The Philadelphia Inquirer, by The Philadelphia Inquirer

Efforts by Phila. administrators to stem the complex problem have fallen short.

By John Sullivan, Susan Snyder, Kristen A. Graham, and Dylan Purcell

For Teshada Herring, the action was unmistakable: The girls smearing Vaseline on their faces and fitting scarves to their heads were preparing for a fight.

The ritual - well-known in Philadelphia schools - is intended to keep skin from scarring and hair from getting ripped out.

As Teshada passed the group on her way to class at Audenried High that morning, the events of the previous week flashed through her mind - a fight she had witnessed, Facebook posts warning that someone from her neighborhood would be attacked, a text blast to her phone that all but named her as the intended victim.

She wondered: Would they come for her?

Minutes later, while taking an algebra test, Teshada was unable to stop thinking about the pack of girls. She glanced up from the test, looking at the classroom door.

The girls in scarves passed by.

Teshada was terrified; now she was sure they were coming for her.

Suddenly, a band of more than a dozen girls and boys - captured on video roaming the halls and looking into classrooms - barged through the door.

The group converged on Teshada and began to beat her.

In less then a minute, they vanished.

"It was like a tornado," her teacher would later say."They went one way, then they went the other way.

In Philadelphia, schools are no sanctuary.

The Jan. 22, 2010, assault on Teshada, which left her bleeding and dazed, was the 2,095th violent incident the School District recorded in the 2009-10 year.

Within a few minutes, a video at the three-story school recorded violent incident No. 2,096, another attack in a hallway in a largely unused part of the building that teachers had complained about for months. Students rushed past a security guard as the fight erupted. Then, he waded into the fray, reaching down to help a girl who had been knocked to the ground and kicked and punched by her assailants.

By June, the district's total of violent incidents had grown to 4,541. That means on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes.

That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.

And those are just the incidents that are reported; teachers, students, and administrators interviewed by The Inquirer during a yearlong investigation say many are not. During the 2009-10 school year alone, 183 cases came to the district's attention only after the city police made arrests.

Violence in Philadelphia schools is more than the sheer numbers. The specter of violence traumatizes students and teachers, and stifles learning.

Audenried, housed in a gleaming, new $60 million building in Grays Ferry, is equipped with a sophisticated camera-surveillance system. But that was no deterrent to the band of youngsters bent on attack who roamed the corridors.

In the attack's aftermath, Teshada - then a 15-year-old freshman - had to confront the elemental question of whether she could stay in her neighborhood school and learn.

And her teacher, Brynn Keller, after witnessing the assault, grappled with her total inability to protect a student in her classroom.

Incidents of violence like this raise the question of whether Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman, in the midst of her third year, is fulfilling her pledge to make Philadelphia schools safe places to learn.

Ackerman contends that on her watch the district has taken strong steps to curb school violence - such as enforcing a zero-tolerance policy on discipline and expelling students. She cites a drop in reported incidents as proof the efforts are working.

Moreover, she said, school violence is a national "public health problem" that will require an entire community to resolve: "We're going to have to fix it as a collective effort and not expect the school to take on the responsibility for trying to do everything."

Ackerman conceded that the School District must do a better job developing responses to violence, but that getting hundreds of "schools to implement these programs with fidelity is where we still have a long way to go."

And she placed much of the responsibility on teachers and principals.

"When young people rush into a classroom, when they roam the halls, that's an adult problem - of the educators in that school," Ackerman said, referring to Teshada's assault at Audenried. "Having been a teacher, having been a principal, I never had that happen in my classroom, and I sure didn't have it happen in my school, because we were clear about what we would tolerate, what was acceptable and what wasn't."

Good discipline occurs in classrooms with good teaching, she said.

But many teachers and other school staff have said that even good teaching can fail in the face of violence, and that the district has done little to help. They, as well as students and parents interviewed by The Inquirer, are openly skeptical of the district's antiviolence efforts and its assertion that it enforces zero tolerance for violence.

"Really? Because you can pretty much punch a teacher and still go to school," said teacher Hope Moffett, who was in an adjacent classroom when Teshada was attacked. In a January interview, she compared the assault to "a prison riot."

