Violence in any school under any circumstances--accidental or not--is intolerable. And yet many of us live with it (the threat and the reality) every day.
The accidental shooting of two Gardena High School students here in L.A. is a reminder of the price we pay for urban violence and the degree of terror many of our students face getting to and from school that makes some of them take up arms for self-protection. In years past I've confiscated knives and mace from students and then wondered if they got home all right.
My first day as a teacher in South Central, a veteran told me it's not the armed thug you worry about so much as the kid who throws his backpack down on the desk and the gun he's got inside goes off. He really said those exact words--and he was probably right--though none of my near calamities, including my basketball team and me being shot at from the street during an outdoor basketball practice, were accidental in nature.
Our school is a few miles north of Gardena High School. Many of our students are friends or family of the students who go there so the details of yesterday's tragedy spread quickly through our campus. But not all of our students learned about this shooting that way. One boy, who lives in the other direction, would have to have found out about the Gardena High shooting via the electronic news because he and his family were locked inside their home all morning while police secured his street after a shooting last night.
Obviously, no one can figure out how to keep violence out of our inner-city schools or the surrounding neighborhoods. The homicide rate in L.A. County is lower than it has been since 1965, but what is an acceptably low homicide rate?
Most of our students are already beyond the fear and loathing and petty grudges that manufacture tragedy. At least most of them don't carry weapons and most of them want no part of the violence though they understand the extent of the burden they carry.
Better security means that every student must be treated as a potential suspect the way that every air traveler now has had to become, at least for a few moments, a suspected terrorist.
I used to mind an intrusion into my classroom for a weapons search. Now I just try to talk students through it and maybe find a teachable moment in it. There is always the hope that the next frisking and wanding of my students will coincide with the teaching of Kafka's Metamorphosis or Orwell's 1984--though my students hardly need any more experiential examples of alienation or dehumanization.
What can educators do to help prevent violence? The world of ideas can be an antidote for students who are being swallowed up by the streets. In that way, we are engaged in a battle with those mean streets for the hearts and minds of those children. Overcrowded classrooms and mindless mandates make that battle much harder to win.
Equally important is what we can do for our non-violent majority of students who must live amidst the ignorance and carnage. Aside from protecting them physically we can at least try to win them away from cynicism and despair.
I remember a six hour lockdown one day, about eight years ago, when a woman and her child were gunned down near the front of our school. We didn't know what was going on outside, only that there had been a shooting and that police didn't know which way the assailants had gone. Helicopters thumped over the roof of my windowless bungalow classroom. Students had to urinate in a waste basket. I made my all-day second period class keep working as long as I could. We finished the day's assignment and I started the next day's, which I partly had to improvise.
I did my best impression of Al Pacino (at the end of Dog Day Afternoon or And Justice for All) screaming my head off, as if the helicopters were louder than they actually were, imploring them to keep learning, be scholars no matter how many gunmen tried to stop them.
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Take a look at this case, in which a single mother of two was prosecuted for sending her kids to a school in another district: http://drboycespeaks.blogspot.com/2011/01/mother-jailed-for-sending-kids-to-wrong.html
This is why we need school choice and also offers a rationale for dissolving school districts and school boards.
We need to address this situation proactively. Because LAUSD will never be"transparent" or do anything else that betrays its culpability for compromisig students' safety or undermining
the quality of their education with overcrowding and other unacceptable conditions on campus, it is up to teachers and parents to demand immediate changes in policies , which also need to be enforced.
I learned quickly that most of our kids were acting out their pain. For instance, nursing a beer after school I wondered why I was so sore after a three on three b-ball game. Then I realized that all three of my opponents had been abused, and they committed those hard fouls to see if I really cared, or if I'd reject them (or use violence) like other men had.
