wear a hat and drink soda during class, that he incites a student
riot that ends with the principal getting bludgeoned to death. Two weeks
later, Foley handed in "Goin' Postal," an equally violent tale about a
character named Martin who sneaks a pistol into school and kills a police
officer, the vice principal and principal. Though he had no history of
violent or even disruptive behavior, Foley was suspended for five days
for making a terroristic threat. Foley's mother, assisted by the American
Civil Liberties Union, managed to have the record changed to state that
Foley was suspended for two days for using profanity in school
assignments. Foley has since skipped high school and is enrolled at a
two-year community college.

Parents and lawyers of both boys contend that the schools
overreacted in these cases, punishing children whose only crime was a
vivid imagination. But even if that's so, it leaves an important question
unanswered: how do principals and teachers know when a violent story or
remark signals a real threat? Those who turn to psychological research
will find only equivocal answers at best.

"These things may be indicators, and they may not," says Kevin
Dwyer, Ph.D., president-elect of the National Association of School
Psychologists. "To try to predict an individual's future behavior based
on what they say or write isn't really possible." His view is shared by
Edward Taylor, Ph.D., professor of social work at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert on childhood mental illness.
"I don't know of any study that has empirically examined whether the use
of violent language in creative writing can actually predict those who
are going to commit a crime," declares Taylor. Such language so permeates
American popular culture, he notes, that its use doesn't necessarily
indicate a predilection for the use of force.

Mindful of the complexities involved in predicting which students
will become violent, many school districts are attempting to circumvent
the threat entirely by altering their physical landscapes. Located in the
small town of West Paducah, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River,
Heath High School was dragged into the national spotlight in the winter
of 1997 when 14-year-old Michael Carneal gunned down classmates, killing
three girls. The school quickly convened a security committee, which
authorized a $148,000 security plan.

Today, Heath requires visitors, teachers and students to wear
identification tags around their necks at all times, like soldiers. It
has students sign consent forms authorizing staff to rummage through
backpacks and cars for weapons; each morning before entering school,
students line up to have their bags searched. Heath also has hired a
uniformed, armed security guard. Officials have prepared should a weapon
slip by security. They've purchased two-way radios for staff members to
wear on their belts, in case they need to communicate during an attack.
And they've placed emergency medical kits and disaster-instruction
manuals in each classroom.

The new environment at Heath High School dismays many parents and
students. "They made my son sign papers so they can search his
possessions, his locker, anything, anytime," says one unhappy parent.
"From what I understand, the Constitution is still in effect. I don't
like the idea of my child going to school and having school officials
search him at their discretion. They're trying their best, but they don't
seem to be getting it right."

Heath's principal Bill Bond defends the measures. "We have
restrictions on everything we do," he points out. "I've never thought
about carrying a bomb on an airplane, but I pass through airport security
just like everybody else. The very concept of security is always going to
reduce freedom. That is a trade-off people have been dealing with since
the beginning of time."

Schools around the country are following Heath's lead. In April
1998, an Indiana school district became the first in the country to
install metal detectors in its elementary schools, after three of its
students were caught bringing guns into the buildings. This past January,
the U.S. Department of Education reported that nearly 6300 students were
expelled in the 1996-1997 school year for carrying firearms: 58% had
handguns, 7% rifles or shotguns and 35% other weapons, including bombs
and grenades.

Faced with such statistics, more schools than ever before are
buying security devices like spiked fences, motorized gates and
blast-proof metal covers for doors and windows. Administrators are also
signing up in droves for the services of security experts. Jesus
Villahermosa Jr., a deputy sheriff in Pierce County, Washington, expects
to run 65 sessions for educators this year, double the number held in
1997. "I'm completely booked," says Villahermosa, whose curriculum
includes how to disarm students and how to run lock-down drills.

Such measures may make schools feel less vulnerable, but how do
they affect the learning that goes on inside? Here again, research
provides only tentative answers. Citing neurological and psychological
research, Renate Nummela Caine, professor emeritus of educational
psychology at California State University-San Bernadino, maintains that
when students feel threatened or helpless, their brains "downshift" into
more primitive states, and their ability to think becomes automatic and
limited, instinctive rather than creative.

