Because it’s unseasonably cold and powerful winds kick up dust and debris on this late April morning, the students at Canyon Springs High School don’t linger as they head to their next class, or the cafeteria.
Instead, small groups come together, long enough to gossip, tag the kid who dissed them earlier in the day, or exchange the secret handshakes that betray gang membership. Then they’re off, back into the ebbs and flows of people.
In the cafeteria, a disorganized mass emits the sounds most of us would recognize from school days. Some post up against walls, thumbs tucked under backpack straps, some huddle around tables, eating soggy pizza. They watch a couple of “white boys” get into a minor scuffle — or at least that’s what one student calls them. Some food is tossed, of course.
The bell rings, and one batch of kids scurries out, replaced by another. More of the same, sans scuffle.
The bell rings once more and the cafeteria empties. It falls silent, and then the 17-year-old girl, arrested for carrying a gun, is escorted in handcuffs by a police officer through the deserted dining hall and out the back doors, never to return.
Stashing
Kids like to talk. So it’s no surprise when a fit 18-year-old standing outside the basketball gym starts chatting about guns and gangs at Canyon Springs. He’s open about the subject, just not about using his name — he could get shot for this shit, man.
He says other than those specialized handshakes, gang members don’t advertise their affiliations by wearing their colors to school. They’re smarter than that.
They’re also smart enough, for the most part, to hide their guns somewhere on school grounds, like in bushes, says another kid, a senior who’s standing amid the din and disorganized mass in that cafeteria. Although he doesn’t make the connection, it might explain why 40 students in Clark County have been caught with guns so far this year, and not more.
That figure may sound worse than it is, however. According to Clark County School District Police spokesman Ken Young, fully half of the 48 guns confiscated last year fired only BBs or pellets, not bullets. Some are left over from weekend activities, like paintball, and forgotten in the trunks or back seats of cars, according to school trustee Ruth Johnson.
Young says there hasn’t been an increase in the number of guns taken away this year, but there have been some scary incidents.
“We
The Canyon Springs cafeteria senior says “it’s a big possibility” that kids on campus are armed right now. But, he adds, “[They’re] probably stashed.”
If gang members have stashed guns somewhere on campus today, none of the administrators find them. They did, however, find a loaded .45-caliber handgun in that 17-year-old girl’s backpack. How? A person familiar with the situation says it’s because a kid talked.
About three weeks after that girl was escorted through the silent cafeteria on April 11, another student is caught carrying a gun in his backpack at Canyon Springs. It’s not clear whether he was in a gang.
A common technique of gang members looking to bring weapons on school grounds is to make, either by force or persuasion, non-gang members carry them. It’s not known who or what prompted the 17-year-old girl to bring the gun to school. Either way, her fate is sealed: She’s never coming back to Canyon Springs; the Clark County School District’s zero-tolerance policy requires she be expelled and charged with misdemeanor possession of a deadly weapon.
Gangs just ‘wanna shoot’
Frustration boils just beneath the surface of some of the ideas to combat guns in schools, and it’s justified. In September, gunshots were fired in the parking lot of Legacy High School during a football game. In October, a Legacy student was shot in the leg while getting off a bus. Again in September, a bus carrying Canyon Spring students was fired upon, and again in October, an 18-year-old was arrested for shooting at a police helicopter after a football game at Western High School. In April, Desert Pines High School was locked down after a man allegedly brought a handgun onto campus during a fight involving seven people, six of whom didn’t even attend the school. The Review-Journal reported that the fight may have been gang-related.
Whether it’s Canyon Springs’ principal pushing for metal detectors, or state Sen. Bob Beers advocating that teachers be permitted to carry guns, people are searching for the answer. The problem is, many feel the proposed solutions don’t address the root cause. They’re just Band-Aids on a gaping wound that’ll continue to bleed no matter how tightly it’s put on.
One hall monitor at a school with a gun and gang problem, who asked that his name and school not be printed for fear of losing his job, has his own solution. It’s doubtlessly born of his own frustration on the front lines breaking up gang fights and generally keeping the peace: The county should round up all the gang members, lock them in a room, and let them go at it.
“First group that comes out on top, fine with me. Because you got kids here that wanna get their education,” he says. The gang members, on the other hand, just “wanna shoot.”