Since then, Moffett has become openly critical about violence and Ackerman's plan to turn Audenried into a charter school run by a nonprofit company. Despite receiving positive evaluations, Moffett faced firing for giving students bus tokens to travel to a demonstration opposing Audenried's conversion and then talking to the press about being disciplined. The district backed off after the union sued.

The Inquirer's investigation

The Inquirer spent a year looking into violence in Philadelphia public schools, interviewing hundreds of teachers, parents, students, and education experts about the district's problems.

It also commissioned an extensive, independently administered survey by Temple University that sampled the opinions of more than 750 teachers and aides - 6 percent of the 13,000 the district employs.

More than two-thirds of those who responded to the survey reported that the violence and disruption in their building hindered their students' ability to learn. And more than half said violence had worsened during the last three years.

Educators in schools throughout the district spoke out about high levels of violence and disruption in their schools.

"There are far more disruptive and violent students than our system can handle," said one middle school teacher, who spoke of students who "hop from classroom to classroom . . . causing chaos."

The Inquirer also obtained thousands of internal School District police reports of violent incidents dating back to 2007. They show that during the last four years serious crimes occurred dozens of times a day, in every corner of the city, at every level of school.

Case histories of assaults that landed in Common Pleas Court were reviewed, including that of the two girls and a boy who joined several others in the assault on Teshada at Audenried.

And a database was created with information provided by the School District and analyzed, detailing more than 30,000 serious incidents - from assaults to robberies to rapes - reported in the district during the last five years.

Even taking the district's numbers at face value, the results are stunning:

Violence worsened in 111 of the district's 268 schools in 2009-10. (Because some schools were closed or converted to charter schools, the district counts 257 schools this year.)

In the district's 32 neighborhood high schools such as Audenried, the violence rate increased 17 percent over five years - to 51.1 reported incidents of violence per 1,000 students in 2009-10.

Assaults accounted for two-thirds (66 percent) of all serious incidents, up from 61 percent five years earlier.

Nine out of every 10 schools - from elementary schools on up - reported a serious assault last year.

Nearly three-quarters of the schools reporting violent incidents had at least one teacher assaulted. There were 690 teacher assaults in the district that year.

Although the numbers are alarming, considerable evidence shows they may not even be accurate. Documented cases of underreporting suggest the problem of violence may be even greater.

Teachers and other school staff said they faced constant pressure from administrators to not report violent incidents, which renders the district's statistics suspect.

Depending on the principal, schools vary widely on how they report and handle violence and whether they call city police - a problem that Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison conceded. Some principals would rather handle matters themselves, he said.

"Different schools have different cultures and different ways of handling matters," said Gillison, who oversees police matters for the city. "What we have to do is try to change the culture, and that takes time."

In many cases, the district's main intervention system has evolved into an exercise in paper shuffling, rather than a way to get troubled students the help they need. So many students were enrolled in the program last year - 51,166, or one-third of all students in the system - that teachers and counselors are overwhelmed.

When antiviolence programs do work - and creative, effective initiatives have flourished in some district schools - they aren't implemented on a wider basis

None of these findings surprise Jack Stollsteimer, the independent safe-schools advocate between 2006 and 2009, who was charged with monitoring violence in the district until state officials eliminated his job.

"The district is just a disaster when it comes to school safety," Stollsteimer said. "No administration I've seen has adequately addressed the problem."

Long-standing problems

In Philadelphia - the most violent large city in America for the last two years, according to FBI crime statistics - many of the problems afflicting the district are long-standing and predate Ackerman's tenure, which began in June 2008.

Dozens of Philadelphia schools, including Audenried, sit in neighborhoods plagued by poverty, hunger, drug abuse, parental neglect, and crime. Making these schools havens where the district's 155,000 students can learn is a vexing problem that resists an easy solution.

Deputy Superintendent Leroy Nunery said the district was in the early stages of developing a comprehensive approach to violence, but was facing a shortage of funding. The district's $3.2 billion budget allows it to spend slightly more than $12,449 per pupil, below the state's average of $13,144 and far less than wealthy suburban districts spend. It also faces a budget shortfall for the coming school year that could exceed $600 million.

"In this constrained budget environment, we're not going to have the luxury of throwing a lot more dollars at the problem. We're going to have to fix this in the classroom," Nunery said.

Against this gloomy background, the School District has found some points of light, frequently citing test scores moving up during the last eight years as evidence of success - achievements that have won Ackerman national accolades, including one from a group she formerly led that lauded her as the nation's top urban school leader.

