By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer

ATLANTA – Four first-grade students and a teacher were sprayed with Mace by a gunman who demanded the keys to the teacher’s car outside St. Anthony’s Catholic School Dec. 5.

No one was seriously hurt, but the six-year-old children and the teacher, Olivia Kappus, were threatened at gunpoint by the man who entered a mobile classroom parked on the street adjacent to the West End School.

The separate classroom is necessary to comply with federal guidelines that prevent public school teachers giving remedial help to students with federal Chapter 1 funding from doing so on Catholic school property.

Mrs. Kappus or an aide regularly escort small groups of children from the school to the classroom and back to the school after their period of special help with reading and other classwork. According to Maureen Kane, superintendent of Catholic schools and interim principal at St. Anthony’s, Mrs. Kappus had just brought the four children to the mobile classroom when the man entered behind them at gunpoint demanded keys to the teacher’s personal car, parked beside the classroom.

According to police reports, she tried to spray him with Mace, but he turned the chemical on her and the children, who were standing behind her, then fled. Atlanta police, firemen and Grady emergency vehicles responded to the call and examined the children and teacher, Ms. Kane said. None was seriously hurt, but they were frightened and traumatized. The children were sent home with parents and relatives for the day and are being counseled at the school.

Ms. Kane said she had alerted the Home and School Association and was writing parents of the school’s 125 students to discuss further the safety issues faced by the school in its neighborhood.

“We’ve tried to be very careful about safety,” Ms. Kane said. When the incident happened it was just past noon. “There were a lot of people around. It’s lunchtime. Children were out on the playground. From my perspective, (the assault) was pretty bold.”

Some of the children, three boys and a girl, got physically sick from fright. “They asked questions like ‘Is he going to come back? Is he going to hurt us?’” the principal said.

Msgr. Terry Young, archdiocesan Secretary for Education, said the incident is a difficult problem for the school, since Chapter 1 regulations require that a physical separation take place between the Catholic school property and Chapter 1 funded program facility, in this case, the mobile classroom.

“We’ve never left the children alone. They’ve always been escorted to and from the mobile bus,” Msgr. Young said. “We’ve tried to be sensitive to the security issues all along.”

“We will try to ensure and reduce significantly the possibility of something like this ever happening again,” he said. “When someone inserts themselves into your environment, you want to examine and reevaluate ways to thwart their efforts.”

The ability of the Catholic school to resolve the problem is solely limited by regulations instituted for the Chapter 1 program. In July 1985 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that letting a public school teacher working with children on the premises of a religious school violated the principle of separation of church and state.

Although Chapter 1 is a federally mandated program, controlled by the public school system and aimed at children in inner city neighborhoods and other settings where children are identified who need reading and learning assistance, the Supreme Court decision forced a series of makeshift solutions to be put in place in religious schools across the country.

The mobile classroom currently in use is equipped with its own power pole because of physical separation from Catholic school property.

In 1986, when the Chapter 1 ruling was first being implemented at St. Anthony’s, Mrs. Kappus had to teach children in a largely deserted, three-story former public school building one block away from St. Anthony’s. The building was being used by homeless street people, was not secured, and eventually was gutted in a middle-of-the-night fire.

Later an old yellow school bus was converted into a Chapter 1 classroom and parked on the lot of a public library adjacent to St. Anthony’s.

The new mobile classroom is fully equipped for teaching, but is large, difficult to maneuver and, as a result, is parked on Peeples Street a block from St. Anthony’s School, Ms. Kane said.

After the Dec. 5 assault, the school is trying to place the classroom on school property and a security guard has been requested by Chapter 1 officials.