If you met Lucas Brown a few years ago, you would not have expected him, now at age 17, to be months away from graduating from high school, let alone acting as co-editor of his school’s literary magazine and expressing himself as a slam poet.
Not long before Brown started his sophomore year at Ventura High School, he spent six months in juvenile hall after a fight at his old high school in Lancaster ended with him kicking another student in the face. He was expelled and arrested on suspicion of assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
“I was just another teenager trying to fit in — making up stories, fabrications, you know, exaggerations, just to have kids like me,” Brown said. “These kids cornered me about some of my exaggerations, and I got very defensive about it. I ended up punching one of ‘em. One punch turned into a lot of punches.”
His first year at Ventura High, Brown was suspended a few times for fighting and marijuana possession. But with guidance from teachers and administrators, he found his place, discovered his passions and learned how to spend his time productively.
“Like my resurrection,” he said. “I was dying and then I got reborn.”
High schools throughout Ventura County must provide solutions every day for students with behaviors and backgrounds like Brown’s to maintain a safe campus.
When you have up to 3,000 teenagers or more constantly interacting with each other, some will fight. They will bring weapons onto school property, intentionally or not. They will make mistakes.
“Like anywhere else in the world, Ventura County is not immune to these incidents,” said Stan Mantooth, county superintendent of schools. “I like to think we’re a pretty safe place, but violence is endemic in our society.”
Behind the numbers
When the Ventura County Star’s School Watch team polled readers about their top education concerns, school safety was near the top of their list. In response, The Star analyzed two years of violence and weapons data reported by Ventura County’s 22 comprehensive public high schools and compiled by the California Department of Education.
Schools with the highest rates of violent incidents in which students or employees were injured were concentrated in the Oxnard Union High School District, although one Ventura school had the highest rate.
Buena, Oxnard, Hueneme, Channel Islands and Rio Mesa high schools, respectively, had the highest average rates of violence over the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, according to the state data. The violence rates were calculated using the number of injury-causing incidents at each school and its cumulative enrollment.
Buena and Oxnard were the only schools with an average of more than 40 violent incidents a year, with 41.5 and 40.5, respectively.
Violent incidents, as defined by the California Education Code, include those that cause physical injury, involve the use of force or violence, cause injury through sexual battery or assault, injure a school employee through assault or battery, or are acts of hate violence or hazing.
School administrators must apply a specific code to every incident that results in a student being disciplined. All disciplined actions are recorded by the state in a suspension and expulsion database, which includes the school violence data.
The data, however, could be skewed depending on how high schools interpret the different codes. For example, the state code defined as “caused, attempted or threatened physical injury” is “usually used to cite a student when they attempt, but are unsuccessful, or threaten to cause physical injury,” according to Department of Education spokeswoman Pam Slater.
The state considers the code a “violent incident without injury,” so it was not used to calculate local violence rates. But because the code includes “caused” physical injury in its definition, some Ventura County high schools might apply it to students involved in a fight.
In addition, more than two years of data could not be compared, because the state changed the way disciplined incidents were counted starting with 2011-12. And the numbers can vary widely from year to year.
New state law may help
While Oxnard Union schools had among the highest violence rates in 2012-13, three Conejo Valley Unified high schools were among the top five in 2011-12.
Westlake and Newbury Park highs had the third- and fourth-highest violence rates in the county that year. Thousand Oaks High had the third-highest rate of weapons incidents.
The highest weapons rate in 2011-12 belonged to Nordhoff High School in Ojai, even though it only had five incidents. Weapons incidents include possession of a knife, firearm, dangerous object or explosive; or the sale or furnishing of a firearm or knife.
Oxnard Union schools had some of the highest rates of weapon incidents over the two-year period. Channel Islands, Oxnard and Pacifica, along with Fillmore and Santa Paula high schools, comprised the top five.
The 2012-13 data was released by the state at the end of January. Across the state, suspensions dropped 14 percent and expulsions dropped 12 percent.