And some district schools - even those in tough neighborhoods with many impoverished children - rarely see violence. But some of the safest schools, such as Central High and Masterman, are magnets, with selective enrollments.

Even with these undeniable successes, the problem of violence persists in the schools.

In late February, the city's Human Relations Commission issued a report that concluded that conflicts among racial and ethnic groups were widespread in schools.

And a mid-March report by Jack Wagner, the state auditor general, called violence in the schools "a chronic problem" and said an outside watchdog was needed to monitor school violence.

In the weeks before those reports, a brawl at Simon Gratz High in Nicetown, possibly gang-related, landed one combatant in a hospital with a broken eye socket; a sixth grader was arrested for taking a gun to Heston Elementary in West Philadelphia; and one fifth grader grabbed another by the head and began "grinding on her" at Bregy Elementary in South Philadelphia, according to the school police report. Police were not called in the latter incident until the complainant's mother went to the school and was upset that they hadn't been called.

New steps to fight violence

As The Inquirer began questioning district officials and seeking documents for this series, the Ackerman administration was recalibrating its approach to violence in the schools.

It was already under national scrutiny for its failure to stem violent attacks on Asian students by African Americans at South Philadelphia High School.

One dramatic move was the removal in August of James B. Golden, the district's safety chief for five years and a former Philadelphia police captain. He later told reporters that the district's problems stemmed in part from a lack of focus and direction.

"It's an environment where academics are in charge. Educators are in charge," said Golden. "However, there are nonacademic challenges and issues for which you need other professionals to be involved in addressing."

Despite his role as the district's top security officer, he said, the administration failed to consult him on key decisions. In one, at South Philadelphia High, Ackerman approved the installation of high-tech security cameras.

Later, in September, Ackerman authorized a no-bid, emergency contract to spend $7.5 million putting security cameras in 19 schools deemed by state and federal guidelines to be "persistently dangerous."

About the same time, the district launched a plan to address safety at what it identified as the 46 most troublesome schools, Audenried among them.

Plagued by low attendance, chronic truancy, and high suspensions, these 46 schools account for nearly half the district's violent incidents, though only 24 percent of enrollment.

The district also created a commission that includes top city officials to study violence and launched a campaign against bullying. It also increased expulsions for violent behavior.

Many of those who have faced school violence say these are familiar responses to problems that have gone unchecked for years.

But new cameras won't deter an attack as brazen as the one on Teshada at Audenried.

An attack that happened at 8:59 a.m. in the presence of a teacher and a classroom of more than 20 ninth graders.

An attack that left Teshada bleeding and sprawled on the floor, with her hair yanked out from the front half of her head, welts on her face, and a lump under one eye.

"Our hallways are well-equipped with cameras," said Keller, the Audenried teacher whose classroom was invaded by the mob of students looking for Teshada. "These students roamed not just my floor but the second floor as well, for a period of five or 10 minutes before they entered my classroom. Nobody said anything."

'The prison on the hill'

Bordered by housing projects and I-76, Charles Y. Audenried High for years has been one of the district's most troubled schools. In its former building, at 33d and Tasker Streets, dubbed "the prison on the hill," academic failure and chaos reigned.

In 2003, a large melee inside the school resulted in 16-year-old Jamillah Robinson's receiving more than 50 stitches to her face and chest after she was attacked with a razor blade. She filed a civil rights case against the School District and eventually settled.

The attack came after the girl and her mother - as Teshada and her mother would - repeatedly called the school, expressing fear and asking for help.

In sentencing five girls for her attack, Kevin Dougherty, administrative judge of Family Court, excoriated Audenried for its lack of control and discipline: "Audenried should hang its window down with absolute shame."

The district shut the dilapidated building in 2005. Three years later, Audenried High reopened on the same site in a renovated building with a red-slate and purple-brick exterior supported by yellow pillars

Upon reopening, it enrolled only ninth graders, with plans to add another grade each year. When Teshada was attacked, it included about 350 ninth and 10th graders.

Officials were hopeful that past problems would not resurface.

It was a vain hope.

"I don't think they should have put that school out there," said Brittany Lecount, a student who said she watched Teshada's attack.

