It’s what everyone wants to know after a gang member terrorizes a neighborhood: Where are the parents?
For the last several months, at least some of them have been meeting in a South Side church basement to pray and cry and face a deep shame: They are mothers of the gang-bangers on the corners. Or they fear their child is about to join a gang.
Many are also single parents, struggling to pay bills. They work 16 hours a day, and every time they hear a gunshot, they worry their child has been shot or has shot someone else’s child. Some chase after their kids at 2 a.m.; others have stood in defiance when they won’t leave a corner.
And yes, they wonder what they did wrong.
Category Archives: Discipline / Violence
Gang Activity in Suburbs Acknowledged
Two weeks before the fatal shooting of a Franklin teenager in what appears to be a gang-related fight, Nashville police gave gang awareness training to Williamson County school faculty.
The school officials’ request in March for the training suggests a willingness to acknowledge, although not yet publicly, what they and local law enforcement had long been reluctant to admit:
Gangs exist in suburbia.
“Gangs have always been here, probably much longer than the Police Department was aware or recognized,” said Sgt. Charles Warner, a detective with the Franklin Police Department. “We’ve started to see a slow increase. By no means is there an epidemic.”
Several smaller communities outside of Nashville have seen an increase over the past few years in gang presence and gang-related crime. Local police departments attribute gangs’ migration to growth — and to Metro’s aggressive police crackdown on street gangs in Nashville, which pushes criminal activity to outlying cities.
Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison.
Philadelphia safe-schools advocate say the lack of discipline violates the law
Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is “dysfunctional and unjust,” according to a report by the district’s safe-schools advocate.
In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.
Prompted by questions from The Inquirer and two months after receiving Stollsteimer’s report – which he is required by law to complete – the state blasted the safe-schools advocate’s document and said it would release its own version next week.
“The draft report has serious problems – some of the data analysis is inaccurate, the legal analysis is flawed. We are releasing the official report on Monday,” said Sheila Ballen, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Bill allowing Rockford schools to share data gets 1st OK
Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey has said for months that state law should be changed to require the Rockford School District to share names and personal information about students suspected of being truants.
The latest plan spearheaded by the mayor and introduced in the General Assembly on Tuesday does not compel the School District to disclose students’ information. Instead, the proposed law says the School District “may” do so.
Even if the proposal becomes law, the School District still must decide whether to provide the information in the format and within the time frame Morrissey prefers.
“I don’t think any board members would have supported legislation that compels us to share that, no matter what the situation is,” said Nancy Kalchbrenner, president of the Rockford School Board. “The collaboration and our constant communication and working together is what’s important. And this is a tool to allow us to share information.”
Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success
Set just a few subway stops apart in blue-collar Brooklyn, drawing from a similar pool of new immigrants and American-born blacks, two high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.
Since the late 1990s, Lafayette High School in the Bath Beach neighborhood graduated fewer than half its students, posted dismal scores on standardized tests and, in the view of federal civil rights officials, “deliberately ignored” a series of bias attacks against Chinese-American students, including a valedictorian.
The principal appointed in 2005 to improve the school shut down its program for gifted students and, in front of the assembled faculty, likened Lafayette to a Nazi death camp. Finally, at the end of 2006, the Department of Education announced that it would close Lafayette and transform it into five mini-schools.
Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison
Many times people hide their heads in the sand when there is an accusation of behavior in Madison that might put the community at risk. “Not in my neighborhood” seems to be the response from many citizens in denial when the community is tainted with the reality of the growth of gang activity in Madison.
On this note, a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison social work students wanted to raise awareness in Madison of the prevalent increase in gang activity in Dane County communities. As a group project, they have researched the existence of gangs, their history, their trends and movement that could put children at risk.
On April 23 at Leopold Elementary School, Erin Wearing, Corrina Flannery, Amanda Galaviz, Teresa Rhiel, and Yer Lee, students of Professor Sandy Magana’s Advanced Macro Practice Social Work class, coordinated a community outreach event and informational session. It was presented for parents and educators in the Madison and surrounding communities by the Dane County Youth Gang Prevention Task Force.
Madison Police Detective George Chavez and Officer Lester Moore, along with Frank Rodriquez of the DARK Progam shed some light on the growing activity surrounding gang involvement in this area.
Gangs & School Violence Forum audio and video.
Fatal Accidents Erode Perk of Off-Campus Lunches
The students used to overflow the wooden booths and green tables at Don Jono’s Pizzeria, racing through pepperoni slices and large sodas before driving the quarter-mile back to Smithtown High School West in time for their next class.
But now the pizzas pile up behind the counter. Pete Crescimanno, a compact man with a neat black mustache who co-owns the place, estimates that he has lost more than $500 a week in sales since the school district ended its longstanding policy of allowing seniors to go off-campus for lunch. One recent morning, Mr. Crescimanno and an assistant pounded and tossed dough in a nearly empty storefront, with only the radio to break the silence.
“It’s not the same, and you miss that because you used to prepare for the kids and now you don’t see them,” he said. “Of course, you miss the business, but you also miss the fact that they’re not here anymore.”
Toki Middle School’s Justice Club Asks for Community Help
Some Toki Middle School students are shining a positive light on the school, despite recent negative incidents.
On Monday night, several Toki students spoke before the Madison School Board.
“We’re there, we care and want positive things to be noticed about Toki too,” explained one student.
“Toki Middle School is a unique learning environment with a lot of vibrant successful students that are a reflection of the teachers,” said another student.
The students were part of the school’s Social Justice Club.
“People at Toki make mistakes and learn from their mistakes just like everyone else in the world,” said one student.
Those mistakes were the two separate school fights that were videotaped with a camera phone and posted on Youtube.com
District officials said the students involved were disciplined.
“Toki is a wonderful school,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater. “It’s filled with wonderful kids and wonderful teachers and somehow in the rush to the press and the rush to complain we lose sight of that.
Tamira Madsen has more.
Is Urban Violence a Virus?
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.
In Praise of Milwaukee’s High School Anti-Violence Program
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
An anti-violence program at six Milwaukee high schools continues to show progress, and that is good news for Milwaukee Public Schools and especially for students in those schools.
Suspensions and both violent and nonviolent incidents continue to decline since Violence-Free Zones were implemented at South Division, Marshall, Bay View, Custer, North Division and Washington high schools, according to organizers for the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a Washington, D.C.-based group that is working with MPS. If the program continues to show progress, MPS should consider expanding it beyond those schools.
Survey of South LA Students
A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and — perhaps most striking — exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
“A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school,” said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. “They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there’s racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools — their schools look more like prisons.”
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low — and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don’t like to use the word “dropout” to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer “pushout,” because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
Milwaukee’s High School Violence Free Zones
he first step is for youth advisers assigned to any school – there are 53 district-wide charged with being mentors and disciplinarians – to seek out and build relationships with the 10% of the student body that’s most consistently causing trouble.
“The number one thing is follow-through,” Robinson said. “These students feel like, ‘Everybody has let me down.’ ”
Being accessible is important, as is giving that student time to trust the youth adviser with whatever might be going on at home – no money for food, the weight of responsibility for younger siblings, abuse or any number of problems related to or augmented by poverty.
According to 2005 U.S. Census data, a third of school-age children in Milwaukee lived with a family in poverty.
More on Milwaukee’s suspension rates here.
Madison School Board Discusses Discipline, Safety, Cell Phones and Code of Conduct
Watch the discussion via this video
The Madison School Board met on Monday night to discuss a new positive behavior support plan as well as a new code of conduct for students who attend Madison public schools.
The code of conduct has been under review for months by a committee who made recommendations to the board in a special meeting on Monday.
The meeting is especially timely after the highly publicized recordings of students fighting at Toki Middle School came to light last week.
Committee members will recommend making a few major revisions or additions to the code, including specifically banning voice or image recording.
Board members discussed safety, discipline and cell phones, which were all topics of importance that applied to the Toki situation, reported WISC-TV.
Madison’s new student code of conduct targets cell phones. Secret or hidden recordings are a serious offense that could get a student suspended or expelled.
“Cell phones and video cameras are being used in very wrong ways, to take pictures of tests, to film fighting, to record kids in the locker room, that’s just not acceptable,” said school board president Arlene Silviera. “I think we have to be very specific in the use of these types of devices — what can and what cannot be done.”
In an effort to give principals and administrators a chance to exercise discretion to expel a student who brings a weapon besides a gun to school, Madison school district officials are considering alterations to the language in the student codes of conduct.
Recommended revisions were discussed at Monday night’s School Board meeting.
The current rule for a first offense states that a student who has a weapon on school grounds besides a firearm, pellet gun or BB gun and isn’t carrying the weapon with an “intent to cause harm to another” will receive a five-day suspension. After a second offense, a student could face an expulsion recommendation.
The rule revision would give principals and administrators the option to expel the student for a first-time offense.
Dan Mallin, who works in legal services with the Madison Metropolitan School District and is a member of the committee drafting changes to the codes of conduct, said the rule change is meant to take into account a variety of circumstances.
Oakland Police Probe First Grader’s Skull Fracture
Oakland police have opened an investigation into the case of a first-grade boy whose skull was fractured Monday when, he said, an older student slammed him against a tree as he waited for a ride from his daycare provider.
Police investigators will visit Piedmont Avenue Elementary School today to question school officials and any students who might have seen what happened.
Seven-year-old Zachary Cataldo spent two nights in the intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital before returning home on Wednesday.
“After our investigation, the district attorney could very well decide to prosecute and file charges,” said Officer Roland Holmgren, spokesman for the Oakland police.
Vince Matthews, state administrator for the Oakland Unified School District, and other district officials did not return calls from The Chronicle on Thursday. Nor did Principal Angela Haick of Piedmont Avenue Elementary, where the incident took place.
But expressions of concern for Zachary – and outrage at what his father said was the school’s lax response to repeated bullying incidents – poured in from across the country after the story appeared in The Chronicle on Thursday.
“Facebook Taunts”
Twice this month, students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda have used their fists to settle disputes that arose on Facebook.
So Alan Goodwin, the principal, took the unusual step of asking parents to monitor their children’s postings on the social networking site. He did this in a posting to the school’s e-mail list, which is a forum as addictive to some Whitman parents as Facebook has become to their children.
“I am becoming increasingly frustrated by negative incidents at school that arise from students harassing other students on Facebook,” Goodwin wrote April 18.