Metal detectors at every door
So what’s the answer? There’s a growing debate about that, with traditional solutions like metal detectors, good policing and intelligence coming up against a more holistic approach that targets the root cause of violence in the first place. And it’s borne out by the experiences of two schools in the county, Canyon Springs and the alternative Burk High School campus.
In 1990, Ronan Matthew, now principal of Canyon Springs, was assistant principal of Eldorado High School, when a kid got shot in the neck and died during what was reportedly a beef between rival gangs. Matthew watched as the kid, a bullet burning in his throat, gasped for breath, struggling to stay alive.
“It was traumatic,” Matthew recalls. He doesn’t say much more.
He does, however, have plenty to say about school safety, particularly as it relates to gun control — views doubtlessly shaped by his experience at Eldorado. By now, his name is synonymous with the metal detector issue, in part because his school is synonymous with guns, despite the fact that it’s a magnet school for leadership and law, complete with a mock courtroom.
He’s thought a lot about installing metal detectors at Canyon Springs, which is why he can list the pros and cons without prompting.
Skeptics’ argument: If someone wants to bring a gun on campus, they can.
Matthew’s counter: Everybody who attends a high school football or basketball game in the county has to go through metal detectors, so why not at schools?
Skeptics’ argument: Metal detectors haven’t been proven to work.
Matthew’s counter: They’re used at airports and are obviously effective, so why not use them at schools?
Matthew says, “It’s so unlikely for a kid to bring a weapon to school if he knows he has to go through a metal detector.”
There are other arguments skeptics make against metal detectors, however. Clark County School District Superintendent Walt Rulffes says they only provide “a measure of protection,” and that students and others can “defeat the metal detector process” by throwing a gun over a fence or pulling a fire alarm to bypass the system — what the Canyon Springs students CityLife spoke to called “stashing.”
Johnson, the school board trustee, says shuffling 3,000 students through a metal detector at schools with a single start time and multiple entrances is near impossible. (Matthew says he wants one entrance at Canyon Springs. At Burk, all students go through a single front door.)
Besides, Johnson says, “We don’t run jails.”
To the 18-year-old standing outside the Canyon Springs gym, the issue of gangs and guns are interlinked, just like his life and gangs. He lives in a gang-infested neighborhood, like many of his friends, and wonders what metal detectors are going to do for them out there, where the guns are coming from in the first place. “What about outside of school?” he says, raising his eyebrows.
Matthew says emphatically, “The root of the issue is a concern of mine,” but he adds, “I’m just one person. Am I going to go out there and change every kid that’s in a gang? I’m not going to try to change the world. We’re here for one purpose: to serve the students. You have to do that in a safe and secure environment. I wanna be safe.”
The proactive approach
Ron Lustig is the principal of Burk High School, a unique school with a unique philosophy that could act as a model to other schools, like Canyon Springs, looking to solve gang and gun problems. It employs a proactive rather than a reactive approach, and it’s one that appears to be working. The kicker: Burk is home to some of the most at-risk students in the entire county, including gang members, but it hasn’t confiscated a single gun on campus all year.
Burk’s programs and amenities read like a public school true-believer’s Christmas list: It has a daycare center for teen parents; drug and alcohol abuse counseling for addicts based on the 12-step model; and a credit-retrieval program whereby students from other schools can come and take classes in order to catch up and graduate. In addition, it has a mentoring program that not only involves students in group discussions, but also in one-on-one conversations with school faculty and staff. Everyone participates, even the janitor.
At 1:45 p.m. every Thursday, teachers stop what they’re doing and facilitate a discussion on a topic that has nothing to do with the textbook. One recent afternoon, in two different classrooms, students talked about everything from violence and its relationship to the idea of manhood, to the pros and cons of “snitching.” In both classes, students were engaged, and apparently unafraid to say whatever was on their mind. They didn’t necessarily agree with each other or their teachers, and that was all right.
“We really don’t try to solve the problems for the students,” says Lustig, a native New Yorker with a round, owlish face. “We try to create reflective thinkers.”
Another way they create reflective thinkers is via another weekly meeting held at 1 p.m. every Wednesday. Rather than teachers, however, the Wednesday meeting is led primarily by Reggie Turner, director of community relations at the Palms.