"Different streets going to war with different streets, kids fighting each other for no reason.

The only reason Audenried didn't join the 19 schools with the "persistently dangerous" tag was that it was new and needed at least two years of recorded statistics to qualify.

The Inquirer's analysis found that the school was among 55 in the district that had a violent-crime rate the same as or higher than those schools tagged as "persistently dangerous." But these schools were not labeled as such because they didn't meet all of the narrowly tailored state and federal conditions.

Added to the 19 "persistently dangerous" schools, that's a total of 74 - far more than the list of 46 that the School District has singled out for a safety review, and evidence of a far broader problem.

Gang bursts in, starts beating

The morning Teshada Herring was attacked started on a high note in Brynn Keller's classroom. She was praising her students for their high scores on a district reading exam.

Halfway through first period, she got a call from algebra teacher Michelle Davis, whose classroom was across the hall. Davis wanted to know if Keller could take one of her students.

Teshada had arrived at Davis' first-period class late. She was agitated and refusing to take her test. Davis didn't know what was wrong with Teshada, and Teshada wouldn't tell her.

Keller, also one of Teshada's teachers that semester, agreed. Teachers often trade off students to keep them in class rather than a discipline office.

Teshada took a seat in a cluster of four desks in the center of Keller's room. Her seat faced the door. At her back was a window looking out on rows and rows of new public housing, Greater Grays Ferry Estates - the old Tasker Homes.

It's in these neighborhoods that rivalries spark and later flare in school hallways. Children, many of whom weren't even born when the feuding began, see classrooms as fair battlegrounds to carry out attacks.

At Audenried, teachers say they learn about gangs from their students, and they're well-aware of the three rival neighborhood groups named for streets near the school - 27th Street, 31st Street, and 18th Street. The district was supposed to give teachers "gang awareness" training, but never did.

In the face of simmering neighborhood violence, it wasn't just teachers who were unprepared. It was the building, too. Students had learned to evade hallway cameras by ducking into the alcoves outside classrooms or by getting into the bathrooms. Teachers tightly controlled keys to the washrooms, but students broke in by punching holes in the walls, then reaching in and unlocking the doors.

The hallway where the second fight occurred was in a wing of the building that had just three classes. That meant the small security force had to cover numerous hallways.

At the time of Teshada's attack, classes had been in session for 30 minutes, but a security video showed dozens of students milling in the hallway.

Teshada heard them outside. She tried to concentrate on her test - until the door burst open. The band of students streamed in and zeroed in on Teshada.

The rest of Keller's students darted to the edges of the room.

Keller moved toward her phone and called security. "I knew there was nothing else I could do," she said.

Students began swinging at Teshada, surrounding her like a "swarm of bees," Keller said. They knocked her to the ground and continued to beat her.

"It felt like a prison riot. My whole room was shaking. Desks were rattling," said Moffett, who was teaching in an adjoining room.

Two of Keller's students tried to pull the attackers off Teshada. In the end, one boy covered Teshada with his body to shield her.

The attack left the 24-year-old Keller, a graduate of Neshaminy High School in Bucks County and Temple, feeling helpless.

"I'm supposed to be able to protect them," said Keller, whose youthful face belies her toughness. "On that day, that's not something I could do."

Growing Audenried violence

The attack on Teshada was part of growing violence at Audenried during the last school year. By the end of January 2010, there were 17 assaults, one weapons incident, and nine cases of disorderly conduct and fighting, according to School District data.

The school had failed to act to improve the situation despite repeated pleas from the teachers, horrified by the hall-walking that routinely disrupted their lessons and endangered their pupils.

"It was just wildly out of control," recalled art teacher Peter Coyle, who said staff routinely had to lock doors to keep out troublemakers.

At 9:08 a.m. - just a few minutes after Teshada's assault - security tapes show the second assault unfolding in the school. A group of more than a dozen students surrounded a 10th-grade girl, wearing a red sweater vest.

Some of them began punching and kicking the girl, and the attack continued as she lay helpless on the floor. In a matter of seconds, a security guard waded into the crowd and began pulling off attackers.

The back-to-back incidents happened so fast that the school's small security staff couldn't react quickly enough. Two of the school's five security officers were on another floor dealing with the aftermath of the attack on Teshada.

The crowd began dispersing after custodians ran to aid the lone security guard. The victim, who staggered to her feet, suffered serious eye damage.

