Under schools CEO Andres Alonso, school officials have promised to confront the problem and offer teachers more protection. More than 200 teachers gathered last week to explain what they have seen in their classrooms and their schools.
Mr. Alonso and Philip J. Leaf, who studies violence at the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Bloomberg School of Public health, say they are preparing "alternative settings" for students who seem unwilling to refrain from assaulting their teachers. Mr. Leaf points out that addressing violence without examining the underlying causes is not likely to be effective.
Mr. Alonso wants an infusion of 500 volunteers into the schools. They will need training, of course. But the presence of 500 parents and other concerned adults is just the sort of community response the schools need. It would show that the people of Baltimore want to maintain the schools as an anchor of stability and hope for young people.
Of course, volunteerism will not be enough. More police intervention is needed, at the very least, though Mayor Sheila Dixon and Gov. Martin O'Malley will want to avoid an armed presence in the public schools. However, their most fundamental responsibility is public safety, so they may have no choice if the response to Mr. Alonso's call is insufficient.
Something may be needed to protect the churches of the city as well. Pastors will want a police presence when they face situations they know have the potential for disruption. Like Pastor Rush, many of them have seen this sort of disruption as they bury casualties of the drug war.
The teachers, too, made it clear this dire problem is not new. Two young educators at Frederick Douglass High School found themselves dealing with exactly this sort of behavior last year. Gunfire erupted at a football game. On their first day of school, the teachers found themselves running for cover, along with some of the gunmen and other students.
At the same time, these young teachers saw immediately that a majority of their students desperately wanted to learn. They turned up voluntarily at the end of school days for special study halls convened to compensate for the fact that not much teaching could go on during regular school hours. Fires were set, teachers were assaulted and school authorities apparently feared reporting such incidents. If they had, their school would have come under sharp scrutiny and been at risk of the label "persistently dangerous."
Those are words, of course, that increasingly describe much of the city.
C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays in The Sun. His e-mail is fsmith@wypr.org.
