STUDENTS ARE TOLD: DROP A DIME, WIN REWARDS

Schools are increasingly using cash, incentives to encourage teenagers to
report wrongdoing

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. -- Today's topic, class, is ethics: If somebody offered
you $50, would you be more inclined to turn in a fellow student who did
something wrong?

Try this pop quiz on Mrs. Foley's freshman English class, and not a single
hand goes up. But ask them if they think somebody else would take the
reward, and hardly a hand stays down. Everybody knows somebody who would
turn informant.

``People are greedy,'' says Charlaina Hughes, a 15-year-old freshman with a
pixie haircut.

In this resort community where the Piscataqua River meets the north
Atlantic, local police and Portsmouth High School officials have come up
with a crime-fighting program that includes one eye-popping component:
Report wrongdoing, win rewards.

The program has yet to go into effect, but ever since the school board
approved it in June, the town has been debating the morality of using cash
to coax kids into doing the right thing. The amounts, ranging from $10 to
$100, would be left to a special panel of students.

``Oh God, it's been crazy,'' said Mary Carey Foley, the English teacher and
student liaison who will be responsible for fielding anonymous tips from
young informants. ``You wouldn't believe the (debate). The local paper had
a cartoon with a valedictorian, salutatorian and a snitch-atorian.''

As unusual as the program seems, scores of other high schools are offering
similar incentives, from Fresno to Boulder, Colo., to Amarillo, Texas. In
the past year, Baton Rouge, La., and Albuquerque, N.M., have added the
program, and Charlotte, N.C., expanded it from a handful of schools to all
the high schools and down to the middle schools -- 53 campuses in all.

In Charlotte, tens of thousands of posters and stickers cover the campuses
with an Orwellian logo: a pair of eyes and the warning ``Who's watching?''
followed by a hotline number. Police credit the program with solving a
recent homicide, recovering a couple of stolen cars and letting authorities
intercept a knife-carrying kid who'd bragged to friends that he intended to
eviscerate a teacher.

Elsewhere students are tempted to report campus crime with T-shirts, gift
certificates, pizzas, autographed baseballs and other things coveted by
young consumers, said Mary Parker, a criminologist at the University of
Arkansas-Little Rock. The logical extension, she said, will be for schools
to move these programs into increasingly lower grades.

Parents of punctual children were in an uproar when Oregon's Multnomah
County recently decided to pay parents of chronically truant students $3
for every full day of classes their kids attended and $1 for each half day.
Parker said some schools offer rewards to entire classes if, say, they
collectively cut down on playground incidents or absenteeism.

She said programs like the one adopted in Portsmouth are simply copies of
programs already in place in the adult world.

``It's not a system of snitching or ratting, per se,'' Parker said. ``It's
just the citizens of that community policing that community. Does it work?
People are caught. I would suggest that, yes, there is some benefit.''

Yet many others say using money to modify student behavior is unsound and
ethically appalling. It creates the wrong atmosphere, said University of
Maryland criminologist Denise Gottfredson, co-author of a congressional
report on juvenile crime and a leading authority on school-based crime
prevention.

The program in Portsmouth shares its roots with television shows like
``America's Most Wanted.'' Both are offshoots of the popular Crime Stoppers
community crime-watch program, conceived by an Albuquerque police officer
in 1976. Typically, a crime is advertised and people with information can
call in anonymously and, if the tip results in a conviction, claim a reward.

The school-based offshoot was the brainchild of Larry Wieda, a Boulder,
Colo., police investigator who got high schools there to adopt the idea in
1983.

The idea of putting adult-style crime programs into the schools fits into
the broader trend toward treating kids with adult gloves. Even before the
schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, Ark., in March -- in which the alleged
killers of five people were two boys, ages 11 and 13 -- most states had
changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults, and
many states have dropped a minimum age for adult prosecution.

The campus crime-stopper programs depend on getting kids to turn each other
in, and that remains one of the great youth taboos, even in colleges.

Reactions among Portsmouth High School students to the crime-stopper
program were mixed. Students with good reputations were worried about being
blamed as a snitch even if they weren't, while students with less-sparkling
standings fretted about being framed for something they didn't do.