Lessons in Love Help Class Earn Diplomas in Survival : Education: Violence, poverty and failure roamed the halls of a Brooklyn high school. Now that is changing.

By JOHN J. GOLDMAN

July 7, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — Proud and self-conscious in their new black robes, they marched to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” down the side aisles of the auditorium as parents and loved ones snapped their pictures.

And when Principal Carol A. Beck introduced the graduating class of 1991, they rose from their seats on stage with precision--just as they had practiced days before.

Graduation this year at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn was a time of joy and hope, reflection and relief. The 110 seniors receiving diplomas were more than students.

They were survivors.

A dozen steps from the auditorium’s front doors is a special room--the high school’s grieving room--where over the last four years teachers and pupils have mourned the deaths of some 30 Jefferson students, most of whom were murdered.

The high school stands in a police precinct that recorded 109 homicides and some 550 shootings last year--a total greater than many large cities.

When Mayor David N. Dinkins visited the area last month to preach gun control, his audience ducked when shots rang out just 150 yards away.

In such an atmosphere, graduation takes on added poignancy.

“Not just for four years, but for most of their lives, these children have had to struggle just to live day by day,” said Sharon King, a social studies teacher, as she hugged the graduates she had taught. “ . . . When you work in schools like this, at the end of the year, you sometimes wonder whether or not you are going to see them again next year, so goodbys tend to be a little more tearful.”

“I have lost more than 30 children over four years--stabbed, primarily shot,” said Jefferson’s Principal Beck. “You name it. It’s happened.”

“I know many people who got shot, stabbed or even died,” said Carl Dadaille, senior class president. “You don’t want to go that way.”

Students last filed into the grieving room in the middle of May to mourn their schoolmate, Manny, who was killed while riding his motorcycle. He was struck by a car. Some of the mourners expressed small consolation--at least Manny was not murdered.

“Starting from the freshman year, there are a lot of kids who didn’t make it,” said Lorna Mae Silcott, Jefferson’s homecoming queen, as she stood in the auditorium in her graduation robe. “But still we hang in there.

“Manny, who died, he was a very good student. He was nice. . . . That day, the mourners just went in and let everything out. There wasn’t a tearless eye. Teachers, students, even Mrs. Beck. There wasn’t a tearless eye.”

Earlier this academic year, students also sobbed for a schoolmate who was killed by a bullet that struck him in the head as he sat in a Chinese restaurant. They cried for a pupil who was killed in a fight over a gold chain, another who was slain in a dispute over property or a girlfriend. Still another student was killed in a drive-by shooting.

The tailback on Jefferson’s football team was shot this year. The tight end was hit by a bullet in 1988. Both survived and returned to play football.

“They’re like children of war,” Beck said.

Four years ago, when Beck became principal, Jefferson was first among all high schools in New York state in serious incidents of violence, including assaults, robberies and rapes.

The 68-year-old school was a dungeon. It had not been painted for years. Some fixtures were without light bulbs, many toilets did not work. Students were torn by neighborhood rivalries, and roamed hallways that smelled of cigarette smoke and sometimes pot. Classroom attendance some days was 50%.

Many teachers were terrified. Batteries and radios were routinely ripped from teachers’ cars.

“I went into a state of shock. I hadn’t seen anything like this,” recalled the 53-year-old principal. “The level of violence was staggering. The fights would begin in the fifth-floor lunchroom and work their way down.”

Soon after Beck arrived, a ninth-grader was shot to death on the street in an incident over a girl. Beck went to the funeral. She was the only person present. Even the boy’s mother was absent--she went to the Laundromat instead of the services.

Two days after the killing, a major fight broke out at the school. Beck said she realized at that point that the root of some of the violence was the inability of students to mourn.

Beck discovered that students were fearful of letting their emotions show. One boy who was part of the fight said he was taking a lot of showers at home because the only place he could cry was in the shower.

Others confessed to the principal that they cried privately in the stairwells of housing projects. Still others told Beck they wept in pillows or in closets.

“Children deal with so much death and dying, they negate it has happened,” Beck said. The sheer stress of survival in such a violent neighborhood makes grieving very difficult.

“Some of them (the students) have been hurt so much,” said Geri Taylor-Brown, a guidance counselor. “Some of them don’t know how to mourn and they have so many problems in day-to-day living. I asked students during a class once what they were most afraid of. One student told me he didn’t know if he was going to live until tomorrow. He was killed that night.”

Beck turned her conference room into a grieving room, which she calls “an oasis of comfort.”

The first time students mourned a schoolmate there, they were hysterical.

“The girls were crying and hyperventilating,” Beck recalled. “We made arrangements to go to the wake. I drove a lot of children home after the wake.”

After some 30 deaths, a rhythm of mourning has emerged.

At first, Taylor-Brown will say nothing as students weep, scream and say the person’s name. Some will ask why their friend died. Students will ask whether they will be next.

Friends often will share photographs, stories, poetry. Sometimes, the talk will drift to other deaths in their families that went unmourned.

“The point is to try to get them to move from just the sobbing to talk about how they actually feel about the death. Eventually we get around to writing,” explained the guidance counselor.