Teens are conducting an increasing share of their social lives electronically, via text-messaging, e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook. Threats, harassment and bullying all have followed them online. Although such behavior is not new, research suggests that it is expanding rapidly, and educators and lawmakers seem resolved to pay closer attention to the words students exchange online while off campus
I find it remarkable that many are so cavalier about exposing their social networks, detailed activities and …… anything else on sites that mine all of this data for economic purposes. The recent discussion on “Technology & Madison Schools” is worth considering with respect to the issues our children need to understand today, and tomorrow.
Verona students suspended for drinking, drugs on school trip
Nineteen Verona High School students are facing the music after partying on a school-sponsored trip to Costa Rica.
School officials have suspended the students after learning the students drank alcohol and some smoked marijuana during the trip earlier this month.
“It was a bit of a sordid affair,” Principal Kelly Meyers said. “The preponderance of the trip was an outstanding and valuable learning experience, but it was tainted severely by a few nights of really, really poor choices. Now we’re embarrassed, all of us.”
Thirty-three students were on the 10-day trip that included hikes in rainforests and meeting villagers. The group belonged to a school club called the Land Rovers, which goes on regular outings. They paid for the trip out of their own pockets.
Most of the offenses took place in the students’ hotel rooms on the final night of the trip, Meyers said. After word got out about the misdeeds, the school launched an investigation into what Meyers called “a very unfortunate occurrence.”
The group had six adult chaperones, including five employees of the high school, which should be “quite ample,” Meyers said. That the chaperones apparently didn’t know what was going on means some changes in how trips are overseen in the future may be made, she said.
Madison’s Sennett Middle School Discipline Climate & Security Cameras
But her enthusiasm for the cameras pales in comparison to a new district-wide middle school program started this year called Positive Behavior Intervention Support, or PBIS.
“This is very good for kids — very, very good,” Lodholz said.
The PBIS program uses positive behavior support coaches like Sennett’s Jennifer Tomlinson. She works with students, teachers and staff to teach positive behavior skills to students.
Often the behavior is rewarded and promoted by the students themselves, through handmade posters or activities aimed at showcasing such behaviors, WISC-TV reported.
Officials said the key is to actually instruct kids how to behave correctly, be it through mediation sessions, classroom instruction or other innovative approaches.
“We need to teach kids how to be accountable for their actions and that’s what we’re doing through this system,” Tomlinson said.
Lodholz said the program helps offer instruction to students on how they should be behave. She said the PBIS program builds upon other Sennett school strategies and that it all seems to be working.
Last year incidents of misconduct at Sennett totaled 1,706, and 1,169 suspensions were handed out.
But in the 2007-08 school year to date, with the cameras and new program, Sennett’s seen more than 730 fewer misconduct incidents — at 973 — and only 94 suspensions.
Toki Middle School Security/Safety Update
This school year some parents, teachers and staff have complained about increasing safety and violence issues at Toki, including bad behavior at the school.
Last March, after a packed PTO meeting, school district officials added another security guard and a “dean of students” to help keep the peace. A positive behavior curriculum program was initiated as well.
“We certainly have a greater comfort level with where the school is headed at this point,” Yudice said.
However, some said that a couple of recent fights at the school posted on YouTube.com show the problems haven’t gotten any better.
PTO President Betsy Reck said teachers have told her things have not improved, despite the extra efforts the last month or so. She said many believe more needs to be done.
“It’s a typical, almost daily, occurrence, the fights at Toki,” Reck said. “It’s a very sad sort of affairs over there right now that they cannot get that under control.”
Last week, police were called to the school for two fights, which apparently were caught on video by students and posted recently on YouTube.com. They have since been removed from the site.
More here and here.
Andy Hall & Karen Rivedal review local school policies on video capture and internet access.
Student Fights At Toki Middle School Posted Online
Disturbing video showing girls engaged in vicious fights on the Toki Middle School grounds popped up on the popular Web site YouTube.
The video, which was posted on April 19, featured a fight between girls outside the school and one from inside the building.
Madison police confirmed that they responded to fights at Toki on Thursday, April 17 and one on Friday, April 18, but can’t say whether the fights were the same ones posted online.
“School staff are very aware not only of the videos, but of the things that happened,” said Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater. “The students have been identified and are being dealt with through the discipline system in the ways that are appropriate for what the incident was.”
That discipline could include suspension. Rainwater said the incidents are so new the discipline process is still ongoing.
The incidents come one month after extra security was added to the school in the form of an additional security guard and a dean of students to deal specifically with problematic students.
The additional safety measure came at the request of Toki parents who felt the school was unsafe with escalating violence all year.
More from Kathleen Masterson.
Suburban DC Schools Reject Metal Detectors
In spring 1991, after a teenage girl stabbed a classmate in the cafeteria of an Anacostia school, the D.C. Board of Education voted to install metal detectors at the front entrances of 10 middle and high schools.
No other school system in the region has embraced the technology, even as metal detectors have multiplied in courthouses, museums and other public buildings across the region over the past two decades.
Many school officials view metal detectors as costly, impractical and fallible. To suburban parents, they conjure up images of armed camps. Even at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, where three loaded guns were found in a locker last week, consensus is building against them.
“I don’t want my son to come to school through metal detectors. That’s prison,” said Alex Colina, speaking to several hundred other parents at a community meeting Monday night.
“Mayor’s Failure to Consult Schools is a Bad Sign”
I read with interest the Thursday editorial on “The mayor and the schools.” As a member of the School Board, I agree that a closer working relationship and collaboration between the city and the Madison Metropolitan School District would be a positive thing. Certainly there are critical issues in planning, housing development patterns, transportation, zoning, and other matters that have a critical impact on our district in both the short and the long term.
For example, the “best planning practices” of infill have had a great deal to do with enrollment declines in isthmus schools by replacing family housing with condos. Decisions by the traffic engineering officials — such as roundabouts at $1.2 million each — have an impact on our budget. When the city annexes land on the periphery, it affects how and where we must provide schools; we do not have a right to refuse to also annex the students that go with the land.
Without a voice in decisions and processes, we are effectively at the mercy of the city on key issues that affect how we use the scarce resources that we have under state finance.
More on the Mayor’s proposal here.
School’s New Rule for Pupils in Trouble: No Fun
Like a bouncer at a nightclub, Melissa Gladwell was parked at the main entrance of Cheektowaga Central Middle School on Friday night, with a list of 150 names highlighted in yellow marker, the names of students barred from the after-hours games, crafts and ice cream because of poor grades or bad attitudes.
“You’re ineligible,” Ms. Gladwell, a sixth-grade teacher, told one boy, who turned around without protest. “That happens. I think they think we’re going to forget.”
In a far-reaching experiment with disciplinary measures reminiscent of old-style Catholic schools or military academies, the Cheektowaga district this year began essentially grounding middle school students whose grade in any class falls below 65, or who show what educators describe as a lack of effort.
Such students — more than a quarter of the 580 at the school as of last week — are excluded from all aspects of extracurricular life, including athletic contests, academic clubs, dances and plays, unless they demonstrate improvement on weekly progress reports filled out by their teachers.
Spoilt Children Disrupt Schools
Primary schoolchildren spoilt by their parents can cause disruption in the classroom by repeating manipulative behaviour used at home, a report says.
Research for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) suggested a minority of children threw tantrums, swore and were physically aggressive.
NUT boss Steve Sinnott is calling for more advice for parents who struggle to say “no” to their children.
The government says it recognises parents want more support.
Cambridge University held 60 interviews with staff and pupils in 10 schools.
‘OPERATION SAFE PASSAGE’ | Parents keep kids home, fearing retaliation — so cops will escort them
“You got one of ours. We’re gonna get one of yours.”
That reality of gang life has kept nearly 200 Crane High School students from the ABLA Homes out of school since March 7, when a reputed gang member from ABLA gunned down another student who lived in rival gang territory. Their parents refuse to send them.
“You know they’re coming for somebody from ABLA, and it doesn’t have to be a gang member,” said a 16-year-old girl, a junior who was afraid to be identified.
So officials have come up with “Operation Safe Passage,” an unprecedented plan to protect students who fear they may be the next target.
Police to watch over buses
When spring break ends next week, Crane students from ABLA — also known as “the Village” — will gather at one central location each morning. CTA buses will pick them up after they’ve walked en masse to the bus stop.
Then a Chicago Police escort will follow the buses to a transfer point, where under the watchful eyes of even more officers, they will board second buses to Crane at 2245 W. Jackson. They will enter the school under police watch.
Schools embrace fingerprint scanning
The lunch lines in West Virginia’s Wood County schools move much faster than they used to. After students fill their trays with food, they approach a small machine, push their thumbs against a touch pad — and with that small movement, they’ve paid for their meal.
For half the state’s school districts, as well as hundreds more across the country, the days of dealing with lost lunch cards or forgotten identification numbers are over.
“A student cannot forget their finger,” said Beverly Blough, the director of food service in Wood County School District, which in 2003 became the first district in West Virginia to use finger scanners.
But the emergence of finger scanning has also sparked a backlash from parents and civil libertarians worried about identity theft and violation of children’s privacy rights. In several cases when parents have objected, school districts have backed down, and some states have outlawed or limited the technology.
Saving the Children
Killing himself was the only way the 11-year-old boy could think of to be with his mom, who died of cancer three years ago.
So he tried — twice. The first time was around two years ago, near the first anniversary of her death. He tried to strangle himself at home with rosary beads, even though his dad told him it was a mortal sin to take his own life.
The second attempt was near the second anniversary of his mom’s death, when he wrapped the straps of his bookbag around his neck in the coat room at his school.
In addition to the two suicide attempts, the boy had been soiling himself. His hygiene was poor. His grades were down. He was written up at school 40 times for various infractions.
After the coat room incident, Wilmington police got involved. When an officer responded and saw the marks on the boy’s neck, his training with the department’s Special Victims Unit of social workers kicked in.
He referred the boy’s father to a social worker and a grief counselor.
Now, a year later, the boy has made a complete turnaround. No more of the old problems. He has not been written up at all this year.
A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly
All lank and bone, the boy stands at the corner with his younger sister, waiting for the yellow bus that takes them to their respective schools. He is Billy Wolfe, high school sophomore, struggling.
