SUNDAY REPORT

FAILING GRADE FOR SAFE SCHOOLS PLAN

U.S. has given $6 billion to combat drugs, violence. With little oversight,
money has gone for marginally successful programs, investigation finds.

WASHINGTON--Over the last dozen years, the U.S. Department of Education has
poured nearly $6 billion into an ambitious yet flawed program that has
fallen far short of its mission to control violence and narcotics abuse in
the nation's public schools.

Billed as the federal government's largest program to deter student drug use
and aggression, the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act provided
an average of $500 million annually to local school districts with virtually
no strings attached. The result: Much of the money has been spent on
initiatives that either are ineffective or appear to have little to do with
reducing youth violence and substance abuse, records and interviews show.

"We are wasting money on programs that have been demonstrated not to work,"
said Delbert S. Elliott, director of the University of Colorado Center for
the Study and Prevention of Violence.

The program's track record takes on added import in the wake of half-a-dozen
school shootings during the past year in which 16 people were killed and 50
wounded. The crackle of gunfire in schoolyards from Oregon to Kentucky not
only riveted public attention to the problem of youth violence but exposed
gaping holes in government attempts to ensure safe schools.

A Times investigation found that taxpayer dollars paid for motivational
speakers, puppet shows, tickets to Disneyland, resort weekends and a $6,500
toy police car. Federal funds also are routinely spent on dunking booths,
lifeguards and entertainers, including magicians, clowns and a Southern
beauty queen, who serenades students with pop hits.

The program illustrates how Washington sometimes deals with vexing social
issues: Politicians pass reform legislation that steers federal funds into
their districts, then unleash a torrent of speeches and press releases
promising immediate action.

Yet few notice how the money is actually spent or what gets accomplished.
Left to thrash about for any strategy that works, local officials scatter
federal money in all directions and on unrelated expenses. If the problem
persists, many lawmakers resort to a familiar solution: More money.

"Every elected official wants these programs in their district," said Rep.
George Miller (D-Martinez), a member of the House Committee on Education and
the Workforce. "Once you succumb to that pressure, you're just dealing with
a political program.

You're not dealing with drug prevention or violence prevention." The Los
Angeles Unified School District used some of its $8-million grant last year
to purchase a new car, four guns, ammunition and an ultrasonic firearms
cleaner at the request of a detective who rarely steps foot on school
grounds. After The Times raised questions about the purchases, district
officials last week decided to return the money.

In Richmond, Va., where a ninth-grader shot and wounded a basketball coach
and a teacher's aide two days before school let out in June, state education
officials spent $16,000 to publish a drug-free party guide that recommends
staging activities such as Jell-O wrestling and pageants "where guys dress
up in women's wear." Although critics say the spending is a waste of federal
money, it is permitted under the general guidelines of the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools program. And some school administrators contend the
activities, which represent a fraction of their expenditures, help reinforce
the anti-drug and violence themes that are taught in the classroom.

A cottage industry of consultants, publishers and small-time "edutainers"
has grown up around the program, competing for the attention of school
officials with slick promotions and networks of commissioned sales reps.

"This is big business," said Mathea Falco, president of Drug Strategies, a
nonprofit institute in Washington that has analyzed dozens of school drug-
and violence-prevention programs.

Nonetheless, a pair of highly critical reports released last year--one done
for the Department of Justice and the other commissioned by the Education
Department itself--all but pronounced Safe and Drug-Free Schools a failure.

Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office suggested eliminating the program
as part of its annual recommendations for reducing federal spending in 1997.
The proposal was rejected.

Even critics agree that eradicating drug abuse and violence in the nation's
schools is a critical issue that should command the attention of the federal
government. It is for this reason that most experts say the program needs to
be cured, not killed.

Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley said the program has succeeded in
"taking a national interest in a problem" and sending money to local school
districts to fix it "without controlling how they do it." But Riley
acknowledged in an interview that he is "concerned" about the results,
particularly in the wake of his own department's study. His concern is
shared by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug czar.

The program simply "mails out checks" without holding anyone accountable,
McCaffrey said in an interview. He added: "There are almost no constraints
on it." Program Aimed at Preventing Violence The official purpose of the
Safe and Drug-Free Schools program is to help schools "offer a disciplined
environment that is conducive to learning" by the year 2000.

To that end, the act directs money to support a wide range of student,
teacher, parental and community programs aimed at "preventing violence in
and around schools and . . . strengthening programs that prevent the illegal
use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs . . . ."

