2 Schools on Violence in Classroom : Discipline: A 6-year-old Encino-based organization remains a source of controversy between police and educators. Its director says it is trying to better balance its law-and-order stance with the rights of the individual.

A federally funded office began six years ago to help schools nationwide deal with student violence by using old-fashioned discipline.

Today, the National School Safety Center in Encino draws praise from police agencies and many school districts that have turned to it for advice. “You can pick up a phone from anywhere and ask, ‘Are there any school districts using dogs to sniff out drugs?’ or ‘Is there any school policy that is effective at reducing bullying?’ ” said Wesley Mitchell, chief of police for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Yet the center, a source of controversy from the beginning, continues to draw criticism from educators and others who complain that it religiously follows the law-and-order credo of its creator, former President Reagan, while failing to address the roots of gang and school violence.

The center “was set up as an ideological tool,” said Irwin Hyman, director of the National Center for the Study of Corporal Punishment and Alternatives in School at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It was not set up as a national center where research would be made and information disseminated,” Hyman said.

Reagan announced formation of the center in a radio address Jan. 7, 1984. Its purpose, he said, was to publish information for school officials on their legal rights in dealing with disruptive students and to serve as a clearinghouse for school safety resources.

“Early on there may have been a stronger law-and-order approach, but we are trying to balance that with the rights of individuals,” said Ronald D. Stephens, the center’s executive director.

Stephens said the advice given districts is not shaped by any particular ideological agenda. He said the center’s approach mirrors the philosophy of the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which oversees the center’s work.

The center has spent nearly $10 million in federal money since it opened. It operates under the auspices of Pepperdine University, producing and selling pamphlets, films and magazines on school crime issues, and providing speakers on gangs, drugs and student violence.

School officials from several districts across the country credit the center with suggesting crime-fighting methods that have soothed communities stunned by outbreaks of campus violence.

For example, the gang-related killing of a high school junior in a Cleveland suburb prompted school officials there to call the NSSC.

“There was instant panic and we needed help,” said Lauree Gearity, superintendent of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District. “They flew out that week. They told us that we were not like Los Angeles, that our gangs were in the formative stages and that we could do things to prevent more problems.”

A similar panic hit Little Rock, Ark., after the killing of a junior high school student two years ago. “The community was really upset,” recalled Bill Barnhouse, director of safety and security for the 22,000-student Little Rock School District.

Some of the center’s suggestions adopted by the Cleveland and Little Rock school districts include creating a student code of conduct, trimming bushes around schools to remove hiding places for assailants and installing special mirrors in school hallways so teachers can see around corners, school officials said.

Former Los Angeles Police Department Officer Gus Frias, now manager of the Orange County Office of Education’s Operation Safe Schools program, said he and the center have worked together on a training class called Gang School for Educators.

“We have educators trained during the 1950s with curriculum obsolete to deal with today’s issues of crime and violence,” Frias said. “The center provides brochures and updated information from their findings nationwide.”

An article in the fall issue of the center’s School Safety magazine suggested that school officials install metal detectors, hire more guards, increase student penalties and conduct random searches to squelch campus crime.

“Squeamishness about taking such measures often reflects administrators’ public relations worries more than anything else,” said the article, written by Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank based in Washington.

The King County Police Department, which serves Seattle, credits the center as one source of information used in its newly released gang awareness manual.

Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Loren Kramer, who is working with Stephens to create a federally financed program to attack gang and drug problems nationally, said the center provides up-to-date information on school crime trends.

“I’ve worked with Ron and I’m impressed with his knowledge and commitment,” said Kramer, head of the department’s narcotics group.

Bernard James, a Pepperdine law professor and an NSSC staff member, said another important job of the center is to educate school districts and police departments about the kinds of information they can legally share.

Historically, information about juveniles’ arrests and convictions has been considered confidential so youths will not be unfairly labeled criminals and denied a chance at rehabilitation. But James said that approach is not always in the best interests of the child.

“Confidentiality has not had the intended benign effect on youthful offenders, and, in fact, it has disastrously undermined the prevention and control of serious crimes they commit,” according to the center’s handbook, “The Need to Know--Juvenile Record Sharing.”

“Schools always benefit knowing who the bad apples are,” said James, one of the handbook’s authors. “Information sharing is a pivotal piece of the school safety issue.”

Critics, however, say the center’s law-and-order approach is too narrow and can harm students.

“Some kids need strict limits but that alone is not going to work; it does not allow them to grow up and learn to regulate themselves,” said Robert L. Selman, a professor in the School of Education at Harvard University.

Hamilton High School’s dean of students, Carolee Bogue, said that after 15 years in the Los Angeles school district she believes “punitive means are never the solution. You never make kids do better by making them feel worse.”

In its literature, for instance, the center gives high marks to Superior Court Judge C. Robert Jameson, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court in Orange County, who a year ago formally ordered all school districts, police departments, prosecutors and probation officers in the county to release information to each other about any student believed to be a gang member or “at significant risk of becoming a gang member.”

Stuart Biegel, a professor in both the law school and graduate school of education at UCLA, said the center historically has been at one end of the struggle between law enforcement and the right to privacy.

“People who want to fight crime constantly find that privacy rights get in their way,” Biegel said. “In a policeman’s ideal world, any evidence you uncover would be admitted and you could get at any records.”

Critics also say the center’s active role in legal and community issues demonstrates that an unstated purpose of the center is to further conservative ideology.

Stephens and James, for instance, served on a task force created by state Assemblywoman Marian La Follette (R-Northridge) last summer to review her longstanding campaign to break up the Los Angeles school district. La Follette’s efforts to create separate school districts in the San Fernando Valley, which was recommended by the task force, has received most of its support from middle- and upper middle-income parents opposed to the busing of children from the inner city to the Valley.

The NSSC filed a friend of the court brief in support of a Washington school district’s right to suspend a student who had delivered a school election speech that included racy jokes.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1986 overturned a lower court’s ruling favoring the student’s free-speech rights. The center also filed a brief supporting the right of police in an Orange County city to stop and question youngsters suspected of being truants in a court case eventually heard by the state Supreme Court in 1987. The state’s high court declared the public interest in enforcing truancy laws outweighed any intrusion on individual rights.

Also, critics say, many of the center’s crime prevention suggestions are little more than the sort of common sense school officials should already know.

In its printed materials and films, children are encouraged, for example, to participate in sports and join churches rather than gangs. School officials are advised to keep track of incidents of school violence, make plans for campus disasters and restrict access to schools by outsiders. Parents are asked to volunteer their time at local schools.

In the Los Angeles school district, where growing campus violence prompted the school board last month to order automatic expulsions for students bringing guns to school, the center apparently has had little impact, district officials said.

“They send me materials from time to time, but we have not disseminated any information about their materials to schools,” said Lulu Lopez, who developed the district’s curriculum on gang prevention for elementary school children.

The suggestions in the center’s publications and speeches come from experts in law, education and school safety, said Stephens. Because the NSSC was created to be a national clearinghouse, he said, its value comes from reporting school safety methods being tried across the country. Most of the nation’s 16,000 school districts do not have the experience of school officials in cities such as Los Angeles.

Officials at the Department of Justice say they are pleased with the center’s work. Lois Brown, who oversees the federal grant for the NSSC, said she foresees no trouble in getting approval this fall for the center’s proposed 1990-91 budget of $900,000.

“It would seem to me that if they weren’t in existence someone would have to invent them,” Brown said. “People need the expertise.”