Article

2008-04-11 -Lurid Crime Tales-

Teacher beating leads to calls to address classroom violence

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Posted by Fred 2008-04-11 00:00|| || Front Page|| [4 views ] Top

#1 City schools officials say the student involved in the attack on Berry has been suspended

I wonder if they got suspended for as long as that kid did who took a call on his cell phone from his mother in Iraq who was in the military.

Posted by gorb 2008-04-11 02:57|| 2008-04-11 02:57|| Front Page Top

#2 I watched every episode of the Baltimore based series, "The Wire." I would swear that the series is reality, captured by hidden cameras. It is certainly true that city truant officers haul street corner drug dealers to sign up for school, each September, for the sole purpose of increasing state funding. Once the punks sign up, they head back to the corner.

Posted by McZoid 2008-04-11 06:15|| 2008-04-11 06:15|| Front Page Top

#3 Student on student assaults occurred in the Indianapolis in the early 80s till the local DA assembled a grand jury, indicted principles for obstructing justice for failure to report and act on criminal assaults, and got plea bargains which removed them from working in the state. This is no different. It is criminal assault and the perps need to be handled like any other criminal, not someone or something that needs to be understood. It's not suspension - its criminal justice that's needed. Listen jerk if you 'want to be treated like an adult' we certainly will for punishment.

Posted by Procopius2k 2008-04-11 09:04|| 2008-04-11 09:04|| Front Page Top

#4 The school admin needs to have another class on how to look puzzled when discussing the increasing numbers of kids being homeschooled.

Posted by Richard Aubrey">Richard Aubrey 2008-04-11 11:29|| 2008-04-11 11:29|| Front Page Top

#5 In the spirit of the public schools, in order to better understand these "alienated" yoots, it looks like it's time for more teacher "sensitivity" training. And a buck a pack increase in the cigarette tax to pay for it.
Don't tell me I couldn't be a big city mayor...

Posted by tu3031 2008-04-11 11:34|| 2008-04-11 11:34|| Front Page Top

#6 and got plea bargains which removed them from working in the state

maybe they moved to Baltimore and got hired there.

Posted by Woodrow Slusorong7967 2008-04-11 11:43|| 2008-04-11 11:43|| Front Page Top

#7 And I was right...

The grainy cell-phone video of a student hitting Baltimore City art teacher Jolita Berry in her classroom, replayed on the national news and the Internet, has reinforced the wide concern among school safety experts that teachers often don't receive enough training in how to defuse potentially dangerous confrontations with students.

Berry's case has angered local officials, who said they would hold a meeting to try find ways to give teachers skills to deal with disruptive students. Baltimore City schools offer classes on how to deal with such situations, but they are voluntary, and are only available to a small number of teachers. Those who study school violence say that kind of instruction is crucial. "An essential part of new teacher training has to be about how to de-escalate conflict," said Jane Sundius at the Open Society Institute, a nonprofit that has studied school suspensions and funded programs to improve student behavior.

"Rather than confront the child, learn to move the child away from their peers," said April Lewis, director of safe and supportive schools in Baltimore. Students are often embarrassed in front of their peers and become more confrontational with a teacher because they don't want to be seen as backing down, Lewis said.

The attack occurred after Berry asked the student to take a seat. The girl refused and walked up to her. "She said she's gonna bang me," Berry said. "I said, 'Back up, you are in my space. If you hit me, I'm gonna defend myself.'" Berry said the principal told her that she had used "trigger words" that made the incident worse.

"Teachers need to sharpen their observation skills to notice when trouble is brewing," said Rick Phillips, executive director of Community Matters, a California nonprofit hired by schools to help reduce youth violence. "They need to know how to intervene effectively." When he was a teacher, Phillips said, his training didn't teach him to stand at the door of his classroom and check in with students daily on how their lives were going, but that is an essential part of keeping schools safe. "I don't think our teacher training has caught up with this problem."