Since it was launched in 1987, the Safe and Drug-Free Schools effort has
paid out $5.7 billion. Nearly all of the country's 14,881 school districts
participate in what Education Department literature calls the federal
government's "primary vehicle for reducing the demand for illicit drugs
through education and prevention activities." Top department officials admit
they have no idea how much of the money is spent on programs, training, even
metal detectors, because all of the decisions are made by state and local
officials. But it is the way the money is distributed that hurts the cause,
say experts and lawmakers.

Congress wrote into the law a per-capita spending formula that spreads the
prevention money so thin that six out of every 10 school districts get
$10,000 a year or less. In some cases, small districts receive only $200 to
$300--far less than the estimated cost in staff time to fill out application
forms. Governors are given 20% of their state allotments to award as grants.

"The funds are so spread out that some school districts really don't get
enough money to make a difference, and that's a problem," Riley said.

In Northern California's Humboldt County, the tiny Greenpoint Elementary
School District was awarded $53 last year. Principal Kelaurie Travis said
that she held on to the paltry sum for a year, hoping to scrape together at
least $100 to spend on an anti-drug speaker or a field trip for her
20-student district.

"It's crazy," Travis said.

Questions about the program's shortcomings prompted Congress to slash
funding by 25%, from $624 million in 1992 to $465 million in 1995. Since
then, however, spending has risen and the Clinton administration is seeking
a raise to $605 million next year.

Within the past year, the two federal examinations gave the program poor
marks.

The Justice Department study, which reviewed 78 government-financed juvenile
delinquency programs, found that Safe and Drug-Free Schools "funds a
relatively narrow range of intervention strategies, many of which have been
shown either not to work . . . or to have only small effects." That finding
was echoed in a report by the Department of Education that tracked 10,000
students for four years and concluded that "few schools employed program
approaches that have been found effective in previous research." The study's
bottom line: The attitudes and behaviors of youths enrolled in the
prevention programs "mirrored national trends," in which drug use has
increased sharply since the early 1990s.

"If you ask from a taxpayer's standpoint, most people in the Department of
Education say they are very disappointed . . . ," said Judy Thorne, the
study's principal investigator. "[The program] is not doing what Congress
intended it to do." Nationwide, drug statistics show that students continued
to experiment with drugs at earlier ages, with the number of eighth-graders
trying marijuana more than doubling, from 10.2% to 23%, since the early
1990s.

Under the first year of a federal law requiring all kids carrying weapons to
be expelled, 6,093 students were disciplined during the 1996-97 academic
year for toting firearms, mostly guns but also rockets and grenades.

Still, U.S. education officials insist the program is worthwhile and that
schools are safe, with 90% of the nation's campuses never reporting any acts
of serious violence.

Recently the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington criminal justice
research group, lashed out against media coverage of the school shootings
that all but ignored the fact that the number of school homicides has
actually dropped over the last five years, from 55 annually to 45.

Even those who were touched by the tragedies say no amount of federally
financed instruction on anger management or impulse control could keep a gun
out of the hands of disturbed kids. "A school program wasn't going to do
it," said Kathryn Henderson, a prevention coordinator who served on a
Springfield, Ore., emergency response team in the days after Kip Kinkel,
then 15, was accused of killing four people and wounding 22 others in a May
shooting spree.

Rather, top education officials warn against making the program a scapegoat
for problems beyond the schoolhouse door--among them broken homes, the
waning influence of churches, easy access to drugs, and TV programming that
exposes children to 11,000 murder scenes by age 16.

"We do not believe--and I say this strongly--we do not believe this is a
school problem alone," Gerald N. Tirozzi, assistant secretary for elementary
and secondary education, told more than 300 school prevention coordinators
at a Washington conference in June. "It is a community problem." But the
head of the Education Department's 28-member Safe and Drug-Free Schools unit
conceded in an interview that the program has produced "mixed results,"
adding that it is difficult to pinpoint any effect on student behavior.

William Modzeleski, the program director, said: "If the drug use goes down,
it's not an indicator that we've been successful, just as if the drug use
goes up, it's not an indicator that we've been a failure." Frustration in
Congress Rises Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who chaired a House Education
and the Workforce subcommittee that examined the program last summer, said
there is widespread frustration among legislators and educators.

"Most of the numbers on Safe and Drug-Free Schools will tell you that the
federal program has failed miserably. . . . Lots of strange things happen
with this money." Federal funds have gone for uses that appear to have
little to do with encouraging kids to stay off drugs or resolve their
conflicts peacefully, according to interviews, records and legislative
testimony.

Months before the March rampage that left five people dead and 11 wounded at
a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school, local officials spent part of their
federal dollars to hire a magician.

