B y Michael Dean Clark Staff Writer

April 16, 2000

The specter of Columbine High School has yet to fade.

This past Friday, police arrested two 17-year-old boys in Sonora, Calif., believed to be planning a Columbine-like attack at their high school. Closer to home, several students in the San Fernando Valley were suspended this past week for a prank that raised fears of a Columbine-style plot.

On Saturday, President Clinton remembered the April 20, 1999, shootings while announcing millions more in federal funding for school safety programs.

Nearly one year after two students stormed into Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., and fatally shot 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves, fear remains.

In realty, schools continue to be safe havens for children, said Robert R. Butterworth of International Trauma Associates in Los Angeles. What has changed, perhaps forever, is the public's perception. Today, few parents believe that schools are inherently safe places, he said.

"The odds of a school shooting happening in the classroom are probably lower than getting struck by lightning, but the drama of the situation has really frightened people," he said.

Thursday marks one year since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out one of the worst episodes of violence on an American high school campus in history.

The violent outburst by two self-perceived social outcasts inevitably forced educators, parents and students to re-evaluate their schools and ask whether something like Columbine could happen there.

A year later, time has eaten away at the sense of urgency. Students for the most part have locked the past away and returned to worrying about problems closer to home.

"You know, when it happened and there were all those rumors going around that something was going to happen here. I thought about it all the time," said Iraida Perales, a junior at Northview High School in Covina. "Now it's over and I don't really think about it."

Many students no longer fear a mass shooting breaking out at their school.

"I don't think it will happen here. This neighborhood just isn't like that," said Northview sophomore Danny Alcantar.

Such reactions are typical of teen-agers, who tend to bounce back from tragedy quicker than parents, said Jim Douglas, principal at La Puente High School.

"To be honest, the awareness and the fear and trepidation is mostly among adults," he said. "Kids tend to be more resilient and move on from things a little quicker than adults do.

"Most kids' perception of their safety at school comes from what has happened to them and most have not had something of this magnitude happen to them."

Adults, however, have had a harder time separating the perception of imminent danger that Columbine made them feel from the reality. The fact is, crime in schools is usually far less than in the communities around them, Douglas said.

Still, Temple City resident Susan Taylor-Mills often fears for the safety of her son, a 10th-grade student at Temple City High.

"I've held my children very close to the vest," she said. "It's difficult for me to let them walk to school because I'm afraid what other children will do."

Such fears were more intense last year, in the weeks following the Littleton shootings.

During that time, schools from West Covina to South Pasadena to Whittier were evacuated or locked down by bomb threats or Internet-driven rumors of Columbine copy-cats.

In the Whittier Union High School District, prank graffiti threatening more violence sparked fear at La Serna High School. Taking chat-room reports of future violence seriously, about half the students stayed home until the rumor mills quieted down.

Superintendent Anthony Avina said that fear just isn't prevalent today.

"I just can't imagine that there's that heightened fear today that there was the two or three of four days after the incident happened," he said.

Columbine definitely changed the way schools and communities deal with school yard threats. Now every perceived threat is rigorously addressed.

On April 4, a 24-year-old Eliot Middle School teacher in Altadena told deputies one of his students, a 14-year-old eighth-grader, repeatedly asked him what time he was going home "so my uncle can come up and shoot you."

The student was cited and arrested on suspicion of threatening his teacher and released into his mother's custody.

Just this week, five students at James Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley were questioned about possible threats coinciding with the anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings.

No arrests were made and the incident was declared a hoax. But the response was swift.

"It's gone to the opposite side, where if kids get mad and say they're going to kill someone, now they're being led out in handcuffs," Butterworth said. "We go from one extreme to another, and it seems that we lose our common sense."

Some community members say school districts have not done enough.

In Jess Angulo's failed bid for a seat on the San Gabriel Unified School District's board, he made campus safety one of his key issues. He believes that districts need to let parents know the extent of the fighting and violence on local campuses.

"I think one of the main problems is that parents aren't being informed on the issues of school safety," he said. "It's not safe it's absolutely not safe."

Angulo also believes that teachers need to be given the training and equipment to take care of problems as they arise, like aggression diffusion training and phones to call the police directly if necessary.

New fences and added security guards are necessary steps in some cases, but what all schools need to do is make preventing the problem their top priority, said John Byrnes, founder of the Center For Aggression Management in Winter Park, Fla.

"We're trying to do all these environmental things to prevent aggression from happening when in fact . . . the only way to do that is to give people more human schools," he said. "What we must do is offer skills that will enable people to see the signs of potential aggression so they can prevent it from happening."

In fact, the new security measures schools are taking don't address the root of the problem in many cases and may not be effective at stopping angry outbursts, said Byrnes, who trains educators and corporate employees across the country on how to identify aggression and prevent it from escalating.

"What I see is an awful lot of people reacting to aggression," he said. "And if all you're going to do is react, eventually you are going to be dealt with violence."

Prevention is exactly what officials at El Monte High School have focused on, Principal Doug Halvorsen said.

To head off potential problems the school has developed a peer support program, added and retrained counselors, brought a family counselor on campus 12 hours a week and added a campus resource officer to four campuses, among other precautions, he said.

"We have a lot of eyes and ears and we're pretty in tune with what our kids are dealing with," Halvorsen said.

That is exactly the type of approach Byrnes advocates.

Unfortunately, too many districts are focused primarily on punishing kids after they've been a problem, he said.

"If Columbine has done anything for us, it's made us hyper-vigilant we're suspending people with finger guns now," Byrnes said. "The question is, do parents and students have the skills to diffuse these situations, and all too often the answer to that is no."

When it comes down to it, most educators, parents and students admit that if students are motivated and disenfranchised enough, school violence can still occur despite the best preparations.

"I think most schools have done about what they can," Douglas said. "As much as you can be ready for what you don't know, schools are. You try to be ready for the negative but you don't dwell on it."

Staff Writer Andrew Samuelson contributed to this story. 

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