Education

RICHMOND (CBS 5) ― School violence is all too real an issue since Columbine and the Virginia Tech massacres. So why do insiders from one Bay Area school tell CBS 5 Investigates the school's been lacking needed security measures for years?

It's a school where students and teachers sometimes fear walking the halls. Police cars sit in front, and security guards wear bulletproof vests.

"I've seen a knife, I've seen a gun," said former teacher Mary Beth Leland. "It made it very hard for them to learn," said Robin Dalyrymple.

She said she remembers the day four men armed with guns came into her classroom and robbed her students: "They took chains off their neck, they went through their pockets, took a cell phone. So many things like that happened."

The school: Richmond High, the city's biggest with nearly 1,700 students, smack in the middle of an area plagued by gang violence.

"This sounds like tough territory?" we asked Gonzalo Rucobo, founder of Bay Area Peacekeepers, a non-profit group that works to keep kids out of gangs, and often is called in to keep the peace at Richmond High. His response: "Yeah, it is."

Rucobo said those gang disputes don't stay out in the neighborhood.

"If something happens in the community it follows back into the school," he told us. The result is violence: Fights, like several found on YouTube and worse.

"They're not able to be able to keep the kids safe," Rucobo said.

Why? Because he said they can't keep gang members from the neighborhood - or anyone else – out of the school.

"There's at least 6 ways to get into that school," he said.

So just how easy is it to access this school? CBS 5 Investigates decided to find out, like here on October 16th, when a CBS 5 producer, a woman, simply walked through an open gate onto campus, into the school, around the busy central mall area and further, completely unchallenged.

And then a second time on October 30th, another producer, a man, walked in right past a security guard and took his own leisurely tour, even lingering in front of the administration office...with no one asking questions. So what do school administrators say about it?

"It sounds to us at least some of these students don't feel safe," we asked Assistant Principal over Safety Jose DeLeon. "Would it surprise you to hear that?"

His answer: "No, it wouldn't surprise me."

DeLeon said as it sits now, almost anyone can come on campus, and they do. The problem? He said the school can't monitor all the school's many exits, all the time.

But DeLeon, and Principal Julio Franco said there's a simple solution to the problem: A fence, like the one over at Kennedy High School, where Franco served as principal until last year.

"At Kennedy, the school is fenced around, so we actually didn't have many outsiders because we had the fence," said Franco. "That seems to me to be pretty basic," we told him. His response: "It would be basic to me too."

In fact, DeLeon said they've been asking the district for that fence for at least three years. But, three years later: "We still don't have a fence."

But that's not the only security problem at Richmond High. In the mall area, which is the biggest open area in the school, there are two security cameras but only one works. And that's not the only broken one.

On the system's monitor you can see several blue squares. Each one represents a broken camera. Out of the 16 cameras in the system, only seven work. DeLeon said a new system probably would run the district about $80,000.

And it certainly would have been nice to have a working camera monitoring the football field earlier this year, when somebody drove a van on the field and set it on fire. A huge area was completely blackened.

"The cameras that are fixed on those entrances no longer work, we didn't know who came in and who came out," DeLeon told us.

Fixing the field cost $100,000. "So an $80,000 dollar system potentially could have paid for itself? I mean, these things seem so basic. Why don't you have these things?" we asked. "You would have to talk to the Superintendent about that," DeLeon told us.

We tried to ask West Contra Costa School Superintendent Bruce Harter about it but he said he wasn't available and refused to talk to CBS 5 Investigates.

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