Jaleyah Collier had just said goodbye to Kevin Cleveland outside a doughnut shop a few blocks from Hawkins High School on a spring afternoon in 2017. Get home safe, she told him before walking way.
Minutes later someone drove into an alley nearby, got out of the car and asked Kevin, 17, and two others about their gang affiliation. The gunman then sprayed them with at least 10 rounds, killing Kevin and wounding the others.
Jaleyah, 17, then a high school sophomore, barely had time to grieve when a month later, her best friend, Alex Lomeli, 18, was shot and killed when someone tried to rob a market about a mile from the same high school.
In the early hours of May 13, 2018, two other teenagers Jaleyah was close to, Monyae Jackson and La’marrion Upchurch, were walking home with friends when they were shot to death near Dymally High School.
Each of Jaleyah’s friends was killed within walking distance of public high schools in Los Angeles.
“You don’t know when it’s going to be a person’s last day,” said Jaleyah, a senior at the Community Health Advocates School, one of three small schools on the Hawkins campus. Kevin “woke up not knowing.”
While much of the recent national conversation on campus violence has focused on mass shootings, schools also deal with other physical and psychological harms that thousands of students experience directly or indirectly near campuses.
In Los Angeles County, at least one homicide occurred within a mile of 89 percent of public high school campuses, according to a Times analysis of data from 2014 through 2018. There were at least 50 homicides within a mile of 15 campuses during those years.
The effects of that violence can be devastating and costly. Campuses have begun incorporating the inevitability of trauma into their curricula, addressing stress reduction and how to settle differences without resorting to violence. Students have symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychiatric social workers are a staple on many campuses. Because there is too little mental health funding to meet the need, teachers and staff are often on the front lines in identifying the warning signs of emotionally needy students.
One concern is practical: getting safely to and from school, avoiding not just bullets, but also flashpoints, street harassment, hit-and-runs and muggings. With limited district busing, some students use public transportation or other options. On their journeys, they sometimes pass candle- and flower-filled memorials to fallen friends.
Carl Hull, 16, a sophomore at Dymally High School, starts his walk to school each morning by turning into an alley to avoid gang members who live on his street. Once, when he was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the blue Dodgers logo, they stopped him and asked about his affiliation — he’s not involved in gangs, he told them. Another morning, a few days after hearing gunfire near his house, he found a 9mm bullet shell. Each day, he said, is “like a guessing game.”
Decades of research suggest that the effects of exposure to violence on teenagers are wide-ranging and can result in anxiety, depression, anger, absences and an inability to concentrate in class.
Even if students didn’t know the victims, they see reminders on social media, memorial posts and the T-shirts that friends and family wear in trying to raise money for funerals.
Jaleyah woke up May 13 to find her Instagram feed filled with posts about the shooting of Monyae and La’marrion, she said.
Children in high-crime areas are “losing more people in their youth than most of us have lost when we get to 30 or 40,” said Ferroll Robins, executive director of the nonprofit organisation Loved Ones Victims Services, which counsels victims of violence and their families.
“I do worry about what is going to happen to them emotionally, mentally. How bad are they really being scarred?” Robins said. “And how much of those scars are going to play into their life later?”
Jason Powell knows he can’t begin teaching his English and music classes at Dymally until the kids can address the latest violence in their lives. Over the past five years, 105 people have been killed within a mile of the campus, the highest number surrounding any public high school in the county. Ten of the victims were 18 or younger.
Last year alone, 20 people were killed within a mile — about one every 2 1/2 weeks. Sometimes they are current or former students, including Monyae.
After the deaths of La’marrion and Monyae, Powell gathered his ninth-graders into circles during class and asked them how they deal with pain. The exercise was intended to develop positive coping and conflict resolution skills. One by one, the students took turns telling stories of loss. Similar scenes played out at several area schools where students had known the boys who were killed.
When a friend dies, “they come in welled up with emotion, they’re crying and there’s no way they can concentrate on the lesson at hand, so whatever’s on the board as far as the lesson plan, that means nothing,” Powell said. “They need more immediate help.”
Jaleyah said that seeing the therapist on campus didn’t help her, but that participating in similar community circles at Hawkins taught her how to voice her anger and channel it into action. “They give us a chance to speak and feel free [in] what we have to say, without being afraid,” Jaleyah said.
Sometimes the loss is unrelenting. As Dymally was preparing for graduation just weeks after former student Monyae’s death, there was more bad news: Campus aide James Lamont Taylor was killed at 8:30am, walking on the street about a mile from the school.
The journey their children take just getting to school is a source of stress for their parents, too.
Carl’s mother worries about him getting robbed or shot on the way to Dymally, or hit by a car while crossing the street. Her older son, Brian Hull, was killed in 2016 crossing the street near her home. She and Carl have grown used to hearing gunshots from their apartment in Broadway-Manchester, less than a mile from the high school. She’s afraid that when he walks down the alley behind their home to get to school, he’ll get hurt.
“I have real bad, heavy anxiety,” Latanya Hull said. One afternoon in September, she began to worry when Carl didn’t get home at the usual time. His phone was broken, so she couldn’t reach him. She called the school. Carl was there, they said, in after-school tutoring.
A member of Dymally’s school site council, Hull said she wants to see staff pay more attention to the climate on campus and try to understand the root of students’ problems rather than suspending or arresting them.
For example, she praised the school’s assistant principal, Deon Brady, because he gets to know students on campus, welcoming them in the mornings and mingling at lunch. He takes parents’ concerns seriously, Hull said.
Though more and more schools are adding full-time mental health workers, some still deploy them only in emergencies — such as when a student or staff member is killed.
At Fremont High in the Florence neighbourhood, seven academic counsellors have been trained to look for signs that a student may be in mental distress, Principal Luis Montoya said. The watch commanders at the local police station have Montoya’s number, so they can alert him when something has happened that might affect his students.
“We work in this community. Your job cannot be an academic counsellor only,” Montoya said.
By his junior year at Fremont, Juan Mercado said, he had witnessed a double homicide at a park in East LA, a shooting near his home, and had been robbed at gunpoint while skateboarding outside the school. He felt depressed and anxious, always looking over his shoulder, ditching classes and dropping extracurricular activities.
His mentality became: “I’m trying super hard in school, trying to get good grades and everything, for some random dude [to] just like, take that from me and then all of that work will be gone,” he said.
Juan got the nerve one day in senior year to ask his academic counsellor for help. She called a campus-based therapist, who began counselling Juan once a week at school. It was the push he needed to get his grades back on track. He graduated on time and is enrolled at L.A. Trade Tech, with aspirations to transfer to UCLA.
“If she would have told me OK, like, ‘Come back tomorrow or we’ll talk to him tomorrow’ and stuff, I just probably never would have gone,” Juan said.
—Los Angeles Times/TNS
