Schools try to maintain safe zone against gangs

Like a lot of high school students, Brittinay Bell worries about bullies. She worries about the WASL. She worries about drugs.

But the Rogers High School junior doesn’t worry about street gangs.

“There’s a lot of wannabes that just dress like bangers,” said Bell, 16. “But gangs are just not that big of a deal.”

Just how big of a deal gangs are in schools is a matter of debate among adults.

Cpl. Tom Lee, a police spokesman, last year complained about a “general feeling that some principals are ignoring facts for the sake of public relations” in an e-mail to Spokane Public Schools spokeswoman Terren Roloff.

And when police said last year that nonstudents had entered school buildings wielding bats, knives or guns, Spokane Public Schools officials said that never happened.

“I think the message we want to convey is that schools are the safest place to be,” said Steven Gering, the principal at North Central High School. “This is the one place that is neutral ground. The key message is that it’s safer for kids to be in school than to be out.”

Spokane police say they keep track of about 300 school-age kids that associate with gangs. Of those, 30 are confirmed gang members. And of those 30, school officials said only four are enrolled in school.

The vast majority of the 300 kids watched by police – including about 100 enrolled in public schools – are gang wannabes, whom authorities call “associates.”

The associates can be more dangerous than confirmed members, said Gary Cooper, one of about a dozen resource officers in Spokane schools – security officers who have police training and work with law enforcement.

“They are way more unpredictable because they will do whatever it takes to prove that they are a gangster,” he said.

Among other things, the resource officers enforce dress codes, including prohibitions on gang attire – a key to the battle against gangs, police say.

“When you see a kid flashing colors or whatever, and a person in the opposing (gang) set could see that, there’s always the possibility that it could bring violence to that school,” said Brad Richmond, a detective with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and a member of a law-enforcement gang task force.

National numbers back up educators’ contention that schools are essentially safe – or at least safer than they used to be.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, school violence nationwide dropped 53 percent from 1992 to 2003.

That’s a shift from the early 1990s, when gang violence began to take root in urban schools and began to germinate in Spokane.

Gering, who previously taught in a Texas school with widespread gang problems, said the problems here are minimal.

“There hasn’t been a gang fight; there’s never been a clash” in the three years he’s been at North Central, Gering said. “We just don’t see it.”

But police say it does happen in Spokane.

Records show that a fight between two boys on the Ferris High School grounds in September may have been gang related. A police report wasn’t filed until a week later. Police officials argue that fights that start at school often are settled later on city streets, and they need to know their origins as quickly as possible.

Ferris assistant principal Sean Dotson said incidents involving suspected gang members are rare and can be hard to prove. As was the case with the September fight, rumors of gang involvement often don’t surface for days.

“I have no doubt there’s a rising concern in the community” about gangs, Dotson said. “But we are not seeing that manifesting on our campus.”