Moments earlier he left the sanctuary that is his home, passing those framed photographs of himself as a carefree child, back when he was 5. And now he is at the bus stop, wearing a baseball cap, vulnerable at 15.
A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.
The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.
The aggressor heads to school, to show friends the video of his Billy moment, while Billy heads home, again. It’s not yet 8 in the morning.
Norman Fried has more.
Put young children on DNA list, urge police
Mark Townsend & Anushka Asthana:
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database – the largest in Europe – but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. ‘The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,’ Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling – everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database – is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.
Via Bruce Schneier.
Length of Suspension for Gun Threat Bewilders Pr. William Boy, Parents
On Wednesday morning, instead of heading to Rosa Parks Elementary School in Prince William County, James Falletta clambered downstairs to his basement bedroom. He plopped onto his blue New York Giants bedspread and stared at his pet mouse, Ratatouille, clawing inside a cage.
James, an honor-roll fifth-grader, was not sick. He was starting the 10th day of a seemingly indefinite school suspension for a threat he said was made in self-defense. Late last month, James said, a bully stalked him and his younger brother on their way home from school. To ward him off, James said he was going to go home and get a gun.
That apparently ended the incident but began a 12-year-old’s hands-on lesson on zero-tolerance policies in today’s schools. Administrators, mindful of fatal shootings that have occurred on or near campuses across the country, say they must intervene swiftly and forcefully any time gun threats emerge.
Madison school board candidates discus the Anthony Hirsch case and school boundaries
Hmm. This is interesting. To varying degrees, both Madison school board candidates express unease with the school district’s failure to report a suspected sex offender to state authorities.
Ed Hughes, who is running unopposed for Seat 7, raises the most questions, but Marj Passman, the lone candidate for Seat 6, also is critical.
On the other hand, both support the Madison school board’s recent decision on school boundaries, and both Passman and Hughes praise a committee’s recent report on school names.
Here’s what we asked the two candidates this week.HE DAILY PAGE: DO YOU AGREE WITH HOW THE MADISON SCHOOL DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION AND THE TEACHERS UNION HANDLED THE ANTHONY HIRSCH CASE?
HIRSH RESIGNED AS A SPECIAL EDUCATION AIDE AT LA FOLLETTE HIGH SCHOOL IN 2006 (HE WAS HIRED IN 1998) AFTER A FEMALE STUDENT COMPLAINED THAT HE TOUCHED HER LEG IN A SEXUALLY SUGGESTIVE WAY. HIRSCH DENIED IT HAPPENED.
THE SEPARATION AGREEMENT SIGNED BY THE DISTRICT AND THE UNION SAID THAT IN RETURN FOR HIRSCH RESIGNING THE DISTRICT WOULD OFFER A “NEUTRAL REFERENCE” TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS, AND THAT THE DISTRICT WOULD NOT NOTIFY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF INSTRUCTION THAT IT SUSPECTED HIRSCH HAD ENGAGED IN IMMORAL CONDUCT.
HIRSCH WAS SUBSEQUENTLY HIRED BY THE WAUNAKEE SCHOOL DISTRICT AND IS NOW FACING FELONY CHARGES OF POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND OF HAVING A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH A 14-YEAR-OLD LA FOLLETTE STUDENT. HE HAS YET TO ENTER A PLEA.
Officials increase security at Toki Middle School
Madison school officials on Tuesday said they ‘re strengthening security at Toki Middle School to calm concerns from staff members and parents that the building is becoming too chaotic.
Beginning today, Toki will get a second security guard and also will get a dean of students to assist with discipline problems. The guard is being transferred from Memorial High School, while the dean of students is an administrative intern who has served at La Follette High School.
“I think very shortly Toki will get back on its feet, ” said Pam Nash, the Madison School District ‘s assistant superintendent overseeing middle and high schools.
The moves come a week after about 100 parents, school staff members and top district officials attended an emotional, three-hour Parent Teacher Organization meeting at which speakers expressed fears about safety and discipline at the West Side school.
via Madison Parents’ School Safety Site.
Channel3000:
Police were called to Toki 107 times last school year for incidents that included 17 disturbances, 11 batteries, five weapons offenses and one arson, WISC-TV reported.
So far this year, police have been called to 26 incidents. The district security chief said the school is safe, though, and he warned the numbers can be misleading.
There was no way to compare those numbers to police calls at other Madison middle schools because the district doesn’t keep that data itself. But the district security chief said they are working on that.
Toki PTO President Betsy Reck said “it’s a start,” but she said she believe there needs to be a clearly defined “behavior plan” posted immediately that shows appropriate behaviors and the consequences if they are not followed.
Reck said she wants consistent consequences applied to negative behavior.
Madison Metro West Transfer Point Incident
5602 Tokay Blvd. (West Transfer Point)
Suspect(s) Suspect #1: Male, age 16, Madison; Suspect #2: Male, age 16, Madison
Suspect #1 was arrested and tentatively charged with Robbery (Party to a Crime).
Suspect #2 was arrested and tentatively charged with Robbery (Party to a Crime), and Possession of Drug Paraphernalia.
School is the “Last Moral Force”
Poor parenting and the erosion of family life are leaving schools as the only moral framework in many children’s lives, says a head teachers’ leader.
Schools were increasingly expected to “fill the vacuum”, John Dunford told the Association of School and College Leaders annual conference, in Brighton.
They now sometimes had to teach social skills such as eating a meal together.
“Schools have a much stronger role in bringing up children than in previous years,” Dr Dunford said.
Second Thoughts on Zero Tolerance Policies
The biggest problem with “zero tolerance ” policies is that they require zero thought.
A kid smokes pot or drinks on school property? Bam! They ‘re out for a year.
Simple, right? Even a kid could understand it. Except, sometimes, teenagers aren ‘t so great about thinking through the consequences.
A few weeks ago I wrote about a group of Marshall Middle School girls expelled for a year for alleged marijuana use. The district offers no services to expelled students, and one family couldn ‘t find another public school that would take their daughter.
Since then, I ‘ve heard similar stories. In one district, the parents didn ‘t see the expulsion file until the hearing. It was full of errors, even calling their daughter by a wrong first name, but still the School Board used the “investigation ” to kick her out for a year.
In another district, a middle schooler was expelled for a year for letting her friend try a prescription pill. Now, her mother writes, the girl is a “pariah ” who must apply for permission to be on school grounds for special events.
In still another, the parents couldn ‘t afford private school, and their young teen has been without any formal education for a year.
A teacher also wrote, questioning why I think the schools should be lenient to students who break clear rules.
Actually, I don ‘t. I ‘m all in favor of punishment. But do we as a society really want teens out of school for a year? Some may never come back. And then there are fairness issues. Many times, these kids come from poor families that don ‘t hire lawyers like wealthier ones would. And often, when kids are doing bad things at school, it ‘s because bad things are happening at home.
Madison Schools’ “Above the Line Behavior” Staff Training
Imagine being a student in a school where:
- All the adults (teachers, bus drivers, administrators, after-school staff) work hard to develop relationships.
- Behavioral expectations are consistent and taught in a way that makes sense.
- Misbehaviors are viewed as teachable moments and responses help build responsibility.
Such an experience was the goal of the summer professional development series provided last August 20-24. Through the combined funding of an Evjue mini-grant ($4730), an Aristos grant ($2500), and a grant through The Foundation for Madison Public Schools ($10,000), a six-session series with noted presenter Corwin Kronenberg (pictured) was planned for an array of different target audiences. Kronenberg, the author of the Above the Line model for supporting student behavior, had provided smaller-scale trainings during the two previous summers.
Teachers strike back at students’ online pranks
Tech-savvy teenagers are increasingly paying a heavy price – including criminal arrest – for parodying their teachers on the Internet.
Tired of fat jokes and false accusations of teacher-lounge partying or worse, teachers and principals are fighting back against digital ridicule and slander by their students – often with civil lawsuits and long-term suspensions or permanent expulsions.
A National School Boards Association (NSBA) study says that as many as one-third of American teens regularly post inappropriate language or manipulated images on the Web. Most online pranks deride other students. But a NSBA November 2006 survey reported 26 percent of teachers and principals being targeted.
“Kids have been pulling pranks on teachers and principals since there have been schools in the US, but now there’s an edge to it – the tone and tenor of some of these attacks cross the line,” says Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina.
In the growing backlash against these cybergoofs, however, real-world norms of propriety are being pitted against the uncertain jurisdictions of the Digital Age. A new test may be emerging on how far online lampooning can go, say First Amendment experts – and to what extent schools can control off-campus pranks.
Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers
Catching Up To the Boys, In the Good And the Bad
Teen Girls’ Alcohol, Drug Use on the Rise
She lost count of the vodka shots. It was New Year’s Eve 2005, and for this high school freshman, it was time to party. She figured she’d be able to sleep it off — she’d done it before. But by the time she got home the next day, her head was still pounding, her mouth was dry, and she couldn’t focus. This time, the symptoms were obvious even to her parents.
After that night, she realized the weekend buzzes had gone from being a maybe to a must.
“Before, it was a novelty,” the Silver Spring teen said. “It went from, ‘Well, maybe . . .’ to ‘Oh, I know I’m going to drink this weekend.’ ”
A generation of parents and educators have pushed to ensure that girls have the same opportunities as their male counterparts, with notable results. In 2007, for example, it was girls who dominated the national math and science competition sponsored by Siemens. But a growing number of reports show that the message of equality might have a downside.
Teenage girls now equal or outpace teenage boys in alcohol consumption, drug use and smoking, national surveys show. The number of girls entering the juvenile justice system has risen steadily over the past few years. A 2006 study that examined accident rates among young drivers noted that although boys get into more car accidents, girls are slowly beginning to close the gap.
School Programs Hope Babies in the Classroom Will Reduce Bullying
It’s just Nolan Winecka’s second time teaching a class of fifth graders at Emerald Park Elementary School in this Seattle suburb, and it shows as he stares nervously at the two dozen kids surrounding him.
He burps. And the class erupts in giggles.
Nolan is 6 months old and hasn’t had any formal pedagogical training. But to the group that put him in the classroom, he has everything he needs to help teach children an unconventional subject. A Canadian nonprofit group, Roots of Empathy, is now bringing to the U.S. a decade-old program designed to reduce bullying by exposing classrooms to “empathy babies” for a whole school year.
