"Lockdown! Lockdown!" shouts a teacher, and suddenly the students on the third floor of Southern High School scatter in every direction.

Most slip into classrooms before doors are shut and bolted, as lockdown requires.

But the brave, the defiant -- and the criminal -- scurry off to Stairwells 5 and 6 -- two areas of the South Baltimore school that hall monitors such as Mike McRae, a former prison guard, rarely patrol.

There, cigarette butts, broken glass and chicken bones -- muck enough to cause more than one student to fall -- cover stairs in need of new paint.

Graffiti -- "Man From Flag House" and "Cherry Hill 4 Eva" -- tell the tale of the neighborhood turf wars whose violence spills daily into Southern's hallways.

Between the second and third floors, a 16-year-old flashes a handgun he keeps in his waistband. He is not a student, he says, but he sneaks into the school to "watch the back" of two friends who need protection.

Lockdown -- where anyone not in a locked classroom or possessing a hall pass is subject to punishment -- is intended to find and evict intruders like him. These hall sweeps are an almost daily occurrence, especially after fights.

Principal Darline Lyles has all but ceded the stairwells to youthful miscreants.

"I'msure there are streets in Baltimore you won't walk down," Lyles says. "I ask my students not to go into Stairwells 5 and 6 for the same reasons. It's about personal safety."

When the lockdown ends, the stairwell's denizens know to make their move. They walk out the front door with the lucky seniors who are on track to graduate and are thus excused early each day to attend afternoon jobs.

The school calls this job programming. Twelfth-graders call it "work release."

"Look at the words, 'lockdown,' 'work release' -- it's like we go to a jail," says Sandy Pearce, a 17-year-old senior who is so angry about school conditions that she has begun taking notes and soliciting letters of complaint from students.

"It is out of control in here, and the teachers seem like they're scared of the students. I don't know what happened this year. The school was always much better than this."

Indeed, it was. For all the danger in its stairwells, Southern hardly fits the stereotype of the troubled inner-city high school.

Its principal is widely viewed as smart and aggressive. Southern is home to a citywide biotechnology program, a top basketball team and a strong ROTC program.

As recently as two years ago, city schools officials praised Southern as a place where administrators were making gains in the struggle against school violence and high dropout rates.

But every year in Baltimore, a few of the city's high schools spin horribly out of control while school officials scramble to hold them together.

Last year it was Northern, which caught top administrators' attention after principal Alice Morgan Brown suspended 1,200 children in one day. Lake Clifton was wild the year before, Patterson the year before that.

This year, Southern is unraveling. And while city and state officials, from schools chief Robert Booker to Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and state Rep. George W. Della Jr., have noticed, they seem powerless to stop it.

"We've had problems at Lake Clifton, Patterson and Northern," said 1st District City Councilman Nicholas C. D'Adamo Jr. "When are we going to get a handle on the problem?"

Della added: "I believe Darline Lyles is doing everything she can. I believe if she had more to work with, Darline could run a good high school here. This school is sitting on a time bomb."

Victim of luck, planning

A combination of poor planning and bad luck knocked Southern askew this year.

Lyles says she lost 13 teaching positions and two administrators over the summer, largely because city school officials predicted that her student population would shrink when a new high school opened in Cherry Hill.

She lost three "safe school facilitators," who roam the building looking for trouble spots. And a city schools grant that funded her "twilight" school for troubled and alternative students dried up.

On the first day of school, Lyles watched as more than 1,500 students filed through the front doors -- about 200 more than she was expecting. Some of the new arrivals had been kicked out of other schools; others were city kids who had been caught faking addresses to attend county schools.

And because Southern pulls students from neighborhoods as far away and different as Curtis Bay and East Baltimore, Cherry Hill and Brooklyn, the predictable turf fights erupt daily.

The violence this year was too much for an overmatched staff.

"Kids from Flag House [Courts] and Cherry Hill [public housing projects] have been going at it inside this building for years, but ,, this year I just didn't have the staff to deal with it," Lyles said. "At the end of October, they do a recount of students and we'll get a staff adjustment. But until then, we just have to make do."

In interviews Southern's students and teachers describe a virtual free-for-all, in which danger and filth are so severe that parents such as Laura Lee, a South Baltimore hairstylist, have taken their children out of school.

Girls complain of being groped in the halls. Students openly smoke marijuana. Roaches crawl freely through hallways and in classrooms. Overflowing toilets, graffiti-stained stall doors and strewn hygiene products have rendered the bathrooms unusable.

Students say the dark first floor, the so-called "level of death," is a staging ground for robberies.