Police in Hammond, La., recently spent $6,500 in prevention funds to buy a
3-foot replica of a police car, a prop featured prominently in anti-drug
talks at elementary schools.

"It breaks the mold of a big, bad policeman talking to them if you can bring
something that the students can play with," Capt.

Kenneth Corkern said about the remote-controlled toy.

In Eureka, Utah, 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Tintic School
District officials spent $1,000 last year for a new unit in their
drug-prevention curriculum: fishing. The district purchased poles, tackle
boxes and bait so that 33 students could accompany health teacher Tom Taylor
on a field trip to nearby Burston's Pond.

"The thought was, I love to fish, and if I could get that feeling into a lot
of these kids, I figured that . . . instead of spending their time being out
and drinking and trying drugs, they could go out to the mountains and go
fishing," Taylor said.

Plans for next year: Pay for fly-tying kits "because I'm going to teach a
course on that," he said.

In Virginia, Safe and Drug-Free funds paid for lifeguards in Virginia Beach
and dunking booths in Pittsylvania County, all part of a statewide effort to
promote drug-free activities to students during graduation week. At the
state Capital last November, the Virginia Department of Education published
the sixth edition of a drug-free party guide that explains how to make
decorations, conduct cow chip bingo and hold Jell-O wrestling matches.

"Jello should be lemon-flavored," the guide says. "Red flavors stain
everything." Sometimes the money doesn't get anywhere near the students it
is supposed to help. Schools in Virginia's Fairfax County spent $181,400 in
prevention funds to send 876 county supervisors, school board members,
community members and a contingent of business leaders to a series of
weekend "coalition building" sessions at a resort four years ago.

Although no federal laws were violated, auditors concluded the trips were
"excessive, unnecessary and social in nature," according to a U.S.
Government Accounting Office report. The trips ceased.

In Michigan, complaints from the state's former drug czar ignited a series
of audits and hearings from 1992 to 1994 that revealed questionable
expenditures by schools throughout the state, including $1.5 million for
full-scale models of the human torso; $81,000 for sets of large plastic
teeth and toothbrushes, and $18,500 for recordings of the "Hokey Pokey."
"They taught everything from brushing teeth to combing your hair to sex ed
and self-esteem," said Robert E. Peterson, who brought the questionable
expenditures to light as Michigan's former top drug official.

"I went down to the U.S. Department of Education for years but they didn't
want to hear it," said Peterson, now a New York consultant to philanthropic
organizations. "All they wanted to do is save the program and spend the
money." Secretary Riley declined to say whether these and other federal
prevention expenditures disclosed by The Times were proper.

"I don't want to sit up here in Washington and say some program is a crazy
program and I don't know that much about it . . . ," Riley said.

But Riley didn't hesitate to mince words when it came to federally funded
fishing.

"It doesn't sound like a good use to me," he said.

Guns, Car for L.A. School Police Records show that the Los Angeles Unified
School District used Safe and Drug-Free Schools funds to purchase four Glock
Model 26 handguns, four magazine clips, a $22,000 Pontiac Grand Prix and an
ultrasonic firearm cleaner for the district's police force.

The request came from Norm Clemons, a detective who helps coordinate
undercover drug sting operations at high schools.

Clemons said he asked for the items because the district's security unit
didn't have the money. Clemons said he specifically requested the Glock
model because he wanted a "more modern weapon" to carry as a backup than his
bulky .38-caliber revolver.

"I just thought under the circumstances . . . that the older I get, I need a
little protection," said Clemons, whose surveillance operations take place
in neighborhoods surrounding school sites.

He's now making the rounds in the Grand Prix.

In the wake of questions raised by The Times, Supt. Ruben Zacarias sent a
memo July 28 informing school board members that he would review the
effectiveness and "fiscal integrity" of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools
program.

Last week, Zacarias directed officials to reimburse the federal program for
the guns and car out of LAUSD's general fund.

"I think that when people start to find out about [the purchase], they're
going to start to criticize it . . . ," said Deputy Supt. Francis Nakano.

Ruth Rich, director of the district's Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco Education
Program until her retirement last month, said she reluctantly approved the
gun purchase last year at the general direction of her bosses and because
federal guidelines permitted it.

"You know what?" Rich said in an interview. "I'm damned if I do and I'm
damned if I don't." Her boss at the time, John Liechty, recalled encouraging
Rich to "bring some support" to the district police. But Liechty said he
didn't learn until recently that prevention money was used to buy weapons
and a new vehicle--purchases he now questions.

"Obviously, that sounds terrible," said Liechty, now assistant
superintendent for instruction in the San Fernando Valley. "In hindsight, if
that was going to be a discussion, I would have said, 'Wait a minute guys.
Drug-Free money? Why are we buying guns?' " If any school district typifies
how a well-intentioned federal program plays out in the classroom, it's Los
Angeles Unified, which scatters money in many directions.