Nolan is one of 10 babies in a test of this latest education craze in Seattle-area schools. In all, more than 2,000 empathy babies are cooing, crawling and crying in classrooms in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. The idea is that children — typically from kindergarten to eighth grade — can learn by observing the emotional connection between the babies and their parents, who volunteer for the program and who are with them in the classroom. It’s part of a wave of programs aimed at boosting the “emotional literacy” of youngsters in schools by getting them to recognize and talk about their feelings rather than act out aggressively.
Criminals in school? Who knows?
lgin School District U46 officials say they’re usually in the dark when it comes to students’ criminal backgrounds.
“I don’t know what kids are out there and have what,” said Pat Broncato, Elgin School District U46’s chief legal officer. “They (students) may be under investigation for something, but that may never come to fruition; or they may not have done what they’re under investigation for. So we’re not made aware of who they are.”
Law enforcement and judicial entities across the nation — including the Elgin Police Department, the Kane County and Cook County state’s attorney’s offices and the Kane County Child Advocacy Center — don’t release students’ juvenile records because of stringent laws regarding a minor’s right to privacy, according to Douglas Thomas, a research associate at the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
The nonprofit center acts as the research division of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, based in Pittsburgh, Pa.
“There’s a fairly strict universal code of not sharing juvenile court records, seeing that confidentiality is one of the founding principles of the juvenile justice system,” Thomas said.
An exception is “if a juvenile has been adjudicated and is sentenced; then the sentencing order can be turned over to an education system that has him as a pupil,” said Steve Beckett, a professor and director of trial advocacy at the College of Law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Schools embracing powers for police
New law allows districts to authorize officers, set policies and obtain law enforcement training
Half a dozen Indiana school boards are considering whether to take on the new responsibility of authorizing police officers.
The move could create a minefield of issues from issuing badges to setting policies. So far, Pike Township Schools may be the only district to use a new law that allows school boards to appoint officers.
Previously, school districts could not grant police powers, although several have long said they have “police departments” that derive authority from a local sheriff or police chief.
In districts that convert, students will see little difference. A badge or uniform may change, but few officers will change duties.
The change affects school boards, which will have greater responsibility for making police policy regarding training, firearms use, police chases and various protocols.
Any school police policy entrusted to mayors and sheriffs would rest with school boards, too.
Pike Township Schools became the first school district to launch its own police department in July. Brownsburg, Center Grove and Indianapolis Public Schools are among those considering the change.
The Boy in The Window
By the end of the 2007 school year, he had grown faint. The wide toothy smile and copper-colored skin less defined, the baseball cap diminishing into the background of the poster-sized photograph. Dead for more than a year, Juan Carlos Ramos greets everyone from the window at the corner of Portland and Masonic streets in Albany. As August rolled around and parents began buying new backpacks and school supplies, readying their children for the 2007 school year, the family of Juan Carlos Ramos looked for a new picture to replace the one from which he had begun to fade. In September mylar balloons floated from the railing in front of the window and a colorful Feliz Cumpleaños banner hung across the window celebrating the birth of a young man who will never grow older, who will always be 19.
News of the February 2006 stabbing at the unsupervised party held by an Albany High School student at her parents’ home in the Berkeley Hills arrived on Saturday, a day after the stabbing. Ron Rosenbaum, then principal of Albany High School, sent an e-mail to the AHS e-tree that described in very general terms what had happened. At the time, my older son was a junior at AHS. He was on a camping trip with the Student Conservation Association, a group he volunteers with. When he returned on Sunday, I talked with both of my sons, the youngest a ninth-grader, telling them what had happened, asking them if they knew either Juan Carlos Ramos or the Oppelt children who had held the party. The answer was no to both.
They were not interested in discussing the event in any length, and I had little information. But I reminded them that if they were ever to find themselves in a similar situation that they had an obligation to call 911, whether or not they were implicated in any wrongdoing. I imagined that students would be talking about the party, and I warned my sons against participating in gossip. What I did not anticipate was that on Monday morning, the grassy median in front of Albany High School would be covered with local news vans and reporters, no doubt because the murder had happened in the Berkeley Hills and not in Richmond or Oakland, where similar events rarely attract such attention.
Monona Grove Student Targeted In Racially Motivated Incident
On Friday, several students got into an altercation, stemming from what some are describing as racially driven harassment.
Renee Roach said that her son, LeBraun, has been the targeted by a group of white students because of his race. LeBraun Roach is black. Roach said that her son has been taunted with racial slurs at school.
The day before the altercation at the school, several white students allegedly dropped a deer carcass on the windshield of a car at Roach’s home. The family said this wasn’t the first incident directed at their son. They said their driveway was blocked with Christmas trees just days earlier.
“My wife and kids are scared. That’s understandable when you find a dead deer in your driveway; you kind of wonder what else could be next. Are they going to throw something through the window?” said Arthur Roach, who found the deer carcass.
Suspending Students is Exactly the Wrong Idea
We talk so much about the value of education and the need to do something to reduce dropouts that it may surprise some people that nearly half of all the freshmen in the Milwaukee Public Schools have been ordered not to come to school.
In fact, beginning in the sixth grade, more than a third of every grade level until senior year is suspended and told to stay away from school for up to three days at a time. Many are repeatedly told not to attend school.
The good news is that Milwaukee Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, after more than five years on the job, has finally noticed the destructive practice he has been presiding over and decided to do something about it.
Andrekopoulos says Milwaukee may have the highest suspension rates in the country. He has asked outside educational experts, the Council on Great City Schools, to examine Milwaukee’s suspension policies and recommend ways to keep more kids in school.
The highest in the country. Hmmm. That sounds familiar. What else have we read recently about Milwaukee Public Schools leading the country? Oh, we remember now. MPS also had the lowest reading scores in the country.
Toki Middle School Child Enticement Case
On Tuesday January 15th around 9:24 Madison Police were called to Toki Middle School to take a report of an attempted child enticement. Two girls, ages 13 and 11, said they were followed by a man in a car as they walked to school along Raymond Road from Mckenna Blvd. to Whitney Way. At a couple of points in time the students say the man spoke to them through an open passenger’s side window. First he told the girls, “You guys are going to be late for school.” Following this comment the students quickened their pace. The man in the car continued to follow slowly behind them. After another block or two the man said, “I know your Dad, it’s okay, I can give you a ride … hop in.” One of the girls replied, “You don’t know my Dad.” They walked even more quickly eventually crossing from the south side of Raymond to the north side at Whitney Way where they cut in to the Walgreen’s parking lot. They then observed the man in the car speed up and continue eastbound on Raymond. The girls immediately contacted a guidance counselor
Madison police respond to gun call at Sherman Middle School
All is well after an incident earlier today when police responded to a “gun” call at Sherman Middle School. According to the Madison Police Department “an 11-year-old student discharged a cap gun inside the boy’s locker room.” While the gun was lime green students passing by only heard the sound of the cap gun discharging. Full report below:
Mo. tries new approach on teen offenders
At age 9, Korey Davis came home from school with gang writing on his arm. At 10, he jacked his first car. At 13, he and some buddies got guns, used them to relieve a man of his Jeep, and later, while trying to outrun a police helicopter, smacked their hot wheels into a fire hydrant.
For his exploits, the tough-talking teen pulled not only a 15-year sentence (the police subsequently connected him to three previous car thefts) but got “certified” as an adult offender and shipped off to the St. Louis City workhouse to inspire a change of heart.
It didn’t have the desired effect.
“I wasn’t wanting to listen to nobody. If you wasn’t my momma, or anybody in my family, I wasn’t gonna listen to you, period,” says Korey, now 19. “I was very rebellious.”
At that stage, most states would have written Korey off and begun shuttling him from one adult prison to the next, where he likely would have sat in sterile cells, joined a gang, and spent his days and nights plotting his next crime.
School Violence in Tennessee: Victim Suspended
I’M KIND OF EMBARRASSED to see this happen in Tennessee: “According to the Williamson County School System, self defense is no defense when it comes to getting suspended for fighting. ” In that case, I think she should sue the school system and principal for failing to protect her.
Middle School Safety Survey
FLORIDA TODAY analyzed seven years of misbehavior incidents reported by the district to the state. The newspaper calculated a rate, which is the number of incidents per student, so schools could be compared regardless of their enrollment size.
The findings, which cover the 2000-01 through 2006-07 school years, showed:
- The rate of minor violations, such as skipping detention and classroom misconduct, has been on the rise for six of the past seven years, including the past two, while the rate of serious offenses steadily declined each year. Still, both serious and minor incidents in middle schools outpaced those at the high school level. Serious incidents include fighting, drug and tobacco use and possession, battery and making threats against others.
- Showing disrespect toward teachers and insubordination — the blatant refusal to follow directions or rules — were among the most common minor violations committed by middle-schoolers.
- Of the 12 middle schools, Jackson in Titusville had the highest rate of overall incidents, including minor and serious offenses, each year, except 2001-02 when it had the second highest rate behind Southwest in Palm Bay. Two beachside schools — Hoover in Indialantic and DeLaura in Satellite Beach — had the lowest rate of overall incidents during the past seven years.
16 Year Old Mugged Near West High Thursday Evening
Around 6:26 p.m. on December 20th Madison police responded to the 2300 block of Eton Ridge to meet with a robbery victim. A 16-year-old told police he had just finished basketball practice and was crossing Regent Street when he observed a group of approximately seven individuals. The victim walked from Regent Street to Virginia Terrace [MAP]
to where his car was parked on Eton Ridge. As he neared his vehicle he says three from the group he had noted moments earlier came up quickly behind him. He says perpetrator #1 grabbed him and demanded money. He did not have any money. The victim says #1 next rummaged through his pockets and stole his iPhone.
No weapon was seen, and it is not known whether this robbery and another (case #152841) that happened on N. Mills Street two hours later are connected.
Madison School Board Votes for More Security Funds
Listen to the discussion [47MB MP3 Audio].
Andy Hall & Brittany Schoep:
“This is one of the most important things we’ve brought before you,” Rainwater told the board. “It is critically needed to ensure our schools continue to be safe.”
“We’re walking a really fine line right now,” School Board President Arlene Silveira said. “I think these positions will really help keep us on the positive side of that line.”
The high school positions are designed to help students with behavior, academic, social, transitional and other problems who can hurt themselves and the learning environment, Memorial High School Principal Bruce Dahmen said.
