Student’s Home Yields Cache of Weapons

Some schools are getting tougher, hiring security guards and installing metal detectors and expelling students who so much as mutter a threat. Some schools are getting softer, creating peer-mediation panels and mentoring programs and hotlines so kids can vent without violence.

Some schools, in a grim modern twist on the fire drill, make kids sit quietly in locked classrooms while a hypothetical psycho stalks the halls. Some schools are doing all of these things; others, nothing at all.

Yet, according to analysts and educators who study the phenomenon of random, unanticipated schoolplace violence, there is no silver-bullet solution to stopping a demented kid from grabbing a gun and making people pay for an adolescence gone awry.

“The book is still being written on developing strategies for these types of things,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village. “Clearly, they are not going to be able to prevent all of the crises. If you can’t prevent them, the next best thing is how to prepare for them.”

The shootings in Oregon on Thursday marked the sixth instance in the past six months in which a student or students began spraying bullets across campus with a creepy resolve. Though seemingly freakish occurrences by themselves, the fact that they all took place in predominantly white, middle-class school districts in small towns with no history of violent crime has created deep fears at other predominantly white, middle-class school districts with no history of violent crime.

The experts have profiled the killers, studied the school grounds, sized up the security systems and checked the exits, from Jonesboro, Ark., to West Paducah, Ky., to Springfield, Ore. They’ve even created a new kind of category for a new kind of schoolyard behavior: Intermittent explosive disorder.

But it remains uncertain whether the spate of school shootings is a statistically meaningless cluster of similar events or a scary new social trend, whether kids are becoming more barbarous or whether, as crime statistics indicate, juvenile violence is on the downswing.

Some analysts say, just as copycat airplane hijackings and terrorist bombings were as infrequent as they were deadly during their heyday, the current streak of high-profile school shootings may transform schools as dramatically as the nation’s airports.

Because of these shootings, more school districts nationwide already have embraced high-profile security measures such as metal detectors, surveillance cameras and campus security officers, said Stephens.

“They’re gravitating toward the things that are easy to quantify,” he said. “The things where you can say: ‘We’ve done something.’ ”

Yet, turning schools into fortresses still won’t help teachers and administrators understand whether a truly disturbed student intends to detonate on a particular day, Stephens said. He said tapping into student culture and following up on threats and other rumors are crucial.

And though the evidence is too fresh to be anything more than anecdotal, it’s clear that some schools are doing that. In some schools, even rhetorical references to violence are beginning to be treated with something less than kid gloves.

Some recent examples of kids who didn’t squeeze off a round:

* In April, a high schooler from Lone Oak, Ky., was arrested for threatening to kill a baseball coach for not making him a starter.

* A fourth-grader in Hamilton, Ohio, was suspended for five days and has to report to the principal’s office for a daily frisking because he had compiled a “killing list” of people who had taunted him during recess.

* Police in Memphis, Tenn., recently accused a 5-year-old boy of carrying a loaded pistol to school.

* A 13-year-old was arrested in Tulsa, Okla., two weeks ago after he bragged to friends at a school dance that he was packing a .25-caliber automatic pistol. The gun fell to the ground when chaperons made him empty his pockets.

* A 15-year-old in suburban Chicago was arrested and placed in detention last week after allegedly telling a friend he was going to shoot some classmates. The boy has pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy and solicitation to commit murder.

* A 14-year-old was suspended from school in Cabrillo, Calif., after writing a story for a creative writing class. The story was about the fictional slaying of his principal.

Even before the recent spate of shootings, schools were managing to wrest an alarming number of weapons away from students. A recent Education Department study showed that more than 6,000 students were expelled in 1997 for bringing guns to school, nearly 10% of them from elementary school.

How many shootings were averted because of it? Nobody can say, though some people say schools generally do a terrible job of identifying and isolating their most dangerous students.

The University of Oregon’s Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior recently began working with Oregon’s Springfield School District on security issues just before Thursday’s shootings, said institute co-director Jeff Sprague.