As one of the urban, high-crime school districts favored by the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools funding formula, the 660,000-student Los Angeles Unified
system received $8 million last year--an average of more than $12 per
student, compared with the national average of $8.

The bulk went for training, books and salaries. Other expenditures included
$15,000 worth of Dodger tickets and $850 in Disneyland passes. Rich said
these were intended as rewards for students who participated in last
summer's recreational programs and made pledges such as cleaning up school
grounds, obeying their mothers--even learning to swim.

"You need after-school sports and you need all these programs, as
questionable as they may be," Rich said. "To do nothing is unconscionable."
Far and away the biggest share of the district's money--$4.5
million--purchased instructional materials, including $3.3 million in
character education books sold by Young People's Press, a small, privately
held San Diego area firm that largely owes much of its existence to federal
prevention dollars.

Most of the books were "Lessons in Character," a series of brightly
illustrated, multicultural stories targeted at second-to fifth-graders. The
objective is to teach "pillars" of character--virtues such as respect,
responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness. The curriculum calls for
teachers to weave the lessons into regular classroom instruction for a
minimum of 24 40-minute sessions during the school year.

Another set of books, called "Americans of Character," seeks to influence
sixth-graders through a set of short biographies about notable historical
figures, such as Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln and the late Pittsburgh
Pirates baseball great Roberto Clemente.

The district paid $2.2 million for teachers and administrative salaries to
help administer the program. The amount includes a $1,000 annual bonus
awarded to teachers who serve as program coordinators at each of the
district's schools.

Nearly $900,000 was set aside in substitute pay to replace 2,354 regular
teachers who missed classes to attend seminars on how to inculcate character
in elementary school students or lead discussion groups of "at-risk" middle-
and high-school students.

The use of these so-called student assistance groups--an approach that
gobbles up about half of the national Safe and Drug-Free Schools budget,
according to the Justice Department report--forms the backbone of prevention
efforts for many districts, including Los Angeles.

In all, LAUSD organized about 2,450 student groups at 141 middle, high and
continuation schools, records show. Run by specially trained teachers, each
group included up to 10 students who were pulled out of one regular
classroom period a month to discuss personal problems ranging from drug use
to alcoholic parents.

But it is exactly these kinds of attempts that often backfire, according to
a 1997 University of Maryland review of government-funded juvenile
delinquency programs.

"Treatment students reported significantly more drug use," said the report,
written for the Justice Department. The reason: Such support groups "brought
high-risk youths together to discuss--and therefore make more salient to
others--their poor behavior." Gail Bluestone, who serves as coordinator for
20 student counseling groups at LAUSD's Sun Valley Middle School each year,
said the program works. "I've seen kids who were doing so poorly and had
such poor self-esteem, who were using [drugs] and were ready to drop off the
face of the earth," she said. "I've seen them come back and make it." But
one former Los Angeles High School teacher, who has led 30 such counseling
sessions since early 1996, said the counseling program is ineffective.

Part of the difficulty, said Robin Neuwirth, is that teachers are
ill-prepared to deal with the enormity of the problems that surface during
the in-school counseling sessions. Five days of training and a script on
drug use are no match for heart-wrenching situations better addressed by
professional psychologists, she said.

But the biggest problem, Neuwirth said, is that "the kids will lie and tell
me that they're sober when they really are not.

"I've never had a successful drug-alcohol group, where I've gotten the kids
to stay off drugs or the kids have actually told me the truth. I don't
really find that it changes their behavior." One student agreed. Guelda
Voien, a junior at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, said she
didn't take the anti-drug and violence instruction she received in
elementary and junior high school seriously.

"I don't think many of my peers did," Voien said. "It was kind of like a
chore--we have to go through this and answer the questions but we're going
to disregard it anyway." Merchants Make Money Off of Program Other districts
use Safe and Drug-Free Schools money to bolster school security--a move
educators acknowledge is necessary to ensure the safety of students.

Federal guidelines permit local schools to spend up to 20% of their annual
allotments for safety measures such as installing metal detectors and hiring
security guards. In El Paso, for example, one metal detector company that
caters to the school market has been overwhelmed with new orders during the
last six months. The demand at Ranger Security has been so overheated that
the firm expects to sell more than 300 portable walk-through detectors this
year, about triple its normal volume.

Security merchants are just the latest to join the network of entrepreneurs
seeking to make money off the Education Department's prevention program.