In an interview before Monday night’s meeting, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for high schools and middle schools said, “The number of incidents I deal with in the high schools and middle schools is going up every year. We want to get a proactive handle on it. It’s as simple as that.”
“This is not only important but critical to the future of our schools,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said as he recommended an initial proposal to spend $720,500 for security measures. The money is available through the recently signed state budget, a windfall Madison schools did not know they would get when the Board inked the final budget in October.
The board approved hiring four case managers at East, West, Memorial and La Follette and five positive behavior coaches will be brought on board at O’Keeffe, Sherman, Jefferson, Black Hawk and Whitehorse middle schools.
Related:
- Police calls and discipline rates – Madison middle schools | High Schools
- Discipline / School Violence Posts
Madison Schools Consider an Increase in School Safety/Security Spending
We are at a point in our high schools and middle schools where we need to take some action to assure the public that our schools remain safe and secure,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said. He noted that public safety had become a significant issue in neighborhoods throughout the city.
But long time board member Carol Carstensen asked to table the proposal, and other board members agreed to put the decision off a week for more study.
“I’m probably going to vote for it,” she said. “But I would like a little more time and more details in the next week.”
Related:
- Police calls and discipline rates – Madison middle schools | High Schools
- Student/Staff Safety Options
- West High / Regent Neighborhood Crime Discussion
- Discipline / School Violence archives
Madison School Board Debates School Security
The Madison school board on Monday night is set to consider approving a $780,000 plan to tackle problem behavior in middle and high schools.
Principals have been complaining that behavior issues are creeping up, said Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. That includes everything from running in the hallways to bullying to fighting.
School officials want to hire what amounts to be a behavior coach in its middle and high schools. The staff person would work with students with behavior issues, reaching out to them and contacting their parents or county agencies, as needed.
At the high school level, the proposal would add four behavior and case managers to work with students who are already having problems, who may be disengaged or disruptive.
At the middle school level, the district wants to add seven and a half positive behavior coordinators who would help teach students how to be better school citizens.
“In our middle schools, I would say if there is one area that we have seen a bit of a shift in behavior, it’s bus behavior,” said Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for Madison Middle and High Schools. “We have more issues on middle school buses than any of us would like. That’s an area, that behavior piece, that we want to target as well.”
Part of the school security proposal would include adding two extra security guards at each of the city’s four high school and installing surveillance and radio equipment at middle schools.
Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2006
Presents data on crime and safety at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population. A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It also provides the most current detailed statistical information on the nature of crime in schools, school environments, and responses to violence and crime at school. Data are drawn from several federally funded collections including the National Crime Victimization Survey, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, School Survey on Crime and Safety, and School and Staffing Survey.
Many young black men in Oakland are killing and dying for respect
Along with the Christmas trees and family gatherings, there’s another end-of-the-year ritual in Oakland – a candlelight vigil for the murdered.
The body count is woven into the civic consciousness here – a number chased by homicide inspectors, studied by criminologists, lamented in churches, reported by journalists. Every mayor leaves City Hall on broken promises to quell the violence, and the killings continue. An additional 115 have been killed this year, putting Oakland on pace for another gruesome record.
In the last five years, 557 people were slain on the city’s streets, making Oakland the state’s second-most murderous city, behind Compton.
Most victims are young, black men who are dying in forgotten neighborhoods of East and West Oakland.
A handful of their killers, speaking from prison, describe an environment where violence is so woven into the culture that murder has become a symbol of manhood.
Are We Too Tough on Kids Who Commit Crimes? States take new look at push to charge juveniles as adults
A generation after America decided to get tough on kids who commit crimes – sometimes locking them up for life – the tide may be turning. States are rethinking and, in some cases, retooling juvenile-sentencing laws. They’re responding to new research on the adolescent brain and studies that indicate teens sent to adult court end up worse off than those who are not: They get in trouble more often, they do it faster and the offenses are more serious. Some states are reconsidering life without parole for teens. Some are focusing on raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction, while others are exploring ways to offer kids a second chance, once they’re locked up – or even before. “There has been a huge sea change…it’s across the country,” said Laurie Garduque, a program director at the MacArthur Foundation, which is heavily involved in juvenile justice reform.
Near West Side Madison City Bus (Metro) Incident
Via a reader’s email – Madison Police Department:
On November 19th at 2:44 p.m. Madison police responded to 1300 Seminole Highway after a Metro bus driver noticed someone pointing a gun out of a window on the back of his bus. This was a bus with about 50 Cherokee Middle School students on board. They were going home from school. The driver also indicated he had been shot in the back of the head with a BB. This caused no injury. Officers were able to find a Smith & Wesson black plastic BB/pellet gun & a container of BBs in a backpack. The 13 year old listed above admitted the backpack was his and he had fired the weapon. A friend of his was arrested for disorderly conduct after he threatened to harm other students. He believed one of those students had “snitched.”
Madison Teacher Safety: Going to Court
WKOW-TV [Watch Video | mp3 Audio]:
February 13 became a tense day in two, separate Madison schools.
Police reports show a fifteen year old student at Memorial High School became angry with special education teacher Tim Droster. Another staff member told officers the student made motions to mimic the act of shooting Droster. The student was arrested.
At Cherokee Heights Middle School, police reports show a thirteen year old student reacted to being denied laptop computer priveleges by posing this question to special education assistant Becky Buchmann: “Did you want me to gun you down?” Juvenile court records show the student had previously shot an acquaintance with a BB gun, and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) information stated the student had also brought a BB gun to school and had gang affiliation.
Buchmann went to court and obtained a restraining order against the student.
Droster worked through school officials and his threatening student was given a different school schedule and new conduct rules.
Attorney Jordan Loeb has represented teachers seeking restraining orders to protect themselves in the classroom. “It’s controversial,” Loeb told 27 News.
But Loeb said teachers are no different than someone from any other walk of life when it comes to needing the authority of a judge to insure a threatening person does not cause harm.
“When it’s your safety on the line, you have to do everything you believe is necessary to keep yourself safe.”
Loeb estimated an average of ten teachers and other school staff members per year over the past decade have obtained restraining orders against threatening students and adults in Dane County courts.
But school district statistics show a more than five fold increase in teacher and staff injuries caused by students in the past three years.
In 2003, of 532 injury reports submitted by teachers and staff members, 29 were the result of student assaults.
In 2006, 540 teacher and staff injury reports involved 153 student assaults.
School district spokesperson Ken Syke said the most recent student assault numbers may be inflated by the inclusion of teacher injuries incidental to fights between students.
Related:
‘No Child’ Data on Violence Skewed: Each State Defines “Dangerous School”
A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify “persistently dangerous schools” is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year.
Maryland had six, all in Baltimore; the District and Virginia had none.
At Anacostia Senior High School last school year, private security guards working under D.C. police recorded 61 violent offenses, including three sexual assaults and one assault with a deadly weapon. There were 21 other nonviolent cases in which students were caught bringing knives and guns to school. Anacostia is not considered a persistently dangerous school.
One high school in Los Angeles had 289 cases of battery, two assaults with a deadly weapon, a robbery and two sex offenses in one school year, according to an audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general. It did not meet the state’s definition of a persistently dangerous school, or PDS. None of California’s roughly 9,000 schools has.
The reason, according to an audit issued by the Department of Education in August: “States fear the political, social, and economic consequences of having schools designated as PDS, and school administrators view the label as detrimental to their careers. Consequently, states set unreasonable definitions for PDS and schools have underreported violent incidents.”
Critics of the law, including lawmakers who hope the policy can be changed as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, say the low number is a sign the legislation is not working.
Madison School District School Security Discussion
Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 40MB mp3 audio file. Participants include: Superintendent Art Rainwater, East High Principal Al Harris, Cherokee Middle School Principal Karen Seno, Sennett Middle School Principal Colleen Lodholz and Pam Nash, assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
A few notes:
- First 30 minutes: The City of Madison has agreed to fund police overtime in the schools. Johnny Winston, Jr. asked about supporting temporary “shows of force” to respond to issues that arise. Maya Cole asked what they (Administrators) do when staff choose not to get involved. East High Principal Al Harris mentioned that his staff conducts hall sweeps hourly. Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz mentioned that they keep only one entrance open during recess.
- 52 minutes: Al Harris discussed the importance of consistency for staff, students and parents. He has named an assistant principal to be responsible for security. East now has data for the past year for comparison purposes. Additional assistant principals are responsible for classrooms, transitions and athletics.
- 55 minutes: Art Rainwater discussed District-wide procedures, a checklist for major incidents and that today parents are often informed before anyone else due to cell phones and text messaging.
- Recommendations (at 60 minutes):
- Pam Nash mentioned a strong need for increased communication. She discussed the recent West High School community forums and their new personal safety handbook. This handbook includes an outline of how West is supervised.
- 68 to 74 minutes: A discussion of the District’s equity policy vis a vis resource allocations for special needs students.
- 77 minutes – Steve Hartley discusses his experiences with community resources.
- 81+ minutes: Steve Hartley mentioned the need for improved tracking and Art Rainwater discussed perceptions vs what is actually happening. He also mentioned that the District is looking at alternative programs for some of these children. Student Board Representative Joe Carlsmith mentioned that these issues are not a big part of student life. He had not yet seen the new West High safety handbook. Carol Carstensen discussed (95 minutes) that these issues are not the common day to day experiences of our students and that contacts from the public are sometimes based more on rumor and gossip than actual reality.
I’m glad the Board and Administration had this discussion.
Related:
A Discussion of the Madison School District’s Expulsion Process
Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 45MB mp3 audio file.
Sun Prairie Schools Dealing With Bad Bus Behavior
Bus aides will soon be riding on some Sun Prairie school bus routes to keep the peace.
One of those routes is an elementary route from Horizon Elementary, reported WISC-TV.
Horizon principal Kathy Klaas said a letter was sent home to parents of the students who ride that route, to alert them to the fact that an aide would soon begin riding along.
“We’ve had some issues of horsing around,” said deputy district administrator Phil Frei.
“Sometimes that horsing around gets more serious where kids are bringing a paper clip and threatening kids with a paper clip. So, mostly it’s horsing around, but we wouldn’t allow that behavior in a classroom, and we don’t allow that on a bus.”
