The trouble began, Jolita Berry said, when she asked a girl in one of her art classes at Reginald F. Lewis High School to sit down.
The student did not obey, coming closer to confront the teacher. "She said she's gonna bang me," Berry said. "I said, `Back up, you're in my space. If you hit me, I'm gonna defend myself.'"
But Berry, who is 30 and started her job teaching art at the Northeast Baltimore school in December, did not defend herself. The girl caught the teacher off guard as other students cheered her on and screamed, "Hit her!"
"She just started beating on me relentlessly," Berry said, recalling the Friday morning incident that left her with a sore shoulder and a broken blood vessel in her eye.
As it turned out, one of the kids in the class was recording what happened on a cell phone. Video footage was posted on the social networking site MySpace and aired on local television news, showing a teenage girl hitting a woman lying on the floor.
The woman's face is not visible.
By yesterday, the head of the Baltimore Teachers Union and Mayor Sheila Dixon were pointing to the incident in calling for the city school system to dedicate more resources to reducing classroom violence.
State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick told WBAL Radio that she was "horrified" and said that increased character education, community partnerships and parental responsibility are needed.
"It's just appalling," said Marietta English, president of the union's teacher chapter, adding that Berry is meeting with a union attorney. She said she's been complaining to system officials all year about assaults on teachers. "What I said, you now see on video," she said.
English said her office has been receiving two or three complaints a day of assaults on teachers, many of which are not reported to the school system or police. The system says it has expelled students for assaults on staff members 112 times this school year, compared with 98 at this time last year.
In response to English's complaints, Gen. Bennie E. Williams, chief of staff to schools chief Andres Alonso, agreed a few weeks ago to convene a task force on teacher assaults. Its first meeting was scheduled for yesterday.
While the system declined to comment on the specifics of the alleged assault on Berry, which she reported to school police at 11:45 a.m. Friday, Williams issued a statement yesterday saying that "we are treating this incident with the utmost seriousness." The girl involved has been suspended pending the outcome of the system's investigation.