That school, built in the earlier portion of last century, has been plagued with myriad problems for many years. A revolving door of administrators has not helped, nor has NCLB--which has only served to rob urban schools of their funding, along with their pride. All the schools in this locale, which have tremendously diverse populations, incur some degree of gang activity and economic hardship, but Gardena, unlike Banning, San Pedro, Carson, and Narbonne, suffers from something far worse: a lack of identity. Those schools all have some recognizable degree of talented athletes, pep squads, thespians,or gifted musicians.Gardena has seemingly not had one moment of glory since their track coach won titles several years back, Sadly, he died recently, and even his passing, written up in the newspaper, was indicative of the vacant detachment that seems to color their environment . The coach, who had suffered a stroke years prior, apparently suffered another, while alone at home. It took three days for a concerned colleague to finally check on him, and make the horrible discovery. I would prefer working as a barrista at Starbucks for 1/10th the salary than to wake up every morning to such a dim prospect as Gardena High appears to be.
You make an excellent point about the impact on a school of extracurricular activities. A school police officer once told me that at schools with strong football programs an ethnically diverse football team can set the tone for ethnic tolerance among the rest of the students.
Same happened to a veteren teacher at BHS last summer, all alone, stressed by horrible situation at school, she was slipping swiftly; teachers knew this, but life got in the way and she died at 60. Too soon.
I bet kids at GHS are worth the effort and risks of teaching there. I know many who do, and they stay for kids who need them in an otherwise thankless job.
You have very astutely named an element that most will never consider when calculating why Banning or Carson do not have the metal detectors. Yet. GHS is a dumping ground for kids from all over LA. Lots of kids in all flavors in rotating student body on large campus from different hoods and from what you say, not much to do with themselves socially or physically at school, where spirit and community are necessary for success. Disaster is inevitable. It is a miracle more of this unnecessary tragedy has not happened.
The safety systems vary widely, but in general, they consist of some device which prevents the firing pin from moving unless the gun is held as it would be for firing. Commonly, such a device locks the striker or "firing pin" back unless the trigger is fully pulled to the rear, although there are other systems. If someone says that a modern gun"went off by itself" when he set his bookbag down on the desk, he is almost certainly lying, which is why we need to know more.
It is still possible that hitting the victim was unintentional, but it is not credible that the gun went off "by itself," as alleged.
Where the hell did he get such a weapon? Serious street arsenal lugged around in backpacks is a sign of what's to come with 3000+ students swelling outside gates every morning; it's surprising violence doesn't erupt MORE often--nevermind tragic accidents. These kids are bright, funny, compassionate. And confused. An armed sophomore, I knew without newspapers, was responding to bullies' threats. Scared, angry, he acted foolishly. People do that, especially youngsters.
Many posts about shooting are misguided, assume kids attending "schools like" GHS are lawless gangbanging punks with apathetic parents who collect welfare and/or speak no English--as if these are qualifications on unfit parent inventory.
Actually, corruption & complacency are culprits when a community lets children feed a machine it should rage against.
Instead of squandering $ on some half a***ed answer to a problem as profound as weapons on campus with another fickle fascist quick fix that covers its collective rearend (barely), LAUSD neglected address this issue properly. Again.
Principals and teachers aren't to blame. They too are victims, who aren't professionally trained to treat gun wounds, disarm gunmen, track fugitives or violate Childrens' 4th Ammendmant rights. As LAUSD well knows, a tense crowded campus escalates into violence--children dumped from San Pedro to South-Central hoods @ GHS then crammed into classrooms is a volatile routine undermining safety on campus.
Deasy deflected responsibility, did damage control like district pros, put poor principal on blast publicly and promises more of the same.
The logic of instituting a security checkpoint at the front door of Gardena HS the morning after the shooting is bizarre. I mean, maybe if it had been a gang related shooting and there was fear of retaliation... If LAUSD believes that students @ Gardena need to be searched upon entry then why shouldn't all HS students throughout the district be? If there is a risk of another shooting--accidental or otherwise--is Gardena the only campus with that risk? Of course not. These massive searches are purely symbolic. They are meaningless--and who is protecting the students while they line up around the block to be searched?