One of the students charged in the second attack said her finger had been broken and she had to have surgery. She blamed the victim, saying the girl had "bumped" her first.

The day would get worse. Teachers would learn later that a South Philadelphia High athlete, Tyree Parks, was inside Audenried after school to coach a youth basketball game, probably with a gun. After the game, he was shot to death while walking home. Police searching his body found he had been carrying a .32-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

He did not have to pass through the school's metal detectors, Coyle said, because the youth game was after hours.

Teachers often targets

The young Audenried staff - about 60 percent of whom had three years or less of teaching experience - was gravely shaken.

"I don't think people have any idea about the level of violence we deal with," Keller said.

The plight of Audenried teachers is repeated in many schools throughout the city. Many times, teachers are the victims.

Nearly a quarter of Philadelphia school teachers and staff said they had been physically assaulted in the previous school year - 2008-09 - in a survey conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control. The CDC last spring surveyed 1,350 School District staffers, nearly half of whom responded

The proportion was highest at high schools, where nearly a third said they had been attacked, according to the survey.

More than half the workers also reported they had been victims of verbal threats and assaults during that year.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, called results of the Temple and CDC surveys "alarming" and "a clear call that more has to be done."

This school year didn't start out much better.

In November, Jordan met with Ackerman after two teachers in one week suffered concussions when they were assaulted by students - one of them at Audenried High. Ackerman and Jordan followed with a joint memo to staff, reminding them to take a hard line on bullying and assaults.

Hints an attack is coming

For parents who have little choice but to rely on the School District to protect their children during the day, the violence is maddening.

Three days before her daughter was attacked, Teshada's mother, Bridgette Bennett, called out of work and went to Audenried to speak with school police officers. Her daughter had told her that trouble was brewing, and she had seen the Facebook posts and text blast warning that someone was going to be beaten.

"Somebody's going to get it," Bennett told them, "and I don't want it to be my child.

The officers said they would handle it. But that Friday, Teshada was attacked.

Bennett got the call from the school.

"I was scared that my kid was really, really hurt," Bennett said. "How could this have happened? How did you allow these children to walk around in the halls as long as you did and not say anything?"

A single parent of six, Bennett works long hours in housekeeping at Albert Einstein Medical Center to support her family

"I come home and tell them stories every day so they can be thankful," she said. "Live today like it's your last."

She also emphasizes the importance of school: "Without education, there's nothing."

But Bennett and many other parents throughout the city every day must entrust their children to the public schools. They can't afford safer private or Catholic schools. They can't all find spaces in charter schools. They can't just pick up and move.

In a poll of 802 city parents with school-age children, conducted in June by the Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than a third gave their children's schools high marks for handling safety. One third rated their schools "only fair" or "poor."

After the assault, Bennett took her daughter to the police station and filed a report. But she said what was really needed were more counselors and support in the schools.

"You're talking about our inner-city children. These children are fighting. They're dodging bullets every day. Their parents are on drugs. They're fighting for their lives. They're being molested.

"They need to help these parents," Bennett said of the School District officials.

Teneka Campbell, 34, whose daughter was one of the students disciplined in the attack on Teshada, said the school was out of control:

"The video clearly shows there's nobody monitoring the hallways. It's a shame."

'Really hitting me'

Teshada remembers a girl hitting her first, but soon there were lots of blows.

"I seen a boy hitting me, like really hitting me, like I was a boy," she recalled.

All she could think about was protecting her face.

"That's my main focus," Teshada said. "You can cut all my hair off. I'm going to still be me with no hair."

Teshada lay crumpled on the floor, the buttons and hood ripped off her coat and scattered.

But she got up after her attackers fled and tried to go after them. She wanted to call her older sister for help, too, but adults in the room stopped her.

Despite her injuries, she refused medical attention.

"That would make me feel weak," Teshada said.

Achy and bruised, she stayed home for several school days after the attack.

She cried when she thought about what had happened.

"I felt like I couldn't be protected in here, even inside," she said.

Staying out of trouble

Teshada had attended charter schools since fourth grade and found them more orderly and safer than district schools. At an Afrocentric charter, she learned African dance and how to crochet and speak Swahili.

Her mother told her to give Audenried a try, at least until she could get into a charter high school.