Frei said most of the 28 bus routes have 70 students on board, which can get loud, noisy, and sometimes out of hand.
If a problem or conflict arises, most drivers write up a report at the end of their shift. After that the school district must investigate the report and take the appropriate action.
Madison Schools’ Expulsion Data Update
A total of 92 students were recommended for expulsion in 2006-07, compared with 105 similar recommendations the previous year. Students are recommended for expulsion for a serious violation of the district’s student conduct and discipline plan.
Following the recommendation, the student may be expelled, or may be diverted or dismissed from the process for special education reasons, or because there is not sufficient proof of the violation.
According to the report, 12 students were expelled for use of force against a staff member, eight were expelled for possession of a weapon with intent to use, and seven were expelled for possessing an illegal drug with intent to deliver.
Other offenses included engaging in physical acts of violence as part of a gang (four students), possession of a bomb or explosive device or making a bomb threat (three students), possession of a pellet or BB gun (three students), and physical attacks, arson, serious threats to students and something called “volatile acts.”
School Board President Arlene Silveira noted that the board will be considering expulsion policies at its meeting on Monday.
“The board has had a series of meetings to ensure that we have a fair, consistent and unbiased process for considering expulsions,” Silveira said. “This is an ongoing process, and we will be taking a look at how we fairly handle the student code of conduct in coming meetings.”
Related:
- Police Calls and Discipline Rates – Madison Middle Schools
- Police Calls and Discipline Rates – Madison High Schools Schools
Much more on gangs and school violence.
Waukesha County School Patrols Discussed
Some county supervisors are trying to cut the Sheriff’s Department budget next year in hopes of forcing the department to demand more funding from the schools.
Sheriff’s officials contend the school assignments are routine patrol decisions that should be left to law enforcement.
But critics of the program say the schools are getting special treatment and county taxpayers should not have to pay for it.
“There’s something wrong here,” said Supervisor Rodell Singert of Vernon, who is proposing a $200,000 cut in the sheriff’s budget next year.
Some supervisors say they are willing to see no sheriff’s deputies inside Arrowhead High School and others, if the school districts are unwilling to pay the bill.
Singert said having deputies patrol school grounds is “a substitute” for having school administrators capable of maintaining order in the facilities.
“I’d rather put teachers in the classrooms for that kind of money,” he added.
Police Will Be At Barneveld Schools Wednesday
The Barneveld School District said it will continue to have a police presence Wednesday.
Schools officials said they have identified the student they said is responsible for making a threat about a shooting set to occur later this week. District officials said that the graffiti was found on a bathroom wall.
District Superintendent Joe Bertone said that the student has been suspended pending an expulsion hearing from the school board.
Bullying costs school $4M
After a bully attacked Danny Heidenberg at Hillel School of Tampa, his parents complained to the principal of the Jewish community day school.
When the bully broke 12-year-old Danny’s arm in January 2004, they sued.
On Monday, a Hillsborough jury ordered the school to pay $4-million for failing to keep Danny safe.
Now 16, he has permanent nerve damage in his left hand and likely won’t be able to follow in his surgeon parents’ footsteps. The verdict sends a strong message to schools, the family’s attorney said.
“Schools have to wake up to the point that bullying is serious and supervision is serious,” said David Tirella, an attorney with Cohen, Jayson & Foster. “They allowed a bully to escalate.”
High rate of violence seen in teens’ lives
More than 40 percent of male high school students in Boston say they have carried a knife and more than 40 percent of all students believe it would be easy to get a gun, according to a new public health survey.
One in five students has witnessed a shooting and does not feel safe in his or her neighborhood, the survey found.
The report, which surveyed more than 1,200 students in 18 Boston public high schools in the spring of 2006, found that two-thirds of students said they had witnessed violence in the year before the survey, and one-third had been involved in a fight themselves. Nearly 40 percent of male students had been assaulted, and 28 percent said they did not feel safe on the bus or train.
The report, which city officials are releasing today to launch a series of community meetings on teenage health, highlights the pervasive exposure to violence among city teenagers and the fear it can generate.
The survey’s finding of widespread fistfights – more than one-third of male and female students reported having hit, punched, kicked, or choked someone in the past month – was also disturbing, Ferrer said. Such violence can easily intensify to weapon use, she said.
“We’re missing the precursor to more serious violence, which is a lot of aggressive behavior,” she said. “We need to give our students some skills on how to resolve conflict before it escalates.”
Marcus Peterson, a member of a youth antiviolence group called Operation Greensboro said public apathy contributes to the persistent violence.
“It’s not really an issue anymore,” he said. “It’s just accepted.”
Student beaten at Hayward High can sue district, appeals court says
A man who says he was badly injured by gang members on his second day at Hayward High School while campus safety supervisors sat in their offices nearby, oblivious to the attack, has won the right to a trial in his lawsuit against the school district.
The plaintiff, identified by a state appeals court as Luis M., suffered a ruptured spleen and other injuries in the February 2003 attack, his lawyer, Robert Abel, said Monday. The state First District Court of Appeal ruled Friday that he can go to trial on his negligence claim against the Hayward Unified School District.
Abel said Luis M. was a 15-year-old sophomore and unaffiliated with any gang when the attack happened. He had just transferred from San Francisco to Hayward, where his mother thought the environment would be better for him, Abel said.
Luis M. transferred to another school after the attack and graduated but still suffers from his injuries, the lawyer said.
Mom101: Mom, why’d a teacher get kicked in the head?
Above is a direct quote from the most recent edition of my daughter’s school newsletter, the Lapham Elementary Lookout. Parts of Madison’s Affiliated Alternatives program were moved into her K-2 school this year as a budget Band-Aid that kept Marquette and Lapham from consolidating into one large kid factory. At the time, the decision was steeped in controversy, politics, and emotion. I defaulted to the “for Affiliated Alternatives moving in” side as I vehemently opposed the consolidation option.
I like to think I’m an open-minded person, not the type of mom who’d get all freaked out about some alternative teens under the same roof as my young ‘un. I recall actually being intrigued by the idea that high school students would be attending school just one floor above my six-year-old. I know there was a moment in which I wondered why, exactly, these students needed an alternative to traditional high school, so I looked it up online. It seemed like a great program with educational options for every type of student, those who’d fallen behind in coursework, were pregnant, those who needed vocational skill training in addition to regular schoolwork, the inevitable et ceteras of adolescence. When I read the Lookout, I thought, smoking on school grounds! Tsk, tsk. Ah, well, nothing a kid couldn’t run into walking down the street. Could be worse.
Police calls and discipline rates – middle schools
Following on our previous post, we’ve taken a look at the same categories of data, but this time for MMSD middle schools. The same data notes from the previous post apply here, with a couple of additional notes: the police call data for Toki includes police calls for Orchard Ridge Elementary School, if any, since those schools share the same block; and enrollment dropped in many of the middle schools between the comparison years (enrollment declined about ten percent in the aggregate for MMSD middle schools; school-specific enrollment information is available at the DPI web site).
Madison High School Police Calls & Discipline Rates:
Comparing 2001/2002 and 2005/2006
Madison Parent’s School Safety Site:
When there’s violence at school, parents want answers to their questions about school safety. If parents are told “our school is safer than other schools”, where’s the data that supports that vague reassurance? Police call-for-service data (as posted on this site from time to time) is one indicator of school crime, but it’s only part of the picture, and may not be a reliable basis of comparing school to school – or even comparing whether the safety situation in one particular school is improving or deteriorating.
We looked at police call data for East, LaFollette, Memorial and West High Schools in 2001-02, and in 2005-06. (Data notes: This data was obtained by public records request to the Madison Police Department. Due to the format in which the data was provided, the call totals for each school are for calls made to the block in which each school is located, rather than the specific street address of the school. Calls for each year were tallied over a July 1 through June 30 period in order to track the corresponding school years used for comparison below. Variations in school enrollment between the comparison years aren’t reported here since they don’t appear to affect the analysis or conclusions, but that information is readily accessible on the DPI web site. The DPI web site is also the source of the discipline data presented below.)
Tension Tied to Race Percolates in Ithaca
Nestled in the hills near Cayuga Lake’s southern tip, surrounded by creeks, waterfalls and two of the Northeast’s more prestigious colleges, this city of about 30,000 has long prided itself on its cultural diversity.
In 1997, the Utne Reader put Ithaca — where students from Cornell University and Ithaca College boost the population to about 50,000 — atop its list of “America’s Most Enlightened Towns,” trumpeting an environment-friendly business community and a local currency system intended to support city merchants.
A popular bumper sticker here reads, “Ithaca: 10 square miles surrounded by reality.”
But as reality encroaches, residents and community leaders now concede that racial tensions have long simmered at Ithaca High School, a volatile mix of blue-collar youths from the city, children of the farms in the surrounding countryside and the sons and daughters of professors.
“This community is at the boiling point, because not only students are frustrated, so are parents,” said James Turner, founder of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell. “There’s a broad-based lack of confidence in the leadership of the district. I’m watching this go from bad to worse.”
Violence at Lapham
Police were called to the alternative program at Lapham Elementary after a teacher tried to break up a fight on Tuesday. She fell, was kicked in the head, and taken away in an ambulance.
The Madison police Web site includes no incident report on the event.
Smaller gangs proving deadly
Cities across the country are facing a new kind of gang problem, involving loosely affiliated, but heavily armed, neighborhood organizations that deal drugs and ferociously defend their small turf, acting Deputy Attorney General Craig Morford said Monday.
Federal and local law enforcement officials have long identified such gangs as major factors in New Orleans’ violent street culture. But Morford said that in recent years officials across the country are also starting to focus on these organizations, finding that they are often more violent than established groups such as the Bloods or the Crips.
“They are shooting at each other with a complete wantonness that is different than before,” said Morford, who is the second-in-command at the U.S. Department of Justice. Morford, who is scheduled to give a speech today at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference, met with attorneys at U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office on Monday.
These proto-gangs don’t have the hierarchical structure of a traditional gang. Instead, they tend to be named after a street that the members hail from. The members are often young, sometimes juveniles, Morford said.
Because of the lack of deeply ingrained organization, law enforcement didn’t always pay attention to these groups. But that has begun to change, with U.S. attorney offices leading task forces that bring local and federal law enforcement together to tackle such groups, Morford said.
