In February, Wilson officials decided they had to inspect all 1,550 students for weapons, after two of the school's most promising students were gunned down outside their homes, just hours after a fight at a school basketball game. Their alleged killers -- who were not Wilson students -- tracked the victims down to their depressed Washington neighborhood several miles from the school, and shot them as they unloaded groceries from their car.

The killings made the task of Steve Tarason, Wilson's lean, gray-haired, hard-working principal, even more daunting: to transform the school's image, and to convince affluent parents that Wilson is a better and safer school than many think it is. "The biggest challenge is maintaining the trust of parents, the faith of parents, and to encourage those who are trusting and those who have had a positive experience to go to other parts of the city, and say, "Hey, it can work." He was talking in his small office, keeping on eye on a surveillance monitor perched on a shelf in front of him.

Wilson High was once the crown jewel of a school system that has fallen on hard times. Situated in a largely white neighborhood dotted with embassies and expensive homes, it is just two miles from the vice presidential mansion where Al Gore currently resides. If Gore had decided to send his teenage son, Al Gore II, to a public school, he would almost certainly have enrolled at Wilson High. Yet Gore Jr. is a student at Sidwell Friends School, halfway between the vice president's home and Wilson. It's also the school President Clinton chose for Chelsea.

On the campaign trail, Gore has been confronted with uncomfortable questions about why someone who has been a champion of public education -- and an opponent of private school vouchers -- has, as a parent, shunned the D.C. public schools. At a CNN debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem earlier this year, he was asked, "Is there not a public or charter school in D.C. good enough for your child?" Gore deflected the question, responding that his children should be left out of the matter.

By contrast, Gov. George W. Bush promotes the fact that his twin daughters attend Austin High School, a public school in Texas. But like most issues in the presidential campaign, the truth is far more complex than the comparison between the two candidates suggests. For one thing, Austin High is a world-class high school that closely resembles many private schools. For another, any vice president -- or president -- has to make his children's security his first concern, and that's presumably more easily provided at a small private school than at a crowded public high school campus.

There are other attractions to Sidwell. It was founded by Quakers over a century ago, and tries to imbue its students with a sense of social justice. It has an enrollment of just over 100 students in all 12 grades, who are housed in a lower, middle and upper school. It has worked hard to recruit minority students, who now make up 36 percent of the student body.

But it is a sign of the deep level of distrust with which the public schools are regarded that few in Washington question Gore's decision to send his children to private schools. Parents do send their children to a handful of elementary schools in the affluent, and largely white, neighborhoods in Northwest Washington. But when kids reach high school age, parents either flee to the suburbs -- or find a place in the private schools mostly concentrated along the tree-lined streets near Wilson.

Now Gore and Bush are trying to trump each other with a myriad of proposals for improving public schools. Gore, for example, is proposing using federal monies to hire more teachers to reduce class size, and to pay teachers a bonus of $10,000 to work in inner city schools. He supports a multibillion dollar school construction program that could help schools like Wilson fix dilapidated buildings. Failing schools that don't succeed should be held strictly accountable, Gore says, and if necessary their entire staffs should be replaced.

Bush also wants to hold failing schools accountable, by shutting them down if necessary, and giving parents vouchers to pay tuition at private or parochial schools.

Will these reforms be sufficient to transform schools like Wilson into one where future presidents might be willing to enroll their children? If the past is the best predictor of the future, probably not any time soon.

Politics 2000: Unflinching daily political news, analysis and commentary.