WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department provided federal money to Santana High School after the school asked for assistance in dealing with an "onerous culture of bullying."
"The Justice Department had worked with the school in actually providing a grant to help reduce the likelihood and impact of violence," Ashcroft said in a speech to local government officials Monday. "The school had said we need some resources to have a program that curtails this onerous culture of bullying."
The school used the $123,000 grant to study the bullying problem. Students were encouraged to come forward and report bullying incidents, said local officials. That apparently didn't happen with 15-year-old suspect Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams, who allegedly shot and killed two students and wounded 13 others last week.
According to many students, he was bullied and called names. He never complained to school officials and the students who witnessed the bullying did not say anything either, officials said.
The city of Santee, Calif., applied for the grant in 1998 under a school-based partnership program created at the Justice Department to help schools work with local law enforcement agencies to analyze crime problems, Justice officials said.
"The school was having a problem with bullying, threats and intimidation," said Gilbert Moore, spokesman at the Justice Department's Community Oriented Policing Services program, which administered the grant. "Verbal and physical threats within the school had increased."
In 1998 the Justice Department awarded Santana High $123,028 for a three-year period and provided another $14,454 in 1999. The school has used about $90,000 so far, said Moore. The grant ends this year, he said.
The school has gathered data on bullying incidents based on interviews with kids and will issue a report sometime later this year, said Sgt. Roy Heringer at the Santee sheriff's station.
He noted that Williams had only been at the school for a short time. "The problem was well under way before he came," said Heringer.
Ashcroft said there's only so much that government can do to combat violence in schools.
"It takes more than what the government can do," Ashcroft said. "It's going to take some response on the part of our culture to say that we don't want to promote the idea that violence is the way to solve all our problems."
