Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 16, 1994                   TAG: 9407160050
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ROBERT O'HARROW JR. THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

VA. EDUCATORS SEEK TO CONTAIN VIOLENCE SPREADING TO SUBURBS

Larry Simms, a Loudoun County, Va., social studies teacher, recalled high school students who seemed unmoved after a gun they had stolen was used by a classmate in a slaying and robbery in Sterling.

A group of Arlington counselors spoke of elementary students who fearlessly confront teachers and bring knives to school. Jack Kent, a Spanish teacher at Herndon High School in Fairfax County, said he realized that violence was a fact of school life when he heard one girl tell another that she would bring a gun from home and kill her.

"She said it over and over," said Kent, who has been teaching for 29 years. "I didn't want to be involved in this. I was just helping kids after school . . . but I had to face it and deal with it."

Those educators and nearly 250 others have joined police, psychologists and other specialists this week at a regional conference on youth violence in Fairfax County.

The five-day gathering is one of the clearest acknowledgments to date that classroom violence has become a pressing issue in the suburbs.

"Whether you know it's in your school system or not, by God, it's there," said Michael Koenig, a spokesman for the University of Virginia, which organized the conference. "It's getting serious. . . . Across the board, it is going up."

For three days, speaker after speaker highlighted some of the reasons: students who grow up with little supervision at home; the availability of guns, knives and other weapons; and the pervasiveness of violence outside of school, even in rural areas.

The specialists offered no easy answers. They repeatedly said that solutions would take sustained cooperation among schools, police and parents. And they stressed the importance of preventive measures, such as programs that teach children to talk about their disputes rather than resorting to threats and violence.

"It's just not that easy. There are too many things going on," said Patrick D. Harris, a former police officer and manager of the Virginia Crime Prevention Center.

Responding to the same fears that prompted the conference, some school systems intend to expand anti-violence programs.

In Prince William County, administrators will be expected for the first time to develop detailed security plans for dealing with armed intruders and other violent situations. Fairfax police will open offices in eight high schools in September, twice the number they had last year.

Such efforts are just the beginning of what needs to be done, some teachers at the conference said. Barbara Engelke, a special education teacher in Frederick County, who has been knocked over and has seen students threatened by classmates, said she sees more children getting out of control.

Peter Sheras, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told the educators that they shouldn't ignore such basics as making sure the school building is secure, so that students feel safe.

But Sheras said teachers also must not ignore minor fights or bullying. To contain an incident before it escalates into a brawl, he said, teachers are going to have to speak out against intimidation in the halls and other aggressive behavior.

"We are way too silent about the kind of violence that we see," he said. "You need to act as though your life depended on it, because it might."