“Some of the students write what they want the departed person to know. They write them a letter, they write something about them. . . . They will say ‘I miss you. I love you.’ ”

” . . . They refer back to what their parents taught them. They know how precious life is . . . I think that when newspeople interview someone and there has been a death in their project or something and they are laughing, that is the anxiety. That is the depression. That is the fear. But that is just the way it happens to come out. They really are as terrified as everybody else.”

The aim of the grieving room is not just immediate comfort.

“If students are not allowed to ventilate, if they are not allowed to verbalize, not allowed to get out just as adults the emotions that are inside,” explained Taylor-Brown, “they tend to suppress it, and it does surface at some other time. It may not surface until they are 30.

“These students come here and say, ‘My mother was just shot.’ How do you come to school, your mother just died. Your brother died. Your father died. They come here because they know there will be someone here to help them work it through.”

Beck set out to make Jefferson a safe sanctuary in a community whose poverty is punctuated by burned-out buildings, vacant lots and open crack smoking on some streets.

The first order of business was to restore discipline.

She asked guidance counselors for the records of the worst troublemakers. She also checked and found the average age of Jefferson’s students was 18, which meant that entering freshmen were sharing hallways with 23- and 24-year-olds, who had not graduated and did not belong in high school at all.

The hangers-on were expelled and directed to alternative educational programs.

“That had a tremendously positive impact,” said Frieda Homer, Jefferson’s assistant principal. “When kids come into the ninth grade, they are little children and they should be treated as such. If you come into a place where you have 23- and 24-year-olds still walking around, it’s a very volatile situation.”

Beck moved swiftly to strengthen security. She helped persuade the Board of Education to spend $4 million for painting, vital repairs and new furniture.

Beck also instituted a host of new educational and guidance programs. Academic standards have been raised to the degree that 80% of this year’s graduating class will go to college.

Students have the option of taking law courses and participating in a moot court competition. A civil service program is designed to prepare pupils to pass New York City exams for police officers, firefighters and other government posts. Beck started a restaurant in the school run by students.

In what has turned out to be a successful effort to lessen violence, Beck instituted a system of student-run mediation.

In a special mediation room, students learn there are viable options to violence. Problems are discussed, and in most cases, binding agreements are signed. Last year, the mediators handled 164 cases, settling fights, recovering stolen property, and in some cases, avoiding suspensions from school.

For her successful efforts to stabilize the school, Beck received the 1991 American Hero in Education Award from Readers Digest Magazine and the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals.

Her approach gives Jefferson’s teachers and administrators great latitude to attempt innovations. In her relations with students (whom she calls her babies) Beck mixes discipline with love--a formula that brings a positive response from most pupils.

“We achieved something,” said Dadaille, the senior class president. “We have made a broken path into a good path. Without Mrs. Beck, without the people who steer with Mrs. Beck, we wouldn’t have gotten this far. . . . There are two lessons you learn when you come into Thomas Jefferson, discipline and respect.”

“This is tough love, but it is love,” explained Taylor-Brown. “She (Beck) will say I love them (the students) and she will kiss them and hug them and say ‘If you don’t pass these classes, I am not letting you back in September.’ But it is done in such a way that what can you do but pass?”

Four days before graduation, Beck rehearsed the senior class in the auditorium. After marching to “Pomp and Circumstance,” the students practiced sitting and standing at the principal’s command.

“There is one point where you are going to be presented to the auditorium as the graduating class of 1991,” she announced. “And then you stand up. When you hear 1991, you stand up.”

Suddenly, Beck became a drill sergeant.

“Freeze! Too slow. You moved your hands,” she snapped as the students stood at her command.

“Do not ever put your hands up to your face when you are sitting up there,” she warned. “If something itches, wiggle your nose or something. You don’t want to scratch your face and be in a sloppy position.”

The principal broke into a broad grin as she announced all members of the senior class had passed the required New York state examinations for graduation. Cheers and applause from the seniors and a handful of teachers filled the auditorium.

Four days later, at the formal ceremonies, the graduates stood and sat like Marines.

“I am so proud of you, I could cry,” said Sharon King, the social studies teacher, as she hugged her former students.

The first year Beck became principal, a pupil set an oil-soaked mop on fire in the school. Beck was working late in her office. When the young man saw her car in the parking lot and suspected she might still be in the building, he called the fire department. Still later, when he was caught because school officials recognized his voice on the tape recording the fire department keeps of all phone alarms, Beck confronted him.

The student admitted he set the fire. The conversation moved to his home life. Three days earlier his birthday had passed and no one remembered. He said when he told his mother it was his birthday, she said his birth was the worst day of her life.

Beck pledged she would never forget his birthday. Since then, every student at Jefferson receives a birthday card from the school. Even the graduates get cards the first year they leave.

The birthday cards underline Beck’s philosophy.

“The lesson I have learned is that children need love more desperately than adults can ever imagine,” said Taylor-Brown, the guidance counselor, reflecting her principal’s views. “Each child you work with has to be treated as if it is your own child. When you keep that foremost in your mind, things will work out much better.”