By Lyn Jensen, Reporter
Los Angeles Unified School District requires all of its middle and high schools to conduct “daily random” searches of students and lockers with hand-held metal detector wands in order to find and seize weapons brought to school unlawfully. Schools with over 1,000 students enrolled must have four metal detector wands, used daily, while schools with less than 1,000 students need only have two, used daily.
This policy may be the most controversial finding by a panel, convened by Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer earlier this year, to address the issue of gun violence in Los Angeles district schools. In the aftermath of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida this past February, Feuer convened a Blue Ribbon Panel on School Safety. With the cooperation of the district, the panel spent several months examining district efforts to keep schools safe from gun violence. The final report and its recommendations were made public in August.
Asked for comment, Rob Wilcox of the city attorney’s office stated, “The most controversial aspect of the report had to do with LAUSD’s random handheld metal detector search policy (wanding) and our recommendation that it be suspended while undertaking a large scale audit of the program.”
The panel found that the district’s internal audits of its random metal detector search policy have not shown the policy to be effective in recovering weapons. A 2014 audit of middle and high schools found 38 percent of schools did not have the required number of metal detector wands to carry out these daily searches. The data also showed that, of the 385 knives and firearms confiscated at district schools in 2016-17, a metal detector wand was involved in only five confiscations.
In response to concerns about its random search policy, the district has started a pilot program this school year, the results of which will become available this month.
From April to June, Feuer’s panel convened eight town hall meetings — one in every Los Angeles school board district. The panel received 415 public comments. The final report includes 33 recommendations including:
- Requiring all campuses to have a single entry point, interior locking doors and working two-way intercoms and phones in all classrooms.
- Include information in the parent-student handbook that emphasizes the need for parents to be aware of the necessity for safely storing firearms, and requiring parents to attest at the beginning of each school year that if there’s a gun at home, it’s stored safely. The report asserts, “Even if troubled individuals had thoughts or vague plans to commit violence at school, they could not carry out a school shooting without a firearm.”
- Expand school mental-health programs to include placing a full-time psychiatric social worker at every school, and increasing cross-jurisdictional mental health collaboration.
- Adding a district-level school safety director because, “The District needs a single, accountable leader to oversee, coordinate, and effectively integrate its many important school safety efforts … [and to] be exclusively in charge of assuring that all facets of school safety are integrated and effective.”
- Create a unified approach across law enforcement agencies to identify neighborhoods at risk for crime near schools and develop safe “passages to school” programs.
- The school district, the City of Los Angeles, or both, should sponsor state legislation to impose criminal liability on individuals who make credible threats to a school, even if no specific individuals are named.
- Update and consolidate threat reporting into one singular campaign with a visible brand similar to Colorado’s Integrated Safe2Tell campaign, originally created in response to the 1999 Columbine school shooting.
- Research and develop age-appropriate trauma training for students to respond in active shooter situations with a trauma-informed debriefing session afterward.
- Suggest how to pay for these reforms through means such as encouraging the business community to “adopt” schools, providing funding from the philanthropic community, attracting federal and state grants, supplemental state funding, state bonds, local taxes and local revenue measures.
Panelists included 21 authorities in education, public safety, gun violence prevention, law enforcement, mental health, public health, and architecture. Feuer, Daniel Barnhart and Gloria Martinez of UTLA, Juan Flecha and students Ben Holtzman and Julia Macias representing the school district, Joey Hernandez and Krystal Torres-Covarrubias of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, former Los Angeles council member Greig Smith, former city controller Laura Chick, and Chief of the Los Angeles School Police Department Steven Zipperman were some of the participants.
The expansion of mental-health programs was addressed at considerable length. One finding was that while a significant percentage of the district’s students suffer trauma at home or in violent neighborhoods, there is an acute shortage of mental health professionals in district schools. Recent screening of 8,000 Los Angeles district students found that 26 percent are at high risk for traumatic stress. Additionally, of the 48,000 LAUSD students surveyed in 2017, 19 percent reported they had been bullied in the past year.
The importance of mental health services in preventing gun violence was stated, “Researchers have identified a common theme among case studies of school attacks: In most cases, the perpetrators grappled with stressors to their mental or emotional health and displayed symptoms suggesting they could not cope with these stressors.”
The report also cautioned, “Though mental health issues don’t typically lead to violent behavior, sometimes they do, especially for students who feel isolated and desperate.”
Another finding was that LAUSD previously had a successful peer counseling program that empowered students to build positive relationships, reach out to peers at risk of becoming isolated on campus, and de-escalate potentially violent interactions. As a result the panel recommended, “LAUSD work with the Associated Student Body Presidents to implement student-led peer counseling programs at every LAUSD school.”
Link to report: