I am the interim director of Tierra Encantada Charter High School in Santa Fe and a retired New Jersey public defender and California trial attorney. Several weeks ago, along with my school principal, I visited a Santa Fe Public Schools administrator who was at Santa Fe High School at the time. During the hour or so we spent with him, he was interrupted numerous times with discipline issues. I was struck by the waste of time and talent involved.

I began to reflect on my own role in the educational system and the amount of time spent on discipline in general and gang problems in particular. I was prompted to write this opinion piece after reading the recent New York Times article about Shining Path, the Peruvian terrorist organization that was dormant for several years and has now reappeared as a major narcotics organization.

I then used the Internet to find substantial information that a gang present in Santa Fe is closely linked to Shining Path. I imagine the SFPS system has been impacted by this gang as much as our small charter school may have been. We suffered a theft of some $40,000 worth of computers earlier this year and the facts seem to link the theft to that particular gang.

Also, during the first two years of our charter school's existence, gang-related activity, such as tagging and drugs threatened, in my opinion, our sustainability. Many students with gang affiliations left Santa Fe and Capital high schools thinking they would encounter less discipline at a new charter school.

Many fine students left the school, as they informed me, because of safety issues. The majority of our students are Hispanic and have come to our school because of our bilingual program. Only a small minority are gang-affiliated, but their impact on learning far exceeds their numbers. The school launched a major effort this year to turn the problem around.

However, I feel the issue of gangs in schools percolates beneath the surface of all educational settings, undermining almost all areas vital to the democratic and moral principles that form the backbone of our Constitution and society.

The schools may not be the only institutions that need to react to this clear and present danger, but we clearly must react. The main speaker at last summer's SFPS administrators' meeting cited research that the number one parental concern is the safety of children while in school; learning appeared further down the list, behind happiness. Yet, when addressing the issues facing education, public discourse centers around funding, teacher quality, standardized testing, alternative schools and so on, demonstrating an amazing ability to evade the subject that effects education on fronts broader than we want to admit. The effect, unfortunately, has been to cause some schools to become gang neutral.

I would opine that if safety issues were resolved, parents who now send their children to private and charter schools, and parents who seek school vouchers, would be comfortable in supporting the public education system. In terms of learning and teaching, our school administrators and teachers haven't failed. They are as fine as any I've seen. Our failure is that we've not faced, head-on, the gang problem and its role on the disintegration of discipline in our schools.

Dealing with the gang problem is more than I can ethically ask of a young English teacher who values poetry; of a science teacher who believes a microscope allows students to glimpse into the deeper meanings of life; of a mathematician who finds beauty in the balance of an algebraic equation. Yet it appears that our teachers are spending a minimum of 20 percent of their class time dealing with the mentality that arises from gang culture. They shouldn't have to be burdened by knowing all the gang colors and signs that can be used to disrupt the learning process. They shouldn't have to face obscenities on a daily basis. Teachers shouldn't have to feel that our constitutional system of justice is hampering administrators from effectively dealing with gang issues.

Several teachers who have left their positions said they were afraid to report gang incidents due to perceived threats to their physical safety. The reason I'm voicing this opinion out loud is that I feel that community silence and/or disjointed response to the severity of the problem allows continued gang activity, including recruitment among children of citizens who are truly unaware of the depth of the problems. Allowing the problem to continue unabated will keep refueling the desire of parents for schools of choice, rather than public schools.

My proposals are as follows:

• Organize a summit of concerned community organizations, including schools, to make recommendations for dealing with this issue.
• Establish a task force to determine the economic impact of gangs on Santa Fe.
• Petition through our congressional delegation to place virulent gangs on the international terrorist list. This would allow educators to obtain federal funding to handle the increased financial burden placed on our system by gang-related activities.

If we bail out banks because they are "too important" to society to fail, then surely schools are, too.

Ronald V. LoLordo, J.D., M.A. in special education, is the interim director of Tierra Encantada Charter High School. This opinion is his own and does not reflect the opinion of the TECH governing council.