Student / Staff Safety Options
Via a reader’s email:
An information page on restraining orders from the Dane County Clerk of Court
The statute for harassment restraining orders is Wis. Stat. sec. 813.125. Clusty / Google / Live / Yahoo
Guide for citizens [PDF].
Madison School District Code of Conduct.
I Just Couldn’t Sacrifice My Son
When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy.
I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends — most but not all of them white — whom I’ve chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached school age:
I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.
After nearly 20 years in the city’s Takoma neighborhood, the last six in a century-old house that my wife and I thought we’d grow old in, we have forsaken the city for the suburbs.
Related:
- Where Have All the Students Gone?
- This is Not Your Grandchild’s Madison School District
- Promises Betrayed
Megan McArdle has more.
Middleton Elementary School Lockdown?
Hows this for Bureaucratic horse ____.
I got a call on Friday from my wife telling me that our daughters school, Sunset Ridge Elementary in Middleton, was on lock down. I asked her if she knew what was going on, but she said they couldn’t tell her, so I left work and picked up my daughter as quickly as possible.
When I got to the school the doors were locked, and I had to show an ID to get in. (I’m fine with that part) So I got my daughter, who’s 7 and has no clue why the school had to close, and I asked the after school teacher why the school was on lock down.
His reply was “I’m not really sure on the specifics”
I replied with ” OK, how about what’s going on minus the specifics”
Other teacher buds in “They’ll be sending a note home for it.”
so the weekend goes by, nothing posted on their website, or the school districts website. I take my daughter into school today instead of letting her take the bus as I wanted to find out what was going on.
So I drop my daughter off, and head to the office.
Lesson of shootings: Schools act too late
As school officials in Cleveland revise their security plans after a shooting rampage by a 14-year-old gunman, professionals who study youth violence said the solution is simple: Pay attention to threatening behavior and talk.
A week before Asa Coon wounded four people and fatally shot himself at SuccessTech Academy in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday, he had threatened to blow up the school and stab students, said Doneisha LeVert, 14.
Fortifying schools with metal detectors, security guards and surveillance cameras doesn’t guarantee that a gunman will be kept out, criminologists and educators said. There were no metal detectors at SuccessTech on Wednesday.
The experts said educators should learn a key lesson from the more than two dozen school shootings since Columbine in 1999: Troubled teens who plan attacks often warn of their intentions. Schools should teach staff and students to recognize and report threats, and require they be investigated, they said.
Study: Bullies and bullied more likely hit by crime
As a growing number of states pass laws against bullying, new research finds that bullies and their victims are more likely than other children to be victims of crime outside of school.
“They’re often victimized in the community,” says Melissa Holt, research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, co-author of a new study on bullying.
The kids in the study at greatest risk are those who are both bullies and victims of bullies, Holt says. Of those, 84% had been victims of a crime, including burglary and assault, and 32% had been sexually abused. The study was based on interviews with 689 fifth-graders in 2005 in an unidentified urban, low-income school district in Massachusetts. Holt says the area’s overall crime rate is higher than average, but she believes that the pattern of victimization would hold in most places.
The study found that 70% of bullies and 66% of bullying victims were crime victims, compared with 43% of kids who were neither bullies nor victims.
Holt says bullies may be less apt to walk away from fights, and therefore more likely to be assaulted, and more likely to associate with aggressive kids who would commit crimes against them. A shy or insecure child is vulnerable in and out of school, she says.
Cleveland School Gets $2.5M for Security
The state will provide $2.5 million to Cleveland schools to upgrade security after a student gunman shot and wounded two teachers and two students before he killed himself, the governor’s office said Friday.
The money would be available for security upgrades selected by the district, which has identified installing metal detectors in all of the district’s 110 schools as a top priority, Keith Dailey, spokesman for Gov. Ted Strickland said Friday.
LaFollette High School Weapons Violation
On October 18th around 9:05 Madison police arrested a Lafollette High School student on the above tenative charges. The student is accused of pulling a small knife from her purse and threatening another student with the knife. This happened in a math class following an argument between the two students. A teacher was able to help diffuse the situation peacefully and get the knife away from the suspect. There were no injuries
West High / Regent Neighborhood Crime Discussion
Parents, staff and community officials met Wednesday night to discuss a number of recent violent incidents at and near Madison West High School [map]
I took a few notes during the first 60 minutes:
Madison Alders Robbie Webber and Brian Solomon along with James Wheeler (Captain of Police – South District), Luis Yudice (Madison School District The Coordinator of Safety And Security), Randy Boyd (Madison Metro Security) and West Principal Ed Holmes started the meeting with a brief summary of the recent incidents along with a brief school climate discussion:
James Wheeler:
Police beat officer and Educational Resource Office (ERO) patrol during West’s lunch period.
“There have been complaints from the houses around the school” so MPD increased patrols to “make a statement last week”.
Still a relatively safe neighborhood.
3 arrests at Homecoming.
Made a drug dealing arrest recently.
People do see drug dealing going on and have reported it.
There have been additional violent incidents, especially at the Madison Metro transfer points
Ed Holmes
Behavior is atypical of what we have seen on the past . Perpetrators are new to West.
Emphasized the importance of a safe learning environment.
Make sure there are police and school consequences and that they are severe. These crimes are unacceptable and should not be tolerated.
Randy Boyd (Madison Metro)
60+ bus runs daily for the school system.
There have been some serious fights at the transfer points. Cameras are in place there.
Main problem is confidentiality due to the students age. Can track them via bus passes.
Adding DSL so that the police precinct can monitor the transfer points. Incidents are about the same as last year but the numbers are going up.
Baptist church elders have helped patrol the South Transfer Point. We are looking for more community help.
Luis Yudice
Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.
Parents:
Parent asked about weapons in school, metal detectors and k9 units.
Response:
Do we have weapons in school? Yes we find knives in all the schools. No guns. Unfortunate fact is that if a kid wants to get their hand on a gun, they can. They are available.Ed Holmes:
“We took away a gun once in my 18 years”.
I want to get across to the students – if they see something they have to report it. We have 2100 students and 250 staff members.Parents:
Kids are afraid of the bathrooms
Another lunch assault that has not been reported.
Incidents are much higher than we know because many incidents are not reported.
A parent asked why the District/Police did not use school ID photos to help victims find the perpetrators? Ed Holmes mentioned that District has had problems with their photo ID vendor.
Madison School Board member (and West area parent) Maya Cole also attended this event.
Spike in violence in middle schools raises concerns
A Marlborough student was suspended for bringing a knife to school. A week later, a Concord student was arrested for putting 10 classmates on a hit list. Then there was the bomb threat at a Tewksbury school and a lockdown in Waltham where two knives were found in students’ lockers, just a day after a pellet gun was discovered at another Waltham school.
The episodes all occurred within five weeks last spring, not in high schools, but in middle schools in suburban districts, where educators and law enforcement agencies are increasingly worried about violence penetrating places once considered havens.
Massachusetts suburban and rural middle schools in 2005-06 had 4,750 reports of violence – such as fights, sexual assault, and robbery – and threats of violence; 484 drug, alcohol, and tobacco offenses; 290 cases of sexual harassment, and 383 weapons found, according to a Globe analysis of school safety statistics provided by the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Life on the Edge: No place for children
On Thursday morning October 11, 2007 seven Madison Police officers and some 30 Lafollette High School staff members were needed to breakup a disturbance at the school around 11:15 a.m.. Officers learned that two adult women and two teenage boys (one of the woman is the mother of one of the boys) came to Lafollette where they confronted another teenage boy in a hallway. The boy, who was confronted, reportedly had gotten into a fight with the other two outside of school earlier in the week. He (the boy confronted) said the group of four circled him and the two adult women encouraged the young men to fight. Staff, hearing the ruckus, responded. Karen Rivedal has more. Madison Police Department: Both of these Police Reports did not include West High’s address (30 Ash Street). The incident address can be a factor in reporting school related issues. See the Madison Parents’ School Safety Site’s Police call data summary from July 2006 to June 2007. NBC 15 also covered these incidents. Jessica Blanchard & Casey McNerthney: King County prosecutors on Wednesday charged two Seattle teenagers in a sexual assault on a developmentally disabled female classmate in a Rainier Beach High School restroom in June — an incident that school officials never reported to police. Related: [Editor’s note: City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. released an audit on Sept. 19 that found that many safety incidents in New York City public schools are not being reported as required under state law. For the 10 large high schools audited, 21 percent of the sampled incidents were not reported, including 14 percent of those incidents deemed serious.] Back when Debbie Heimowitz was a middle schooler in Castro Valley, if you wanted to cut somebody down you talked behind her back. Now you post your putdowns on the Internet. Heimowitz, a 26-year-old grad student at Stanford, has made a film about this online cruelty. There’s been a fundamental change in family life, and it has played out over the years in my office. Teachers, pediatricians and therapists like me are seeing children of all ages who are not afraid of their parents. Not one bit. Not of their power, not of their position, not of their ability to apply standards and enforce consequences. The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows: Data like this provides a starting point for getting a sense of the type and levels of incidents that affect safety in our children’s schools, and it’ll be useful to compare these numbers from time to time against like categories of data going forward. Context that we need, but don’t have, is information on the number and types of violent or disruptive incidents occurring in the schools as a whole (not just those resulting in police calls), and to what extent policies on summoning law enforcement in response to a violent or disruptive incident vary from school to school (in which case call data alone may be an unreliable index of the school’s relative safety). New York State education officials yesterday added 17 schools to the list of those considered “persistently dangerous,” substantially expanding the list for the second year in a row. All but 2 of the 27 schools on the new list are in New York City, including a dozen schools designed for students with severe disabilities. Madison Parent’s School Safety Site posted 2006/2007 student teacher assaults/injury data here. Lisa Subeck has more. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial: There isn’t just one right answer to preventing school violence – you try what works. But a program that will expand this fall to five Milwaukee high schools shows promise. Minnesota Department of Education: Governor Tim Pawlenty today announced the establishment of the Minnesota School Safety Center, which will develop a framework for all-hazard safety planning for schools and will coordinate activities of federal, state and local partners. via MPR. Seven-year-old Brajon Brown is clearly a child. He hasn’t committed a crime, though he talks about it. His 12-year-old brother, Malcolm also is not in a gang – at least not one police recognize. He runs with a “crew” of friends formed when Malcolm was 9. Boston police call them “wannabes” and say they usually don’t show up on police radar until they are teenagers and committed to gangs known for more serious crimes. Some experts say Boston neglects such gangs, allowing momentum to build for a coming crime wave that would dwarf the record violence of the mid-1990s. Malcolm, who says the young males in the crew protect their territory by beating up challengers, faces charges in the beating and robbery of a boy earlier this year. “When you look into the eyes of a kid like that, in three or four years, you know he could take a life, no problem,” a former prosecutor and community activist says. He estimates that dozens of gangs like Malcolm’s – semi-organized groups of middle and elementary school-age youth who mimic the actions of older gangs – operate in Boston. Last year, 49 of 102 city-run youth programs allowed only participants 13 or older. And of 180 young people who received city counseling and intervention services, only 49 children were preteens. Stressing the diversion of preteens from lives of crime, Boston’s mayor launched an effort this year to enroll every child between 8 and 14 in a summer program. Teams of city workers knocked on more than 1,700 doors in attempts to reach families who need help. An official says 233 households signed up for services, but he doesn’t know how many were for preteens. Brajon, meanwhile, already walks the streets as if he owns them, slapping pay phones off the hook as he passes and knocking items from first-floor window ledges. The District will be holding a parent training session with Corwin Kronenberg on Wednesday, August 22, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn on Deming Way. Mr. Kronenberg’s focus will be “A Parent’s Approach to Above-the-Line-Behavior for Students.” Teachers will be doing an all-day training with Mr. Kronenberg on August 20 that will focus on creating a common understanding of behavioral expectations in the classroom. Madison Police Department Chief Noble Wray spoke on downtown safety at the monthly meeting of Downtown Madison, Inc. on June 28, 2007, and also briefly addressed the topic of gang activity in Madison schools during the program, as reported in The Capital Times (via the MadCrime101 blog, a welcome and valuable new resource focusing on concerns and issues relating to crime in Madison). Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio / Video. More here [RSS]. BBC: One third of US online teenagers have been victims of cyber-bullying according to research by the Pew Internet Project. Just before Owen started ninth grade in Texas, she testified against her father, sending him to prison after years of sexual abuse.LaFollette High School Incident
West High School Homecoming Police Calls
According to a Madison Police Department report, the teens went to the school nurse’s office for minor injuries. The nurse’s office reported the attack to a Madison police officer, who was at the high school for the West High Homecoming Parade.
