The ABCs of School Violence

Classroom survival is the lesson of the day

It is morning at Morris High School, a gothic fortress rising above the ruins of New York City's scarred South Bronx. All but the main entrance is sealed; in front of it is a security guard, ready to turn back anybody who tries to enter without proper identification. Inside, five more guards equipped with walkie-talkies patrol the halls and cafeteria in the 60% Hispanic, 39% black school. Most classroom doors are locked after classes begin, and study halls, once a favorite spot for fights, have been shut down. The dingy lockers that formerly lined the corridors have been removed. Explains Principal Chester Wiggan: "The kids used to store drugs in them and set fires." Four trailers equipped as classrooms, in which pupils who are disciplinary problems study in isolation from the rest of the student body, are parked outside.

The military-camp atmosphere of Morris High is extreme. But increasingly, schools from Memphis to Los Angeles are adopting similar methods--as well as closed-circuit TVs, guards, emergency phones in the classrooms--to combat a violence that was once undreamed of. Last year alone, Memphis reported 680 assaults, 144 of them directed against teachers or administrators. Miami's Dade County registered a shocking 1,153 attacks, and in Boston schools there were 155 assaults on teachers alone. In high-crime New York City, students erupted in 2,420 attacks, half of them against teachers. In Chicago the assault rate is running at five to six cases a day.

Once a matter of shoving or fistfights, assaults today often result in bloodshed and even death. Last September an eighth-grader in Dade County's Westview Junior High died after a classmate smashed his face with a padlock during a lunchtime brawl. Just two weeks ago a 15-year-old boy was fatally stabbed in the chest at John Adams High School, in the Queens section of New York City, while his screaming girlfriend watched helplessly. On Dec. 5, a Los Angeles high school gang stabbed one victim and beat a second with a heavy belt buckle. Attacks against teachers seem to be increasing faster than student v. student assaults. In one incident last November, a woman math teacher in a New Haven junior high accosted a 14-year-old girl in the cafeteria line after the student insulted a cafeteria worker. The girl wheeled round, flung her tray of hot soup and mashed potatoes into the teacher's face and began to punch her.*

A just-released study by the National Institute of Education, titled Violent Schools--Safe Schools, confirms the problem in detail. Commissioned by Congress in 1974 in response to tales of classroom horror, the 247-page report offers a slightly encouraging note: violence has tapered off in the 4,000 schools profiled since the early '70s. Nonetheless, the report notes that 25% of American schools, about 20,500, suffer from moderately serious to serious problems of vandalism, personal attack and thievery. In 1978, it estimates, one out of every nine secondary school students will have something stolen in a typical month. One out of 80 will be attacked during the same period. Among the nation's 1 million secondary school teachers, 5,200 will be attacked--one-fifth of them seriously --in any given month, while about 6,000 will be robbed. Vandalism, meanwhile, will cost schools as much as $600 million a year.

The report's most ominous finding is that the plague is spreading to rural and suburban schools as well. Even there, brutal fights in the corridors and weapons hidden in cars outside are no longer rare. Says Peter Laarman of the American Federation of Teachers: "One of the more shocking things is that people can no longer say this is an inner-city problem. The dimensions are appalling."

Outright violence is paced by a spreading atmosphere of hostility and disrespect within the classroom. "It's the insults, the dirty words, the cold insolence of the students that really bother teachers," says Stanley Heller, president of the West Haven (Conn.) Federation of Teachers. The decay in decorum can be traced back to the mid-'60s, when the civil rights movement and Viet Nam protest sparked a general distrust of authority. "The unspoken sense of distance between teacher and student began to disappear, and students felt they had a license to behave any way they wanted," says Geraldine Han, who has taught social studies in New York City for 17 years. Han is recuperating from an attack last September, when a 15-year-old boy karate-kicked her in the spine.

In such an atmosphere, many threats, as well as sexual harassment of women teachers, often go unreported because of a "real or imagined fear of reprisal," says

Joseph Grande, executive secretary of the Providence teachers' union. Teachers complain bitterly, too, that even if they do press charges, either school administrations do not support them or offenders get off with a reprimand in juvenile court. "These kids know that nothing is going to happen to them," says Paul Hauge, a teacher in Des Moines's Harding Junior High School who was slugged in the face earlier this year by a 200-lb. student. "They're juveniles. Suspension is merely a three-to ten-day vacation. Even if they're expelled, they're entitled to have a private tutor at taxpayer expense."

In Hauge's case, the assailant was expelled. Han's assailant was merely transferred to another school. A student in a Boston high school who attacked a teacher with a pair of scissors was subsequently released by the juvenile court and returned to the same school. The judge, it seems, felt that the boy had extenuating emotional problems stemming from a scar on his face. And in a cause celebre in Providence, a teacher attempting to restrain a sixth-grade student from punching and choking a classmate whacked the offender on the leg with a blackboard pointer. The school administration took action--against the teacher. The assailant went free.

That kind of leniency may now be changing. The NIE study, among others, calls for firm discipline and leadership by school principals. New York City announced recently that from now on teacher-assault cases will be prosecuted by the city's legal department, rather than dealt with by education officials. The Massachusetts legislature has lately stiffened penalties for assaults on teachers. Los Angeles, meanwhile, is testing an inner-city pilot program known as the "Juvenile Justice Center," in which any offense committed by a neighborhood youth will be tried by one of the center's two judges. "The youngster knows the judge, and everyone else knows the youngster," says Judge David Kenyon. "No way is the youngster going to con you."

So far most attempts to wrestle with the problem have been confined to precautions and containment, the reassertion of formal discipline from without. American parents and educators have yet to figure out a way of making respect for authority and for others part of every student's education. Meanwhile a measure of comfort may be on the way for teachers oppressed by too close encounters with abusive youngsters. UCLA Psychiatrist Alfred Bloch, in a study released last March, found that 250 battered teachers from inner-city Los Angeles schools evinced nervous symptoms akin to "combat neurosis." Now the American Federation of Teachers is offering a special program for them. Worn-down teachers in various cities meet to discuss strategy and vent their frustration. No verbal or physical abuse allowed.

* A United Federation of Teachers safety manual advises attacked teachers: "Go down with the first blow, and stay down."

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