Long Beach Policy Inspired President

WASHINGTON —  When President Clinton, speaking to the nation Tuesday in his State of the Union address, called on public schools to consider requiring uniforms so that “teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets,” he was thinking about Long Beach, a White House official said Friday.

In fact, long before the speech was drafted, Clinton had expressed growing interest in the novel idea as one of several approaches to combat school violence, according to Rahm Emanuel, a presidential assistant and director of special projects.

The Long Beach Unified School District has required elementary and middle school students to wear uniforms since 1994, and the policy apparently has resulted in a sharp decrease in violent incidents there. Clinton received memos and other materials describing the Long Beach experiment and a similar one in Arizona, and he requested more information.

“I like this. This is good. What can we do?” Emanuel quoted Clinton as having written in a return memo.

One thing was to send Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to Long Beach in December to “show administration support for the policy,” Emanuel said. Reno praised local schools such as Long Beach’s for fighting back on their own against crime.

Another was to raise the idea “in front of 45 to 50 million Americans watching the speech,” Emanuel said. “It’s a bully pulpit. You raise it. It doesn’t mean you have to do legislation. . . . The role of a bully pulpit is to highlight issues, highlight values. Other schools may look to this idea just by the president’s raising it.”

The administration recognizes programs such as these as the province of local school authorities and communities, Emanuel said, and it is exploring ways to encourage schools to adopt such efforts. White House officials have discussed the idea with officials at the departments of Justice and Education, he said.

“We’re thinking about issuing a kind of road map, guidelines, for schools if they want to do this and avoid legal pitfalls,” he said. “We’re not thinking about money.”

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Despite its overall success, the Long Beach uniform policy has not been without problems. Two civil liberties groups have filed a lawsuit, charging that the policy places an unfair burden on the poor. The district has said that it has gone to great lengths to ensure that everyone will have a uniform.

Officials from the National Education Assn., while applauding Long Beach’s efforts, said that the approach will not work everywhere. “Every school has to deal with its own problems and its own unique approach to them,” said Richard Verdugo, head of the NEA’s task force on human and civil rights.

In Long Beach, Verdugo said, “they had an extreme situation over clothes. They have a great deal of parental support for this, which is one reason why it’s working.”

The Long Beach approach represents “an extreme solution, like metal detectors,” he said. “You don’t want to create a prison environment. But in extreme situations, you may need extreme solutions.”