New Violence Against Teachers

> During a dance at Gwynn Park High School in Brandywine, Md., an assistant principal had his throat slashed by a former student who came to make trouble.

> A sixth-grade teacher at Simon Elementary School in Washington, D.C., was stabbed with a knife thrown by a twelve-year-old boy who had been spanked for attacking the teacher with a broken bottle.

> Teachers in the East St. Louis, Ill., school system have become so terrified, says School Board President Charles Merritts, that three out of four are carrying guns to class.

A new wave of violence is sweeping U.S. classrooms. Much of it is centered in junior high schools, which have long coped with the most combustible years of adolescence. Yet the incidence of burglary, larceny, assault and even murder is rising in all public schools, reports the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Statistics suggest that more and more teachers are quitting their jobs out of sheer fear of their students.

Race and Rage. The subcommittee, chaired by Connecticut's Thomas Dodd, says that Chicago's teachers were attacked 1,065 times last year--an eight-fold rise in five years. During the same period, student assaults increased by 500% in the Philadelphia school system, which recorded 116 incidents last year. New York City reported 180. In five months, San Francisco's elementary-school students attacked their teachers 83 times.

The Dodd committee feels that a prime factor in school violence these days is racial desegregation. For one thing, it tends to bring the volatility of some ghetto students into the more decorous white community. To compound the difficulties, many school administrators underplay violence out of fear that it will reflect on their ability to maintain control. In Washington, D.C., for example, one elderly woman teacher was kicked in the shins so severely that several operations were required to remove blood clots in her legs. Yet instead of upholding her, the principal labeled her a "troublemaker." Students, realizing that punishment is unlikely, are soon out of control.

Shoulder to Shoulder. Another factor in classroom violence, says the committee, is overcrowded juvenile correction centers. In Washington, the juvenile reception home was designed to house 75 youths; it now holds 375. At the Philadelphia Youth Study Center, reports a committee investigator, rows of sullen boys often sit shoulder to shoulder all day on rows of wooden benches, getting up only for meals and a brief recreation period. With no place to put violent youngsters, authorities are forced to turn them loose--and compulsory attendance laws send them right back to school.

At present, the so-called solutions are grim and inadequate if not absurd. Many big-city slum schools have installed special lighting, hidden microphones, and burglar-alarm systems. New York City policemen often patrol their beats inside the schools. Yet exporting the custodial techniques of Sing Sing to the schools hardly creates authentic discipline, much less an atmosphere conducive to learning.

The Dodd committee concludes that the only way to defuse the schools is to separate the violent children from the others and provide them with care, help and rehabilitation. The committee is thinking about amending the Juvenile Delinquency Act of 1965 to provide the schools with ancillary services. But it may be a year before the committee makes any concrete proposal or persuades Congress to help pay for it.

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