Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992 TAG: 9201270225
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEAL THOMPSON EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
TEENS USED TO SETTLE ARGUMENTS WITH FISTS; `NOW THEY GET A GUN'
SOME PARENTS complain that security measures make schools look like prisons. But that's the plan - to build a fortress to protect those on the inside from the firepowered realities of the street.\ Word spread quickly that a young man at Salem High School was carrying a pistol.
Then-principal Robert Lipscomb pulled the boy out of class and into a vacant room. Second of a series Lipscomb overcame a twinge of fear to persuade the student to slowly hand over the gun stashed in his pocket.
With head bowed, the boy dug into his pocket, pulled out the pistol and handed it over.
They both breathed sighs of relief.
"I don't think that he meant to harm anybody. Maybe himself. But you never know for sure whether he would have or not. That young man had a fully loaded pistol."
That was a few years ago, before Lipscomb moved to Cave Spring High School in Roanoke County. At the time, other Roanoke Valley educators also were taking a few guns off their students.
Educators began to realize that guns were no longer just the property of drug dealers on street corners. Instead, their very own students were carrying guns.
It triggered a reaction in Salem, Roanoke and Roanoke County schools to keep those guns out of their hallways.
Roanoke-area schools piled up preventive efforts and disciplinary codes to fight what they saw as a frightening trend. It's been costly for schools, where paddles had once been the most expensive disciplinary tool.
Chain-link fences now loom around Salem High and William Fleming High and a gate bars the parking lot at Patrick Henry High. Security officers posted at guard houses at both Roanoke city high schools peer into students' cars and make sure other visitors have valid visiting reasons.
Two years ago, Roanoke's middle and high schools were issued hand-held metal detectors to check students for weapons. The devices are especially useful at weekend dances.
More bullet-proofing measures include: principals and vice principals who look like cops carrying walkie-talkies around campus; "resource officers," the police officers who monitor middle schools with handcuffs jutting from back pockets; and schools that conduct spontaneous locker searches.
Addison Middle School in Roanoke doesn't let its pupils wear "big fluffy coats" or carry bags during the day. "That's a safety precaution," principal Beverly Burks said.
"A lot of the measures we have done are preventive, and maybe that contributes to the fact that we don't have a problem," said James Tyree, Roanoke's school security director.
Unlike some Virginia school districts, Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem do not keep official records of gun-related incidents or the number of guns confiscated in schools. But each system insists that preventive measures have kept incidents to a minimum.
"I have asked students if they have guns, not here but at home. And I've been told they don't feel like they need to have it at school," said Hallie Carr, an assistant principal at Fleming. School "may be the safest that they feel during the day."
Educators also say another safety measure is the students themselves. If students know there is a gun in school, there is always one or two who feel compelled to tell a teacher.
The safety record is hardly 100 percent. Real guns, stun guns, pellet guns, starter pistols and toy guns have been taken in the past two years off students in Roanoke Valley high schools, middle schools and elementary schools.
Two Salem High students were suspended last year. One carried a gun in his car and the other brought one to school for a friend, "for his protection, allegedly," Salem Superintendent Wayne Tripp said.
What worries Tripp is that, of four gun incidents in his 18 years as an educator, two happened in the past year.
In Roanoke County, a Glenvar High School student was banned from campus during after-school hours for allegedly pulling a gun at a dance. Three Northside High School students were suspended this fall for shocking classmates with electrical jolts from stun guns.
Since September, the Roanoke Police Department's youth bureau has confiscated a pellet gun, 14 toy guns and six real guns from students.
Mike Rayl, a youth bureau officer at Ruffner Middle School, has worked in city schools since 1983. Until this year, the only gun he'd seen was a pellet gun he took from a ninth-grader who was waving it around in a class at Woodrow Wilson Middle School.
This year, he disarmed two eighth-graders.
One was wandering around school showing off a unloaded .32-caliber revolver he claimed to have found in a field behind school. The other gun was a loaded .22-caliber pistol Rayl took from a 14-year-old before Christmas.
Teen-agers used to settle arguments with a fistfight, Rayl said. "Now they get a gun."
As bad as it is, Rayl said, the schools are safer than the streets for many children because the schools have made efforts to keep guns, outsiders and violence out.
To illustrate his point, Rayl asked an eighth-grade algebra class to raise their hands if they had seen a gun in school. Three children in the class of about 35 raised their hands. He then asked if the pupils had seen guns on kids at Valley View Mall. Almost every hand in the room went up.
Roanoke assistant superintendent for administration Bill Hackley said students who bring guns to school do so to show off, not to shoot. That was the case in the most recent incident at a middle school this fall.
"It was not in anger at anyone. Just a, `Hey, look what I have,' show-and-tell type situation. . . . But a gun brought for show and tell can kill just as easily.
"They're too easily gotten," Hackley said.
Salem Superintendent Tripp has the same fear. Kids know where to go - usually in Roanoke - to find a gun.
"There's no Checkpoint Charlie on [U.S.] 460 that keeps those folks from coming over this way or keeps our folks from going over there," Tripp said.
"Now, it seems youngsters are carrying guns just routinely," Tripp said. "And that's frightening."
It's a problem that educators have corralled, but not quite cornered yet. As Tripp puts it: "Teachers didn't sign up when they took their training for Gunplay 101. We're just not prepared to deal with it."
Hackley said Roanoke is far from becoming like Washington, D.C., where students kill over sneakers and L.A. Raiders jackets. But Roanoke could get worse. "When it will turn on us, I have no way of knowing," he said.
Hackley wouldn't hesitate to impose a dress code if it became necessary. Schools are the only place to attack the problem. On the streets, kids are on their own.
For that reason, Hackley said:
"Weekends really scare the hell out of me."
Staff writer Douglas Pardue contributed to this story.