Most are publishers, consultants and behavioral experts who compete in an
increasingly crowded field for the opportunity to sell off-the-shelf
curricula to needy schools. The textbook business, in particular, has taken
off since 1994, when Congress approved the use of Safe and Drug-Free funds
to purchase violence-prevention materials.

"Edutainers"--motivational speakers, puppeteers, improvisational theater
troupes and other small-time entertainers--also have found work on what is
tantamount to the Safe and Drug-Free Schools vaudeville circuit.

At Los Angeles Unified, Rich said she received frequent solicitations from
"people who are trying to make a living" off the federal program. "Sometimes
recovering addicts will call me.

We'll have people with shows, plays, musical stuff." Mette Boving, the 1997
Miss Louisiana, has been paid with prevention funds to give anti-drug talks
at schools, where she has occasionally serenaded students with the love
theme from "Titanic" and Elvis Presley's "If I Can Dream." California school
districts have used prevention funds for a variety of speakers. The Galt
district near Sacramento paid $400 for a biographical portrayal of Dylan
Thomas, the Welsh poet who died an alcoholic. Elitha Donner Elementary
School in nearby Elk Grove brought in former Harlem Globetrotter Spinny
Johnson, who attempts to underscore the themes of respect and staying off
drugs while bouncing a basketball off his head.

Joe Romano of Washington makes a full-time career as an "illusionist" by
giving 200 drug awareness shows each year on the East Coast. He estimates
that 25% of his fees are paid through Safe and Drug-Free Schools.

"We might cut a girl in half and talk about drugs damaging a body," Romano
said of his 45-minute show, which costs $500 and up.

Fellow magician Tim Moss of Arlington, Va., says that school officials are
becoming increasingly leery about booking anti-drug entertainment.

So this summer, Moss piled his family into a motor home and drove across the
country to drum up business in an emerging market: year-round schools.

"I have some dates in North Carolina and Colorado so far," Moss said before
departing. "I'm also looking to book in Texas and Utah as well." New
Requirement on Spending It wasn't until July 1 that the Education Department
required school districts to spend the federal funds on effective,
"research-based" strategies--a move that critics point out came more than a
decade and $5.7 billion after the program began.

The change took place as the spate of schoolyard shootings heaped even more
political pressure on the program to produce. Riley said the tragedies "have
caused everybody in the country, including us, certainly to step up our
interest in the program." Now, education officials are scrambling to bolster
the program by redirecting federal dollars to strategies that show results.

Last month, Riley convened a task force of 18 national experts to figure out
how to define a "research-based" approach. The panel also will be charged
with creating a list for school officials of what strategies fit the bill.

But as recent research indicates, the list for now may be relatively short.
An examination of 450 school and community prevention programs by the
University of Colorado last year found that "80% have had no credible
evaluations," said Elliott, director of the school's Center for the Study
and Prevention of Violence.

Yet enough scientific data exist to upset conventional wisdom and point the
way to a new generation of promising programs, Elliott said. Of the 450
programs included in the Colorado study, 10 were deemed to be scientifically
effective.

"We know what works and other popular programs that do not work," Elliott
said.

The best prevention programs teach "social competency skills" to students
who often resort to cigarettes, booze and drugs to resist peer pressure and
overcome shyness in social situations, the research indicates.

"Kids need a set of skills to navigate their way through the treacherous
shoals of adolescence," said Gilbert J. Botvin, a Cornell University Medical
School professor who has studied substance abuse prevention for 20 years.

Botvin's own program, Life Skills Training, made the top of both the
Colorado and Maryland lists for effective programs with staying power. A
1995 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. showed
that kids who went through Botvin's course in seventh grade were 66% less
likely to use tobacco, alcohol and drugs as high school seniors.

San Diego Unified School District officials applied for and received a
special $1-million federal grant last year to implement Botvin's program in
its middle schools, a move they hope will break the cycle of marginal
success that has plagued prevention programs.

On Aug. 27, President Clinton unveiled a government guide to help teachers,
parents and fellow students recognize potentially violent youths and respond
to early warning signs.

"We have worked hard, especially in the schools with the Safe and Drug-Free
Schools program," Clinton said during an address on school safety in
Worcester, Mass. "But it's not enough, as we know from the recent rash of
killings in our schools all over the country." Next month, Clinton and Riley
will host the first White House Conference on School Safety.

"We have to do a much better job of making sure that what we are doing is
effective," Riley said in a recent speech. "There is a science of
prevention, and we need to use it." Times staff writers Judy Pasternak and
Erin Trodden and researchers John Beckham in Chicago, Lianne Hart in
Houston, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to
this story.

Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved

Checked-by: Don Beck