Among the risk factors the institute identified was the fact that Springfield is a decaying logging town with a poor inner-city, he said. Yet the suspect in the shootings on Thursday apparently was the product of a good home, even though the boy himself had a history of torturing animals and tossing rocks at cars off highway overpasses.

“Students who are at the highest risk are the least well-tracked,” he said.

Security experts were uniformly aghast at the circumstances surrounding the Springfield incident, in which a student who had been expelled for a gun violation remained unmonitored enough to make it back to school with a gun. “One would have assumed that some huge lights would have gone on,” said Sprague.

Sprague is among those who believe that the school shootings have taken on a copycat effect. “At this point, floodgates are open,” he said of further school slayings.

Some of the school districts that are the most bullish about preventing violence are those that already have experienced it.

Paducah, Ky., officials obtained a $12-million federal grant to beef up school security after a 14-year-old boy was arrested on charges of killing three students and wounding five others on Dec. 1 in West Paducah.

Among the programs being put into place are those dealing with anger management and conflict resolution. A security officer also will be added to one of the schools.

School officials decided against metal detectors and instead chose to keep the school doors locked, said Danny Orazine, a county judge who was on the committee appointed to make safety recommendations.

“We have tried to keep from having an Alcatraz in the schools,” he said.

The school system wants to add school resource officers, quasi-cops who teach security as well as enforce it, he said. “Funding is the key problem.”

School officials in Pearl, Miss., hired security guards, added a counselor and gave principals cell phones after a 16-year-old student killed his mother on Oct. 1, then went to school and shot nine students, two of whom died. They also added a hotline for students who want to leave tips on an answering machine. The school decided against metal detectors.

But money is tight and the district already has had to drop security guards at the elementary school. “We are trying to work for some grants for next year for surveillance cameras,” said Supt. William Dodson.

School officials in Edinboro, Pa., wouldn’t comment on what, if anything, they had done after a 14-year-old boy opened fire recently at an eighth-grade dance, killing a teacher and wounding another one, along with two students.

“There was a lot of counseling of kids,” said Art Williams, mayor of Williams Township, where the school is located. “But how are you going to know which kid might make trouble?”

What remains frustrating about solutions is that some things that seem to work well in some places don’t work at all in others, said George Passantino of the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles, which conducted a study of school violence last October.

“There didn’t seem to be a silver bullet,” he said. “Metal detectors worked in some places and in others they didn’t.”

The group studied public and Roman Catholic schools, which are known for their strict and exacting rules, and found that the parochial schools had significantly lower rates of violence even in high-crime areas, he said. The reason, he said, seemed to be a broad commitment to discipline.

“When you ingrain in their head for years that this, that and the other thing are wrong, it does finally get entrenched,” he said. Some analysts have suggested that, statistically speaking, things happen in clusters, not in evenly spaced intervals, sometimes giving the illusion of a problem that fleetingly seems worse than it is.

What further suggests that the half-dozen school shootings might be well-timed anomalies is the fact that they happened in rural areas where the crime rate is relatively low, as opposed to urban areas where violence is more intense and numbingly chronic.

What should be more troublesome to parents is the number of largely unreported instances in which a kid carries a box cutter to school, or the students whose pistols are taken away with virtually no mention in local media, said Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based security consultant.

Trump, who helped design systems in schools in 30 states and Canada, said he often walks into a school unannounced and wanders around to see who, if anybody, questions his presence. Often, he said, nobody does, even in schools in which some horrendous act of violence has occurred.

Schools, he said, often fail to do simple things, like patrol restrooms or monitor students during periods when there is most likely to be trouble.

“We’re not talking rocket science, or something that costs a million dollars” he said. “There is a culture of denial out there.”

Times researchers John Beckham in Chicago, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Lianne Hart in Houston and Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

School Security

A nationwide public school survey on security measures reports the following:

Visitors must sign in: 96%

Closed during lunch: 80%

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Controlled access to:

Building: 53%

Grounds: 24%

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Drug sweeps

Metal detector checks:

Random: 4%

Pass through daily: 1%

Percentages based on the answers of 1,234 respondents, out of 1,404 eligible schools

Source: U.S. Department of Education