IRVINE : School’s Safety Plan Spurred by Shooting

A drive-by shooting almost a year ago that wounded a student near an Irvine alternative school has cast a long shadow on the campus.

“The incident was a wake-up call,” said Paul Mills, director of secondary and alternative education for the Irvine Unified School District. “As isolated as the incident was, it had a tremendous impact on the school and the community.”

School officials made reference to the shooting when applying for a $5,000 state grant to help pay for a safety plan for SELF High School. The district received the grant this month, and officials plan to use the money to train both students and teachers on ways to promote harmony at the 175-pupil campus.

“Five thousand dollars is not a lot of money for many schools,” Mills said. “But for a school this size, it’s a tremendous resource we can take advantage of.”

A 17-year-old student was one of two bystanders wounded in the Nov. 19, 1992, shooting. Five suspects were arrested in the incident. None of them attended SELF, which stands for Secondary Education Learning Facility.

Nonetheless, the school has outlined several ways of improving campus safety. They include:

* Training students to be peer mediators. “It makes students less likely to resort to violence because they’ll have other students mediating the conflict,” Mills said.

* Training teachers about conflict-resolution techniques so that they can defuse volatile situations and “redirect (students’ energy) to more positive ends,” he said.

* Teaching students and faculty members to respect religious, cultural and ethnic differences. “It’s important that they know to be tolerant and to accept diversity,” he said.

* Involving students in city life through voluntary community service programs.

The grant probably won’t pay for the entire plan. But Mills said it will provide the school with a solid starting point that he hopes will prevent future acts of violence from taking place around the campus.

“It was jarring to the students,” said Mills of the shooting. “We’d like to create a safer environment.”