Mother of Slain Teen Files Suit Over Death : Litigation: School district is accused of failing to follow its own recommendations about bolstering safety on campuses.

The mother of a Reseda High School senior shot to death in a school hallway sued the Los Angeles Unified School District on Thursday, alleging that district officials ignored warnings about campus violence and failed to protect students.

Margaret Ensley alleged in the suit that her son, Michael Ensley, was killed Feb. 22, 1993, in part because district officials failed to follow their own recommendations about bolstering safety. Some of the warnings about the dangers of school violence, the suit says, were made in the wake of a fatal shooting a month earlier at Fairfax High School, where a student was shot and killed as he sat in a classroom.

Ensley had insisted that her only son be transferred to the San Fernando Valley school in hopes of avoiding peer pressure to join a gang in the Athens area of South Los Angeles where he lived, according to the suit and interviews with Ensley. But that was not enough, she contends.

“Although successful in his attempt to avoid joining a gang, Michael Ensley was continually threatened, and made his teachers and other supervisors aware that he felt other students were ‘out to get him,’ ” according to the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. “This harassment and threatening environment was perpetrated by more than one student, and continued for a number of months.”

Ensley alleges in the suit that even after her son told school officials about his concerns, nothing was done. She also alleges that a district task force’s recommendations to install metal detectors and otherwise tighten security and keep non-students off the campus were not followed.

The shooting came less than three weeks after the district launched an unprecedented program of random metal-detector spot checks for weapons in the nation’s second-largest school system.

In an interview Thursday, Ensley’s lawyer, Ronald W. Grigg, said more precautions should have been taken.

District officials had no immediate comment Thursday, saying they had not yet been served with the lawsuit.

One official, who requested anonymity, said that public schools “are probably the safest place in the community” and that the district should not be held liable when violence endemic to society makes its way onto campus.

“A lawsuit is not going to bring Michael back,” Reseda High School Principal Robert Kladifko said. “It’s just going to bring more hurt for everyone involved.”

Ensley was shot by fellow student Robert Heard, 15, as he stood in a hallway during a snack break--just months before he was to graduate and go on to college. Heard was later convicted in Juvenile Court.

Since the shooting, the grieving mother has campaigned for school safety measures. Although she had no comment on the specifics of the lawsuit Thursday, she has spoken out in the past about violence in the schools and her belief that the district could do more to protect students.

Since the shooting, Ensley has helped form a group called MAVIS, Mothers Against Violence in Schools, as a forum to instruct students on the dangers they face.

In her suit, she alleges that during the 1989-90 school year, in response to the stabbing of a junior high school English teacher, the school board formed a task force that issued a report recommending many safety precautions to avoid “the growing dangers on school campuses.” Those included installation of metal detectors, a hot line to report guns on campus, and creation of special schools for violent students, the lawsuit said.

Although the report contained such warnings as “the potential for murder is real,” the directives in the report were not acted upon, according to the suit. It noted that Kladifko helped write the report.

On Thursday, Kladifko said that he was only one voice on a large task force, and that he thought that the lawsuit was “unfortunate.”

As for charges that the district ignored warnings, Kladifko said: “I think the school district did everything they could. There were a lot of recommendations in the report that the school district was not able to follow up on financially--and perhaps because they didn’t think they would be feasible--but they were not a matter of life and death, not at all.”

The lawsuit also contends that Heard was a parolee and should not have been on the school grounds. It says Michael Ensley and other students not only were aware that threats were being made against Ensley, but that it was known that Heard and other students were carrying guns to school.

In the suit, Ensley seeks unspecified damages for failure to discharge a mandatory duty and negligent supervision of the campus and its employees, who she contends should have prevented the death of her son.

Grigg said that if the suit is successful, much of the money will be used to allow Ensley to continue speaking on behalf of school violence measures, including paying for trips to Sacramento to push legislation requiring that more juveniles accused of murder be tried as adults. Grigg also said the lawsuit will serve as a way to raise the issues of school violence and district liability in a public forum.

“The lawsuit was filed to bring to the forefront the need for reform with respect to school security,” Grigg said. “It is hoped that through this lawsuit, by imposing the understanding on school officials that safety measures are needed, that schoolchildren in the future will be saved.”