Among the 22 Ventura County schools, total suspensions dropped 22 percent, to about 2,550. Total expulsions remained steady, however, at 125.
Those numbers could drop this school year because of a state law that took effect in 2013. It requires schools to demonstrate they’ve exhausted every option to correct some types of behavior before suspending or expelling a student.
“Kids are kids, and they make mistakes,” Mantooth said. “We’re educators and we want our kids to learn, but we want our kids to learn a lot of things, not just the subject matter. They need to learn how to get along in this world — that’s the kind of adults they’re going to become.”
Another perspective
Ventura County districts and schools are “working very hard to be proactive and provide a counterweight” to the typical violence that can be expected in a high school, Mantooth said.
Programs like restorative justice are being implemented, Mantooth said. If an incident occurs, the school will bring together the students, parents and faculty involved to discuss what happened.
“It’s recognition of what one person did to the other and looking inside each other to understand what may have motivated the fight or the assault and to find a way to fix it, so it doesn’t stay an open wound,” he said.
But Mantooth said “schools can’t do everything,” and without cooperation from students and parents, it is difficult to help a student develop emotional and social values.
Ron Avi Astor, a USC social work and education professor and school violence expert, said schools “need to become places that get students through some of the difficulties in their communities and their families and integrate them into society in a much better way.”
He cautioned against relying too heavily on one source of information about school safety, especially when the data is reported by the schools themselves.
“Suspension and expulsion data is really important ... but there are really wide variations with how principals and vice principals deal with expulsions and suspensions,” Astor said. “Look at it with a grain of salt — there may be more going on.”
Astor recommended the California Healthy Kids Survey as a way to gauge how students view their school environment. The most recent survey was taken during the 2011-12 school year.
In the Oxnard Union district, 30 percent of surveyed freshmen reported being pushed, shoved or hit at least once in the previous year. One of five freshmen said they had been in a physical fight, and one of four said they had seen someone with a weapon on campus.
Mantooth said educators pay attention to the Healthy Kids Survey “because that’s the actual students’ perception” and it reveals incidents that do not necessarily “rise to the level of formal action.”
Schools should pay close attention to bullying and harassment, rather than focusing too much on worst-case scenarios such as a mass shooting, said Scott Poland, a psychology professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a nationally recognized expert on school safety. It can make kids feel unsafe in “what statistically is probably the safest place they can possibly be,” he said.
“The lower-level things really are the tip of the iceberg and what we need to be working on,” said Poland, who has responded to 13 school shootings.
Poland said the key to maintaining a safe school is cultivating relationships between students and teachers.
“That’s the piece we’re missing,” he said. “If the teacher doesn’t know your name, how likely are you to be going to them to tell them of a possible threat of violence?”
‘An awesome man’
Charles Cornwell, an assistant principal at Ventura High School, said becoming a high school administrator was the furthest thing from his mind when he earned his law degree and passed the California State Bar.
But when the opportunity arose for him to return to his alma mater, Cornwell said, he “took it in a heartbeat.” He wanted to be a role model for students in his community — the children of his former classmates and neighbors along Ventura Avenue.
Cornwell went to middle and high school with Lucas Brown’s father. The understanding Cornwell has of Brown’s home life clearly strengthens their connection.
Brown’s parents separated when he was 3, and he has been living in foster care or with relatives for the past decade. “I don’t want to be a doubting individual, but for some reason or another, my life and how I was raised ... it created my low self-esteem,” Brown said.
Cornwell reassured him. “But you did it, mijo,” he said, using the Spanish word for “my son.”
“No matter what you’ve done, all the trouble you’ve faced — that’s how strong you are. And you’re going to be an awesome man, no matter what. You’re going to be a great father.”
Brown said his confidence has been restored knowing “there are people — adults — who really, truly believe” in him. He will be the first person in his family to graduate from high school and he’ll start studying at Ventura College in the fall, with plans to eventually become a teacher.
Maybe even an assistant principal, Cornwell suggested. “With your wealth of experience, mijo, you can do anything you want in this world,” Cornwell said.