A chain-link fence didn't keep flying bullets off the schoolyard, so workers are finishing up a 10-foot-high wall to shield basketball playing junior high school students from a nearby drug marketplace.
Faculty and administrators wore T-shirts Friday depicting the wall and bearing "The Great Wall of Lindbergh" logo, excited about the $160,000 project scheduled for completion at Lindbergh Junior High School in six weeks.Judy Wade, a physical education teacher, has said she's seen beer bottles and even bicycle handlebars tossed at students during her 25 years at the school. "Now, it's not what they're throwing, but what they're shooting," she said.
Students were evacuated from the recreation fields twice during one week in April because of gunfire. Two years ago, in the only shooting in which someone was injured, a student playing basketball after school was hit in the chest by a bullet and seriously hurt.
"They've had trouble there for as long as I can remember," Principal Max Fraley said Friday, referring to the problem housing project that is adjacent to the school-yard. "It is a very large area where a lot of drug dealers congregate."
Funds for the 900-foot-long, cinder-block wall came from the city school district and Los Angeles County after teacher Joan Reedy was nearly hit recently by bullets as she walked with students to a softball diamond.
"Shots came through the fence and we heard them whizzing by," Reedy said. "I was OK at first, but when I got home I was scared. So I went to the Board of Education and said, `Something needs to be done.' "
Plans call for the wall to be bordered by shrubs and decorated with a large mural, Fraley said.
"We'll use anti-graffiti paint, something that it will be easy to wash the gang graffiti off of," he said.
The mural will include a painting of the Spirit of St. Louis, the airplane aviator Charles Lindbergh flew in 1927 in the first solo trans-Atlantic flight, and a large "L" overlapped by a picture of an eagle, the school mascot.