Officers were dispatched at 12:20 a.m. to the emergency room at University Hospital, where the Fitchburg teen was being treated for a head injury suffered during the assault.School crimes under wraps: Assaults, robberies not always reported to police
A Seattle P-I review of police and Seattle Public Schools records shows that case isn’t the only likely crime that wasn’t reported to police. While a majority of incidents on school campuses were recorded into the district’s safety and security logs and reported to police if necessary, some incidents weren’t — including cases of assaults and strong-arm robberies.
In a few cases, parents or victims say school officials urged them not to report the crimes to police at all.
Pegi McEvoy, who recently took over as interim manger of Seattle schools’ safety and security department, acknowledged that the district had a “fragmented” system for documenting and tracking alleged crimes on campuses. This fall, though, district security specialists began filing their reports electronically — one of a handful of changes intended to streamline and strengthen the reporting process, she said.City Audit Finds Underreporting of School Violence
While we know the mayor and the chancellor want schools to be safe, this audit confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents. Now with data driving all education decision-making, this audit couldn’t have come at a more important time.Debbie Heimowitz brings cyber bullying to light in a new film
“Cyber bullying is harassing someone using the Internet, cell phones and any sort of digital technology. A common scenario is they will find somebody’s picture on the Internet that they know from school. Let’s say it’s ‘Amy.’ I download the picture, Photoshop it, go to MySpace, create a new account, create a new e-mail address and display this whole ‘I Hate Amy’ MySpace page. Then I have everybody at school write mean things about Amy in the comments section. Amy finds out that now everybody at the school hates her and has no clue who started this page.A Lost Art: Instilling Respect
I am not advocating authoritarian or abusive parental behavior, which can do untold damage. No, I am talking about a feeling that was common to us baby boomers when we were kids. One of my friends described it this way: “All my mother had to do was shoot me a look.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was a look that stopped us in our tracks — or got us moving. And not when we felt like it.
Now.
These days, that look seems to have been replaced by a feeble nod of parental acquiescence — and an earnest acknowledgment of “how hard it is to be a kid these days.”
In my office, I have seen small children call their parents names and tell them how stupid they are; I have heard adolescents use strings of expletives toward them; and I remember one 6-year-old whose parents told me he refused to obey, debated them ad nauseam and sometimes even lashed out. As if on cue, the boy kicked his father right there in the office. When I asked the father how he reacts at home, he told me that he runs to another room!Police calls for Madison schools, July 2006-June 2007
The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows:
By call date
By school, subgrouped by call date
By school, subgrouped by incident type
School subtotals
Incident type subtotals
To repeat the commentary from the last time we posted call data statistics:NY State Names 17 More ‘Persistently Dangerous’ Schools
The schools ranged from the behemoth Jamaica High School in Queens to smaller schools like Powell Middle School in Harlem and Public School 14 in Staten Island. The list also includes a school in Rochester and Berkshire Junior-Senior High School in Canaan, N.Y.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to compile annual lists of “persistently dangerous” schools but leaves it to each state to define the term. Many states, including New York, have been criticized for issuing extremely short lists in past years.
“We are utterly determined to make all schools safe,” said Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, in announcing the list yesterday at a news conference in Albany.
Mr. Mills said New York’s list had grown because the state had vastly improved its reporting efforts. He noted that the 49 other states had listed a total of only 30 schools as “persistently dangerous” last year, just a hairsbreadth more than the schools now listed by New York.
Wisconsin DPI “Discipline Data Collection and Reporting” webpage.Madison Police Chief Hears About West Side Crime
Children seeing people run from police through their backyard, waking up to the sound of a gunshots, watching drug deals.
These were some of the scenes described by West and Southwest Side residents as hundreds of them turned out Wednesday to voice their concerns about crime in their neighborhoods at a meeting with Madison Police Chief Noble Wray.
“Allied Drive is not the only problem on Madison ‘s West Side, ” said Suzanne Sarhan, who owns property there, prompting hundreds to rise to their feet in applause.
Ald. Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, who set up the neighborhood listening session for Wray, said the safety problems need both short- and long-term solutions.
“I don ‘t ask for any quick fix, ” she said.The Violence-Free Zone initiative seems to be tamping down violence at two Milwaukee high schools
The Violence-Free Zone initiative places young people from the community into schools as youth advisers. These advisers form relationships within the school and nearby community, and they work to identify students labeled as the most disruptive. They may help a kid find a safe place to go after school or better living arrangements for families. At South Division High School, they have even helped families with tax forms.
In the hallways, advisers defuse arguments before they boil over, and they confront unruly students with a stern message: Violent behavior is not acceptable. But along with that message, healthy alternatives are offered.
The program is all about making stronger connections with troubled kids and offering them hope.New Minnesota School Safety Center Established
The School Safety Center will be housed at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and will work in partnership with other state agencies. Retiring Brooklyn Park Chief of Police Wade Setter has been named to lead the Center.
“Bringing together all of the partners involved in school safety – law enforcement, schools, emergency response and victim service providers and others – will help us keep Minnesota students safe at school,” Governor Pawlenty said.
“This cooperation will go a long way toward ensuring the safety of our children,” said Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion. “Wade’s experience as a law enforcement officer, a mentor to young people and his proven leadership in forming partnerships make him the ideal individual to launch this effort.”“A Loss of Innocence: Young brothers’ lives are example of the lure of gangs”
Parent Training Opportunity with Corwin Kronenberg
Each MMSD principal was asked to work with their parent organization to send a representative team of five parents to the event. It is not clear if this happened at each school or if the program has reached capacity.
If you did not hear about this event before the school year ended and are interested in going, contact either your principal or the appropriate Assistant Superintendent — for elementary parents, that would be Sue Abplanalp (sabplanalp@madison.k12.wi.us, 663-1639); for middle and high school parents, Pam Nash (pnash@madison.k12.wi.us, 663-1635).
Read more about the MMSD’s adoption of Kronenberg’s system —
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2007/06/madisons_adopti.php#c195268Madison Police Chief on Gangs in Schools
Chief Wray acknowledged the growing problem of gangs in Madison and their presence in Madison schools, and spoke of the need to quantify the extent of the problem and its trends, rather than reacting based on anecdotal “information”. I couldn’t agree more. The MPD can make much progress toward this goal by fuller and consistent disclosure to the public of incidents and statistics on gang activity (whether through its police district newsletters or its public information office news releases). But to quantify the gang problem in schools, the MPD will need to rely on data from the MMSD, since much can happen in a school which is relevant to quantifying the gang problem but isn’t brought to the attention of the MPD. Can the gang problem in Madison schools be accurately and reliably quantified and assessed for those schools that don’t have ERO’s (Education Resource Officers)? Of if the policies on when calls for service are to be made to MPD vary from school to school? Or when the MMSD relies on suspension and expulsion rates, instead of actual incidents of disruptive and violent behavior, to gauge school safety (all the while moving toward a policy of discouraging suspensions and expulsions)?Cyber-bullying gathers pace in US
The most common complaint from teens was about private information being shared rather than direct threats.
Girls were more likely than boys to be targets and teens who share their identities online are the most vulnerable, the survey found.
But teenagers still think that the majority of bullying happens offline.School co-founder, teacher wins scholarship
She took a risk and wrote that story for an assignment in ninth-grade English class. But her teacher gave her an “F,” telling her not to talk about it.
“Ironically, I ended up teaching ninth-grade English,” Owen said. “I wanted to be different as a teacher. I wanted to be someone that students could talk to.”
Owen went on to do just that, co-founding a school in Milwaukee as a haven for bullied and harassed students. And now, she has won a national scholarship for her efforts, paving the way for her to help others form similar schools across the country.
Owen, who helped start The Alliance School on W. Galena St. in 2005, is one of 38 undergraduate and graduate students in the nation to win scholarships this year from the Point Foundation. The Los Angeles-based non-profit has honored outstanding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students for six years.
While the majority of the students who attend The Alliance School are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, the campus serves any student who struggled in the traditional high school environment because of harassment, intimidation or abuse.