Berry, the teacher who was attacked, joined the staff at Reginald Lewis last December. She maintains that she had good training and good mentoring from an experienced teacher, but it didn't help her."These students are so unpredictable and so nothing really prepares you for that" she said.

There were about 500 assaults on teachers and staff at Baltimore schools last year, although they represent a variety of incidents. For instance, students will be disciplined if a teacher is inadvertently touched while intervening to break up a fight.

Phillips said it isn't just the behavior of the teachers that can de-escalate a situation, but what students do as well. In this case, the rest of the class apparently watched the fight and did not intervene. One student reported the fight to the office, but others encouraged the girl to "hit her."

The Community Matters program tries to take leaders -- good and bad -- in a school and teach them how to maintain a safe environnment."We have understood that you can't legislate compassion or kindness. You can empower the influential leaders to speak up and other students will follow the modeling of those kids," he said.

In that environment, other students could have physically tried to stop the fight, or they could have told the girl to stop and reminded her what trouble she would get into if she hit the teacher.

Another view was that the community needs to get involved in helping support the children whose behavior is linked to family problems, said Anne-Marie Bond, assistant director for the social work community outreach service at the University of Maryland Baltimore.

"These issues are well beyond the school per se. They reflect other layers in the community and experiences students have," Bond said, adding, "It is hard for the school to address this without a more community-wide or city- wide aproach."

Much can be done to improve the counseling and mentoring in schools," she maintains. Reginald Lewis, for instance, doesn't have a mental health counseling, although it has dealt with many students from troubled families.

"The kids in the community experience a lot of trauma in their daily lives that are associated with poverty, addiction, street violence," Bond said.

The student who allegedly assaulted Berry was suspended, but the school system has not said what will happen to her. She could face an expulsion or transfer to another school or criminal charges from the teacher.

Posted by tu3031 2008-04-11 11:58|| 2008-04-11 11:58|| Front Page Top

#8 In other words Tu - they blame everyone else *except* the student. How Disgusting!

Its the teachers fault!

Its the fault of other students!

And they wonder why people are homeschooling so much......

Suspension? Suspension? What the f-k is that? She should be serving at least 90 days in ADULT JAIL for assult.

State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick called for increased character education, community partnerships and parental responsibility.

Oh yeah! That will work....

Posted by CrazyFool 2008-04-11 12:53|| 2008-04-11 12:53|| Front Page Top

#9 Who, in their right mind, would want to send one of their children to the Baltimore schools? This punk should be tossed out of school permanently, do two years highly publicized jail time AS AN ADULT, and every student in Baltimore should be told that if they touch a teacher in a fight, they'll get at least the same punishment.

Failing that, let the teachers start packing heat. When the first little Johnny, Janie or Shanniqua gets a .45 slug in the gut while assaulting a teacher, most of the little darlings will get the message loud and clear.

Posted by Zorba Sletch9834 2008-04-11 18:09|| 2008-04-11 18:09|| Front Page Top

#10 As a teacher I make the following comment: whenever a serious student incident occurs, the leftist types among the teachers (and they are legion) ask themselves what THEY have done wrong. Furthermore, public schools, following leftist ideology, have ruled out the concept of shame when such misdeeds are performed. The perpetrators are hidden behind layers and layers of student confidentiality, and are not identified as the miscreants they are to the student population as a whole. In other words, a students misbehaves and a cover-up immediately takes place.

Posted by borgboy 2008-04-11 19:19|| 2008-04-11 19:19|| Front Page Top

#11 When I went to school, violence wasn't a problem. Of course, I went to a Catholic school, and the really bad actors, if they got in at all, could be easily expelled.
Of course, there was always Fr. Poux, assistant headmaster and golf coach, with his cricket bat to explain things to the guys who thought they were tough.

Posted by Rambler in California">Rambler in California 2008-04-11 20:13|| 2008-04-11 20:13|| Front Page Top

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