How did a relationship between a megaresort and an at-risk high school develop? Turner says he actively sought a school to assist. When he arrived at Burk, which is located near the Palms, he says, “I just knew we could do something that made a difference.”
To that end, he brings in special guests to share life-lessons and give advice to the most at-risk of these at-risk students once a week, plus other things, like the occasional gift as a reward for good behavior or attendance. The Palms has deep pockets, after all.
Turner says he’d like to see more casinos take a special interest in a school in the way the Palms has with Burk. “To me, it’s disappointing that they all seem to have their organizations that they support. Other casinos do need to step up. Those are our future team members.”
Adds Lustig, “We don’t just ask [the Palms] for haphazard, last-minute requests of certain things, or just financial endowments. We actually come up with a whole game plan for the year. They need to see a return on their investment.”
It’s an approach he thinks could work for other schools that might help reduce the number of kids, both in and out of gangs, bringing guns to school.
Framework for intervention
The thing about Burk is this: It only has about 450 students, making one-on-one time with students a hell of a lot easier than it is at places such as Canyon Springs, which can have upwards of 2,000 students. It’s a burden Lustig, who’s worked at so-called comprehensive schools in the past, understands.
“When you’re in a survival mode, it’s very hard to be progressive or proactive, and definitely numbers and resources play a role in that,” he says. “However, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Without safety, and without respect and relationships, it’s very hard to enhance a student’s academic achievement. You’ve gotta really have that as a framework.”
One way to set up this kind of framework is by following Long Beach (Calif.) Unified School District’s lead, and create an intervention program designed to forge relationships with students who belong to gangs, or who may be headed down that path.
Jim Shaw, the California district’s safety supervisor, says he has five people who work in the program whose primary function is to hit the schools and build a rapport with gang-involved youth.
“Once we know that a kid’s involved in a gang or an at-risk activity, we’re going to be monitoring that student closer,” he says. “We see them through to their diploma.
“It’s a matter of extracting the information you need before the problem happens. You really need to know when a kid’s at risk and when he’s going to go off” in order to prevent a kid from bringing a gun to school, he continues.
Rulffes’ idea of prevention is a bit different. Law enforcement, he says, has told him the best prevention method is a high level of vigilance, which requires “good training in place” to ensure that faculty and staff are alert, he says. “That’s probably the most effective, broad-based technique.”
To an extent, he’s right. After all, the most recent arrest of a student carrying a weapon at Canyon Springs was made possible by staff who knew the kid in question didn’t usually carry a backpack. When they saw him with one, they confronted him, says Young.
Nobody would argue that vigilance isn’t a good thing, and that, in its own way, vigilance isn’t proactive. But it’s sort of like hoping to strike oil with a shovel: Dig long enough, you might eventually find a little. But there’s no way you’ll be able to dig deep enough to get it all, or to make the effort worth it.
Alex Bernal, of the Clark County Gang Intervention Team, operates with a philosophy similar to that of Shaw’s. He’d like the school district to know that his team exists, and that even though they’re short-staffed, they can and want to help. Indeed, Bernal is a frequent presence at Burk, giving speeches and talking individually with students.
Among other things, says Bernal, his team of intervention specialists can help kids get set up over at the county’s many community centers, which offer all sorts of services, not to mention mentoring, and information and training for school faculty and staff on trends in the gang world. “We do provide a lot, and it can only help, not hurt,” he says.
But in a school system that can barely keep up with the costs of providing for the more than 300,000 students already there, that has to build a dozen new schools a year just to keep up with growth, bringing in an outside agency seems like a long shot. “We don’t have the money and we don’t have the space for it,” says Johnson, the school board member.
Nevertheless, there has to be a shift in philosophy if the gang-gun problem is going to be solved, says Lustig. “You can have a closed school, and they’ll find a way to cut. You can have metal detectors, and they’ll find a way to smuggle stuff in.
He continues, “It’s all about why. Why do they join gangs? Why do they bring guns? We have to really address the why. The biggest thing we can do as a county, in my opinion, is just be proactive.”
Complains the Canyon Spring student who’s family is in a gang, “They don’t do enough activities at schools.” If they did, “it’ll change it.” Then, as if to underscore the frustration and uncertainty associated with the problem, he adds, “It’s a 50-50 chance.”
VIA:Las Vegas CityLife
Return To News Stories
See Other Lv CityLife Stories