Last September, Corporal L.G. Welch was attending a presentation at Ragsdale High School. He walked into one of the school’s bathrooms and immediately caught sight of the graffiti on the walls and in the stalls. In a simpler day and time it may have been a “Kilroy was here” drawing, but in 2006 it wasn’t Kilroy who’d been there but three gang members representing three different gangs. To the untrained eye, the symbols may have meant little more than youthful petty vandalism, but Welch’s eye is anything but untrained. He knew all too well what the symbols meant and who had spray-painted them there.
“It was the Latin Kings, the Black Gangsters Disciples and the Bloods,” he said. “Three active gangs that had marked their territory in that one boy’s bathroom.”
That one episode only confirmed what Welch already knew - has known for years - that gang activity has pervaded literally every high school in Guilford County. More alarming, it has filtered down to the middle schools and has even made inroads into some of the elementary schools. Welch has been sounding the alarm for a full decade, and has been monitoring gang activity even longer, but only in the past year or so has he been able to cut through the wall of denial.
“I’ve been preaching to them and doing gang classes for teachers, administrators, neighborhood-watch groups and churches since 1997,” he said, “showing them the identifiers, what to look for in the schools and neighborhoods. I told them it’s going to be a problem if we don’t get a handle on it and I’ve been trying to get the schools to look at the issue. They were saying back then that we don’t have gangs in our schools.”
But, with few exceptions, they’re not saying it anymore.
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