Blackboard Battlegrounds: A Question of Survival

SECURITY on our campuses is the No. 1 educational problem today --not curriculums or new approaches to teaching," says California Educator Eugene McAdoo. "You can't teach anything unless you have an atmosphere without violence."

Few urban educators would disagree. Armed robberies, assaults and purse snatchings occur with depressing regularity in many--though obviously not all--of the nation's city schools. Declares Los Angeles' Principal Sid Thompson: "For teachers and students alike, the issue unfortunately is no longer learning but survival." His own high school is known as "Fort Crenshaw" because of its steel mesh fence, armed guards and classroom doors that lock from the inside. Not even such Draconian measures have left Crenshaw free of violence. Last month a gang climbed over the fence, tore off a student's jacket and severely beat him.

An especially alarming aspect of school violence is the growing number of assaults upon teachers in many cities across the country. New York, for example, recorded 541 such attacks last year--almost double the 285 reported in 1971. Detroit averages 25 assaults on teachers every month. The result is that many teachers are afraid of their students and incapable of imposing the discipline needed for teaching.

Far more often, however, it is the students themselves who are the victims. School officials blame most of these incidents on intruders, often dropouts who return to prey on their former schoolmates. They lie in wait in school toilets to shake down students for their lunch money, roam the halls and playgrounds extorting and terrorizing.

Such violence reflects to a large extent the jungle of the slums, for it is there that the schools with the worst problems are located. For an addict needing money for his next fix, a student with lunch money is an obvious target. Gang fights frequently spill over into school buildings. Vandalism alone costs schools $200 million a year nationally. Violent acts are often so seemingly meaningless that they defy reason. Outside Intermediate School 155 in New York's desolate South Bronx, a youngster was nearly stomped to death recently during an argument over a bottle of soda pop.

Increasingly, students in such schools are arming themselves with knives and cheap handguns. "In the kids' eyes, a gun is an equalizer," says one teacher. At Los Angeles' Compton High School a 17-year-old student, armed with a gun and a knife, demanded money from a 16-year-old. The victim drew his own gun and shot the extortionist dead.

One answer to the rampant violence is to place guards in the schools. New York City is training 1,200 security guards for its 95 high schools. Chicago has increased its guard force of off-duty policemen from 200 to 490 in the past three years. It now assigns up to eight men to each school, where they inspect locks on doors and check student identification cards, which bear not only the student's photograph and class schedule but are color coded to show his lunch hour. As a result, Chicago has reported an 11% drop in assaults. Philadelphia has assigned 61 uniformed policemen to problem high schools, organized an 80-man mobile strike force of retired cops, and has had a similar drop in school violence and crime.

Some educators sadly observe that elaborate security arrangements only shift the scene of the crimes elsewhere. "It's a community problem," says Crenshaw Principal Thompson. "We can secure the schools, but that doesn't secure the communities." Perhaps not, but it is certainly an important first step.

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