School Violence is a Travesty

By now, everyone has heard of the story of Jolita Berry, the art teacher at Reginald F. Lewis High school.  It seems that no one in the City School System was willing to step up to the plate for her.  City Prosecutors couldn't move forward because under Maryland law, police cannot make a complaint about an assault they did not witness.  Jolita Berry was assaulted in her workplace, as her students cheered on the assailants.

This is fundamentally unacceptable.  The law must be changed.

No employee of any business or organization should ever go to work in fear for their life.  This is even more important in a public school.  How can we possibly educate our children in an environment of fear, loathing, and violence?  How can any child be expected to learn where violence is tolerated -- either by teachers unwilling to file charges, principals willing to back their teachers, or by laws that make it difficult to secure our schools?

Answer:  We can't.

Violence in our schools cannot be tolerated at all.  The Maryland General Assembly must step and do their job to secure our schools.  While local school boards enjoy substantial power in Maryland, the intersection of law enforcement and education in our public schools leaves local school boards powerless.

Several big issues that came out of the Jolita Berry Assault:

1. There have been 120 assaults against teachers in the Baltimore City school system since September 2007, but only 6 (now 7) charges have been filed.  This is mainly because of intimidation, but also because teachers do not feel they have the support of their upstream administrators.
2. There is a complete and fundamental lack of accountability on the part of parents and guardians for the actions of their children in schoolls.
3. Criminal law in Maryland is inadequate to deal with the issues of victim intimidation in general, and teacher intimidation in general.  I don't think this is deliberate, I just think that when the laws were written, no sane person ever envisioned an environment where students would be ganging up on teachers and assaulting them.

I think we need to address this issue on a number of fronts.  Some things will take a long time -- we need a cultural shift about the role of education in the lives of young people back to the way it was when I was in school, frankly.  We also need a cultural shift that re-couples parental responsibilities to parental rights.  We also need to change the thinking in modern educational theory to a position that when students are in school, the school system is eminently responsible for providing them a safe and conducive learning environment-- even if it means diminishing some of those students' rights they would have outside of the learning environment.

1. Therefore, I would encourage the General Assembly in Maryland to address the following:
2. School officials are required to report to police ANY alleged assault on school property.  Failure to do so will have two non-exclusive outcomes.  First, any school official that does not report to police any alleged assault of which they have knowledge will be summarily dismissed, their teaching certificate revoked, blackballed from working in education (private or public!) for a period of ten years, and will lose their pension.  Second, they will be made subject to obstruction of justice charges.
3. Any school official that encourages a victim of assault NOT to press charges will be charged with witness intimidation and will be summarily dismissed, their teaching certificate revoked, blackballed from working in education (private or public!) for a period of ten years, and will lose their pension.
4. Each school must issue a report (twice a year) on the number of crimes committed, broken down by category, and a detailed report on the disposition of each crime.  This report would obviously not include names, but would include the disposition of each crime.
5. Each school system must issue an annual report -- available for free at any school AND online -- detailing the information on an aggregate basis.
6. Parents must be made liable for their child's conduct. Both in a civil sense and a criminal sense.  But I would extend this into the school itself.  Let's stop this expulsion and suspension nonsense.  Anyone with 1/10th of a brain knows that suspended kids probably have less supervision at home than they would in school.  So I would flip the punishment.  If a student is given detention, the parent must come to the school to serve it with them.  If a student is "suspended", the parent must come to the school to serve it with them.  If a student is "expelled", they will be placed in home detention, given an electronic bracelet, and monitored.  If they break the terms of home detention, the PARENT goes to jail with them.  It is time that parents start to feel the pain that school administrators feel when their children are disrupting the educational environment.
7. Amend criminal law to require police officers to file complaints where their investigation uncovers an assault.
8. Any student charged and convicted of assault on school property (or when the school system has custody of them, such as on a field trip or sports event) will be ineligibile for a drivers license until their 18th birthday, will be ineligible for student financial aid or state scholarships until they are 25, and will be ineligibile to any higher educational institution in Maryland that receives state or federal money until they are 25.  Furthermore, students who are allowed to remain in school will be banned from ANY extracurricular activities (including attendance) until graduation or their 21st birthday, whichever comes first.
9. Any student over the age of 14 charged with assault will be tried as an adult.
10. If a student is charged and convicted of assault on on school property (or when the school system has custody of them, such as on a field trip or sports event), their parents will be billed for the cost of investigation, prosecution, and incarceration.
11. Any student who encourages, cheers on, or does not work to intervene (ie, by calling 911 or getting a school employee) OR refuses to answer questions in an investigation will be charged as an accessory after the fact, and subject to all the penalties as if they committed the assault.

I realize there is a lot of stick here, and not a lot of carrot.  But students are kids, and as such, they need to earn the privilege of the carrot.  We shouldn't reward students for acting appropriately in school.  If we do that, we might as well discard any notion of "honor" or "duty" in our society.  Acting with honor should be its own reward.  Acting dishonorably should come with extreme punishments.

Because violence in our schools is an unacceptable travesty.