Regimented classrooms, inflexible teachers, an atmosphere of
suspicion, can all induce feelings of helplessness, contends Caine,
author with her husband Geoffrey Caine, a law professor turned
educational specialist, of Making Connections: Teaching and the Human
Brain (Addison-Wesley, 1994). "What schools are doing is creating
conditions that are comparable to prisons," she declares. "Where else are
people searched every day and watched every minute? They want to clamp
down and they want control. It's based on fear, and it's an
understandable reaction given the circumstances, but the problem is that
they're not looking at other solutions."

Psychologists say that surrounding troubled young people with the
accoutrements of a police state may only fuel their fascination with guns
and increase their resistance to authority Likewise, punishing young
people for talking or writing about their violent musings may just force
the fantasies underground, where they may grow more exaggerated and
extreme. "It's a response that says, `We don't know how to react, so
we're going to respond harshly,' "says Patrick Tolan, Ph.D., professor of
adolescent development and intervention at the University of
Illinois-Chicago. "If you're a child, would you come forward and say
you're troubled in that atmosphere? Are you going to rely on adults if
that is how simplistically they think about things? Rather than saying
something to a counselor, you might well keep quiet."

Suspending or expelling a student, moreover, strips him of the
structure of school and the company of people he knows, perhaps deepening
his alienation and driving him to more desperate acts. Kip Kinkel, for
example, went on his rampage after being suspended from school for
possessing a stolen handgun.

Yet there are punishments more severe and alienating than
suspensions and expulsions. As schools begin to resemble police
precincts, school officials are abdicating their duty to counsel and
discipline unruly students and letting the cops down the hall handle the
classroom disruptions, bullying and schoolyard fights. And the cops
aren't taking any chances. They're arresting students and feeding them
into a criminal justice system that sees little distinction between kids
and adults. "Once that police officer is on the scene, the principals and
teachers lose control completely," says Vincent Shiraldi, executive
director of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. "I think it will
make students a more litigious group and much less able to solve their
problems peacefully and reasonably"

There may be a better way, and educators are beginning to look for
it. Instead of building schools like fortresses, architects are
experimenting with ways to open them up and make them more welcoming.
Designers are lowering lockers to waist-height and in some cases
eliminating them entirely, so students can't hide behind them or use them
as storage spaces for guns. Instead of being built on the outskirts of a
school, administrative offices are being placed in the middle, enclosed
in glass walls so officials can see what's going on. Gymnasiums and
auditoriums are being opened to the public, serving as meeting places for
the local chamber of commerce or performing arts group. "The kids feel
nurtured by this," says Steven Bingler, a school architect in New Orleans
who participated last October in a symposium on making schools safer that
was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the White House
Millennium Council. "School doesn't feel like a prison to them
anymore."

On a more personal level, some schools are offering increased
access to counselors; others have hired a "violence prevention
coordinator" to whom students can give anonymous tips about classmates in
trouble. In accord with this less punitive, more therapeutic approach,
students who use threatening language are being steered into
anger-management programs, intensive therapy and to other support
services.

As for Aaron Leese, he was charged with making a terroristic threat
and thrown in a holding cell for the afternoon. "My thought was that they
wanted to scare me a bit so that I would bend to the system," he says.
The charge was dropped after he submitted to a 90-day probation and a
psychiatric evaluation. Leese was ordered to stay off school property,
forcing him to miss all the senior activities planned for the end of the
year--a banquet, a picnic, a dance. Then his principal, Superintendent
Linda Hippert, relented. "I felt that Aaron needed to be punished, but my
assumption after the investigation was that the punishment did not fit
the crime," says Hippert. "I know Aaron very well, and what he was denied
was above and beyond what he had done." With her blessing, Leese was
allowed to graduate with his class.

PHOTO (COLOR): At an Indianapolis public school, a security guard
uses a metal detector to check a seven-year-old student for possible
weapons.