School Safety

Both my wife and I are teachers. While we agree with President Clinton that a forum on school safety is important (July 21), we more strongly agree with Barbara Prideaux's opinion that "the real answers will have to come from home, not the school." Every teacher we know also backs this belief. LESLIE N. HERSCHLER Garden Grove

Re "NRA's off-target plan," Opinion, April 9 You don't need to be a mathematician to know that the odds of a child surviving a school shooting are greater if the shooter is shot and killed than if he keeps shooting until his clip is empty. The moment someone enters a school with intent to kill, survival is the only issue. Instead, James Mulvaney writes about the difficulty in shooting a weapon during a crisis or what kind of weapon the staff member is carrying. This is about life and death, not succumbing to the will of the National Rifle Assn.

WASHINGTON - A National Rifle Assn.-backed task force unveiled a sweeping set of proposed school safety measures Tuesday, a counter to gun control bills introduced after the Connecticut mass shooting. The most attention-getting recommendation: to train select school personnel to carry firearms. The task force steered away from an earlier NRA proposal to rely on volunteers to provide security. Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas and head of the Drug Enforcement Administration under President George W. Bush, announced the National School Shield task force findings in a Washington news conference amid tight security.

California lawmakers have moved forward with one of several bills introduced after the massacre of young students in Newtown, Conn. The measure would put panic buttons in the state's schools. Under the legislation, proposed by Assemblymember Kristin Olsen (R-Modesto), if federal funding becomes available to cover the cost, school districts would install panic buttons in each classroom, cafeteria, theater, gym and other regularly used space in a school serving grades K-12. Pressing the button would alert local law enforcement to respond to an emergency that could include an armed intruder on campus.

I object to the characterization of teachers made by Mike Downey (May 14). There are about 3 million teachers in the U.S., and you can count on one hand the number of teachers who have engaged in inappropriate conduct with their students. To add to his exaggerations and inaccuracies, Downey adds the man who drove his car into the preschool playground, who wasn't even a teacher. The type of person who goes into teaching, together with the very thorough background checks teachers go through, assures us that the stories Downey writes about are extremely rare.

The City Council and the Irvine Unified School District board will hold their annual joint meeting Monday. The two governing bodies will discuss a proposal to divide the anticipated $10-million cost of rehabilitating the Heritage Park Aquatics Complex. They will also hear a report on the progress of a program that the district and the Irvine Police Department started in 1996 to promote campus safety. The meeting will be at 5:30 p.m. in council chambers at City Hall, 1 Civic Center Plaza.

The Irvine Unified School District's Board of Education will review its yearlong effort to improve school safety and reduce youth violence. The discussion will give school officials and board members a chance to assess what steps the district has already taken and look at what officials should do next. The public can watch the presentation tonight at 7:30 on cable television Channel 3. Youth violence has been a key issue in Irvine.

Students from 85 high schools across the county attended a Los Angeles town hall meeting Friday with educators and Assembly members to discuss ways to reduce school violence. The Freedom From Fear Student Convention, sponsored by the county Office of Education at Cal State Los Angeles, gave about 175 students a chance to talk with school officials and lawmakers about how to make schools safer.

WASHINGTON - A National Rifle Assn.-backed task force unveiled a sweeping set of proposed school safety measures Tuesday, a counter to gun control bills introduced after the Connecticut mass shooting. The most attention-getting recommendation: to train select school personnel to carry firearms. The task force steered away from an earlier NRA proposal to rely on volunteers to provide security. Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas and head of the Drug Enforcement Administration under President George W. Bush, announced the National School Shield task force findings in a Washington news conference amid tight security.

Think of the NRA's newly proposed National School Shield initiative as a kiddie version of the National Missile Defense program. Star Wars for Schoolyards. A hail of bullets will protect everyone! After the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the NRA unleashed a pile of experts on the problem of school safety, hiring former Republican Rep. Asa Hutchison of Arkansas to lead the panel. In a Washington news  conference announcing the panel's findings and recommendations Tuesday, Hutchison said the NRA afforded its panel “full independence” and insisted on “no predetermined outcomes.” What a total shock then that the panel's No. 1 recommendation was to put an armed guard in every public school in America, the very thing that NRA President Wayne LaPierre urged in his news conference in December, one week after 20 primary school children and six educators were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary.

WASHINGTON - A National Rifle Assn.-backed task force unveiled a sweeping set of proposed school safety measures Tuesday, the gun rights group's counterproposal to the spate of gun control bills introduced in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December. Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas and drug czar under President George W. Bush, announced the National School Shield task force findings in a Washington D.C. news conference amid tight security.

WASHINGTON - Wayne LaPierre, a top official of the National Rifle Assn., lobbed a blistering attack on President Obama's gun proposals Thursday, accusing him of exploiting the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting to roll back gun rights. "It was only a few weeks ago when they were marketing their anti-gun agenda as a way of protecting schoolchildren from harm. That charade ended at the State of the Union when the president himself exposed their fraudulent intentions," said LaPierre, addressing the National Wild Turkey Federation convention in Nashville.

SACRAMENTO - A group of Republican state lawmakers Wednesday proposed allowing school districts to spend education funds to train teachers, administrators and janitors in gun use. Responding to last month's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the lawmakers said arming school personnel would help protect campuses against violent intruders. "The idea is to create essentially an invisible line of defense around our kids," said Assemblyman and tea party adherent Tim Donnelly of San Bernardino.

It was a bloody rampage on Connecticut more than a month ago that brought gun control back onto the national political stage, so it was appropriate that state's Legislature became one of the first Monday to publicly wrestle with the thorny questions of containing gun violence. Parents of some of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre went to the state capital, Hartford, where they told lawmakers that better enforcement was more important than new restrictions. Other parents insisted that assault rifles simply were unneeded for personal use and should be banned.

A 16-member commission, appointed in Connecticut to examine last month's shooting rampage at an elementary school, kicked off its deliberations Thursday, even as the nation continued to wrestle with finding policies on how to deal with gun violence. The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission was appointed to review a variety of gun issues including school safety and mental health questions. It is expected to issue preliminary recommendations by mid-March. The advisory commission was created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Jan. 3, just weeks after the attack by Adam Lanza on the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Everyone knows the terrible litany of gun violence: Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Ft. Hood, Tucson, the Cinemark movie theater in Colorado, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Sandy Hook Elementary School. Here are some examples you may not have heard about: Pearl High School in Mississippi; Sullivan Central High School in Tennessee; Appalachian School of Law in Virginia; a middle school dance in Edinboro, Pa.; Players Bar and Grill in Nevada; a Shoney's restaurant in Alabama; Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City; New Life Church in Colorado; Clackamas Mall in Oregon (three days before Sandy Hook)