Heather Bradford, a senior who lives in Pigtown, says two boys, whom she could not identify, urinated on her arm as she walked in a stairwell during the first week of school. When she complained to administrators, she was told to clean herself up and go to lunch.

Students and nonstudents come and go at will. Lyles says several times this year she and her staff have caught a group of six girls from Francis Scott Key Middle School in the halls at Southern. Students from other city high schools have also shown up, she said, "because they've heard this is a place they can hang out."

Fights have occurred daily since school began, with administrators sometimes being knocked down or injured trying to stop them. Lyles and her staff have suspended many of the boys involved in the fights. But some of the fisticuffs now involve girls from Cherry Hill and Flag House, who have adopted the violent rivalry their male counterparts began.

Mia Johnson, a 14-year-old freshman at the school, says she watched recently while her cousin was beat up by three boys. "But it took a half-hour for an administrator to come do something about it," she said.

That is the stuff of parental nightmares. The oldest of Wanda Hardy's three daughters, 16-year-old Telyna Ogle, was shot to ,, death in 1992 in East Baltimore. Her other two daughters, Tyra and Myra, are freshmen at Southern.

"I just have a feeling that something terrible is going to happen again to one of my children," says Hardy, who is looking into private schools.

Her daughters' algebra teacher, Patrick L. Reed, had his right hand smashed in a door by an unidentified student. Reed said his hand was all but severed and had to be reconstructed at

Union Memorial Hospital. Seven weeks later, he is unable to write or teach. His right index finger is held together by pins.

"We've lost control," says Reed, 50, who has taught in the city schools since 1978 and had never been hurt before. "There are so many kids in the hallways and stairwells. That's how you get the trash, the fights, the fires."

Frequent fires

Small blazes are as common as backpacks this year at Southern -- in trash cans, in ceiling tiles and on bulletin boards. There were three fires this week -- one Tuesday charred Stairwell 5 and kept Lyles from attending a community meeting at the South Baltimore Recreation Center called to find solutions to Southern's violence.

Schmoke left a groundbreaking next door to respond to Tuesday's fire. The mayor was disturbed to learn that some students who had been thrown out for gang activity were let back into Southern.

"When those 30 kids were gone, everything was calm," Schmoke said. "The school system just let them back in."

Lyles said most kids causing trouble are "out to make reputations for themselves" and are not really dangerous.

"I know we're doing everything that's humanly possible to make this school comfortable for everyone," she said. "When the school's really not safe, I won't be here."

But Sandy Pearce, the 17-year-old senior who has begun collecting students' horror stories, said it's clear the staff has lost control.

"The people causing trouble are not scared of anything," she said. "If you do something wrong, there is no outcome."

On Pearce's left arm is a bruise caused when someone rammed a chair into her in the cafeteria, where students routinely throw full trays of food and overturn trash cans. Many students avoid the lunchroom now, sitting instead in the library or a sympathetic teacher's classroom.

Last week, Booker, the city schools chief, took the school district's first steps to respond to Southern's problems. He doubled the number of police officers from three to six and released funds to allow Lyles to hire additional staff.

Booker also said last week that he wants to open an alternative high school for disruptive students as soon as possible -- perhaps before next school year.

"We have some disruptive children in our schools," Booker said. "And we need to find some place for them. We don't need them in the regular schools."

Lyles said she is convinced her school will settle down once she gets additional staffing and can re-open her own alternative program. She had one meeting at the school Oct. 12, which ended with parents yelling at each other.

On Lyles' wish list are a full-time probation officer and a full-time .. administrator to deal with special education disciplinary issues. She would like a before- and after-school program for seniors to make up missed credits.

She might have city school officials plan better, too.

"What North Avenue didn't count on were the extra students we wound up with at the beginning of the year," Lyles said. "If they had known, if I had known, things would be different now."

She does not hold out much hope, though.

"As long as I've been here, this has been the situation," she said. "These problems aren't new. We deal with it all the time."

A call for change

Others are beginning to look more broadly at the structure and staffing of the city's high schools and calling for change. The city's high schools, says board member Dorothy Siegel, are "a crisis."

"You lose too many kids because of the chaos of large schools," she says. "We need to do whatever we can to break these high schools up."

All of the chaos seems to be taking a personal toll on Lyles, now in her fifth year. Normally upbeat and energetic, she now seems tired, friends and students say. Lyles says she wants to stay at Southern, to reclaim the progress she had made before this year.

But she wouldn't fret if she suffered the fate of Northern High's Alice Morgan Brown or Patterson High's Bonnie Erickson. Both lost their jobs after chaotic years.

"The one difference," she says, "is that I'll go pleasantly."

Pub Date: 10/30/98