Just Call It a Reward for the Student Hero : Youths who report gun-toting peers deserve cash award

There are few things more unconscionable than bringing a dangerous weapon to a school, especially if that weapon is a gun. It destroys concentration even if it is only used to intimidate or to show off. And if that gun is eventually used there to maim, wound or kill, the tragedy goes far beyond the shooting victim or victims.

The learning atmosphere that school staffs have labored so long and hard to create is destroyed at least for a few days, and perhaps much longer. You can forget about anyone concentrating on classes for the rest of that afternoon. You can count on a few dozen nightmares that night. You can count on having parents and children who will think that maybe they will skip school until things are under control.

You can count on the need for counselors at that school for students who need to talk about it. And you can count on a lot of brainpower and energy being spent not on learning, but in countless meetings on what to do to make the school more secure.

Now, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the school board have an idea. They are thinking about giving students a modest monetary reward of $25 to $75 for coming forward and reporting gun and drug-toting peers soon enough to avoid such tragedies. What, we ask, is so wrong with that idea? Not much.

The problems of guns and knives in school districts around the region are vast, and certainly not confined to crime-ridden and gang-scarred neighborhoods. Last school year, for example, folks were applauding a decline in the number of LAUSD students who had been recommended for expulsion for bringing guns and knives to school. The figure had dropped to 800 incidents. Well, big deal. That’s still 13% higher than it was in the 1986-87 school year. And those are just the guns and knives that were discovered. How many more might there be?

For that answer, consider that so-called law-and-order town, Simi Valley. In a report this year that revealed a surprising problem, nearly 10% of 5,000 students surveyed there said they had seen a gun on campus in the last month. About 5% said they had been threatened with a gun, and 5% of the teachers said they had been threatened as well. This is an immense problem.

But we are hearing from all manner of so-called experts who are throwing cold water on the idea of a small reward for students who report such incidents. They ought to stop wasting our time.

They have labeled rewards as a competition between safe schools and the development of civic responsibilities. Huh? Others say we should be teaching responsibility. Granted, so go ahead and teach it. Still others say it will be detrimental to overall character development. They must be kidding. And one brilliant Yale professor called it “being a snitch who gets paid money to inform.”

Please.

Do we think so little of our teen-agers that we believe that they can be irreparably corrupted for less than the cost of a pair of Nikes?

And any reference to these students as snitches, stool pigeons, rats or informants merely feeds into the problem that we are all trying to solve, which is to get more students to come forward.

Any child who reports the peer who has a gun, or reports someone who is extorting money, or reports someone who is selling drugs can be described in one word. He or she is a hero, purely and simply. It is our desire to protect such children from retaliation that prevents us from granting them a more proper public recognition. So, a small reward can be one way of showing them that they are worthy of a palpable form of gratitude for their deeds.

Perhaps less time should be spent on overblown moral debates. It would be better spent on figuring out the safest and most effective way to implement the reward plan.