Campus cops to focus on middle schools

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2003 | 10:57 a.m.

Clark County School District police will try a new approach to quelling campus crime when classes begin Aug. 25 -- targeting truancy, bullying, fights and drugs at middle schools.

"I've always said middle school is where the rubber meets the road," School Police Chief Elliot Phelps said this morning. "That's where you have kids of a certain age group testing the boundaries, trying out behaviors that need to be capped immediately. If we pay closer attention to the middle schools, we're going to see crime go down later in the high schools."

Several categories of crime on Clark County School District campuses -- including the numbers of guns confiscated, assaults, burglaries, robberies and drug possession -- declined for the 2002-03 academic year, according to statistics released Monday by the district police. Overall, crime was up 3 percent, but enrollment in the schools grew by about 5 percent.

Phelps said he expected the overall number of incident reports at schools could climb significantly over the next year as campus police crack down on the offenses that lead to violent crime later.

"You have a kid doing graffiti, bullying other students, on the surface he's not looking like a major criminal," Phelps said. "It's those offenses, along with truancy and drugs, that we know set up the climate for things like assaults and other crimes involving victims to occur."

The district last year received a federal grant of $3.8 million over three years to hire 31 additional officers for middle school campuses, Phelps said. About 15 of the new officers are expected to be on the job when classes begin in less than two weeks, Phelps said.

School districts across the country are facing new pressure to reduce campus crime. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to identify "persistently dangerous schools" and offer students at those schools transfers to safer campuses. Nevada's definition of a dangerous school is a campus that has criminal citations or arrests exceed a set percentage of the total enrollment for two out of three consecutive years.

Three Clark County schools are expected to be named to the Nevada Department of Education's dangerous schools list later this month -- Gibson Middle School, as well as Washington and Biltmore continuation high schools. There were 26 criminal citations and arrests at Gibson during the 2002-03 school year, while Washington and Biltmore each had eight.

The "persistently dangerous school" label needs to be viewed in context, Phelps said. While the overwhelming majority of the district's schools are safe, there are campuses with pockets of criminal activity, some which starts elsewhere and then spills onto the campus, Phelps said.

"If you have a persistently dangerous neighborhood, you're going to have a persistently dangerous school," Phelps said. "It's not fair to put the entire burden on the school to modify behavior learned in the community."

Last year was the first time Gibson had its own school safety officer, said Principal Crystal Helm.

"We're trying to be proactive and respond to incidents as quickly as possible, and it's unfair that our school is going to be deemed unsafe because of that," Helm said Monday. "We're in a Catch-22 here."

Clark County Schools Superintendent Carlos Garcia while he was pleased to see the drop in crime for the past academic year. At the same time Garcia said he agreed with Phelps that a rise in overall figures in the coming year was possible.

In the long run, however, Garcia said he expects campus crime rates to drop, particularly at the high school level. With the new closed campus rule that prohibits students from leaving during the day, along with new surveillance equipment and an emphasis on community-style policing, the opportunities for committing crimes are dropping drastically, Garcia said.

"The overwhelming majority of our campuses are very safe," Garcia said. "There's always work to be done, but I think our school police and staff are doing an excellent job protecting our kids."

The total number of incidents handled by school police in the 2002-03 school year was 9,738, up slightly from 9,451 in the prior year, according to figures released Monday by the district. But that includes a jump in enrollment of about 11,000 students, Phelps noted.

Citations for battery on campus increased slightly from 736 to 774 last year, while reports of assault dropped from 58 to 47. Total arrests overall were also down, to 852 from 885.

In the context of being the nation's sixth-largest school district, Clark County's crime figures are relatively low, Phelps said. The figures include any incident that takes place on district property, whether it involves a student, employee or individual not connected to the school.