When she arrived at Audenried as a freshman in 2009, she tried to keep to herself.

Most other girls didn't like her, she said. What really irritates the troublemakers, she said, is talking to them in clear, proper English.

"They think you're trying to insult their intelligence because you're being intelligent," she said.

Teshada, a confident teen who likes to dress up and make people laugh, said her best weapon is her smile.

An aspiring nurse, she scored the highest in the class on one of Keller's midterms.

She never caused any trouble, her teachers said, but in trying to avoid it, she skipped class, and her grades began to suffer.

A few days before Teshada got jumped, she confided in her mother that conflicts among girls in the school were mounting. There was something about a boy, a disagreement between two girls, and she got caught in the middle, she said.

She had received the text blast on her phone that someone was going to get it.

The text didn't mention her by name, Teshada said, but she was still uneasy.

"I think they just didn't like me and needed a reason to fight me," she said.

Plea for more safety

Less than a week after the attack on Teshada, a group of Audenried teachers joined about 100 others at the Guerin Recreation Center in South Philadelphia to tell the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations about school violence. The Jan. 28 hearing was the first of 11 held after attacks at South Philadelphia High.

"There is little keeping our students safe within our school's walls," Keller testified.

Several students involved in the attacks that day were sent to disciplinary schools.

But others remained at Audenried.

A 16-year-old boy was rejected for transfer by the School District's regional office, even though he admitted to simple-assault charges in court.

Keller still remembers his court case. She was there.

"You will never go back to Audenried High School," Family Court Judge Abram Frank Reynolds told him, according to Keller's recollection.

But the boy returned to Audenried within a month while serving out his six-month probationary term.

A female student, whom Keller identified as being in the room, also faced little punishment.

"It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth to know some students involved got away with it," Keller said.

School District officials declined to address the boy's case for this article but issued a statement.

"A student could have been allowed to stay at the school for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he/she may have been a special-education student, or insufficient evidence to support their alleged involvement in an incident, etc.

Special-education students can be disciplined, but the district has to take into account their disability in deciding on consequences.

Moffett said she had asked the principal why the girl had been allowed to remain at Audenried.

She was told: "That's it. You just need to accept it. She had a five-day suspension. She's going to be here."

Principal Terry Pearsall-Hargett had no comment.

Safety aides added, for a time

After the attack on Teshada, the district added three school police officers, an in-school suspension room for troublemakers, and a full-time "climate manager" to handle discipline at Audenried. It also closed off an unused section of the building where wayward students would wander in. Teachers reported marked improvement in safety.

But in a familiar theme in the School District, the fixes did not endure. At the end of last year, 33 climate managers were axed, including Audenried's. The district cited budget concerns.

The firings created unrest among teachers, although they say that conditions in the building are calmer this year.

A winning basketball team energized the school. District standardized test scores are improving in math.

But now they have other concerns. Audenried has been named one of the district's 18 Renaissance schools, a turnaround charter school run by Universal Cos. Inc.

The Renaissance plan means many teachers will likely leave the school rather than take leave from the district to work for a charter.

The day that teachers got the news - Jan. 25, 2011 - a group of them had gathered in the library.

An after-school basketball game was letting out when a gunshot outside pierced the air. Coyle, standing in front of a large glass facade, ducked for cover behind a metal pole in the library.

The school's dean said she had seen an unknown figure pointing what she believed was a weapon. The principal heard gunshots outside the school, and city police found a shell casing outside a school doorway, according to a police report. The school was placed on lockdown for 35 minutes.

Headed off to new school

When Teshada returned to school, she saw classmates carrying razor blades for protection; they had gotten them past metal detectors.

And when her mother learned that some of the students involved in her daughter's attack - including the 16-year-old boy - remained there, she told Teshada: "That's it. You have to go."

She moved the family to West Philadelphia in search of a safer school. But in the Philadelphia system, finding such a school can be an elusive quest.

Teshada now goes to Overbrook High, where, she said, she feels safer. But her new school is on the state's "persistently dangerous" list.

"That's the way it is in the city," her mother said in resignation. "You just have to deal with it."

By Dylan Purcell

Philadelphia School District officials have touted a 29 percent decline in serious incidents over the last two years.

They promote it in news releases. They promote it on their website. When callers to the district are put on hold, they hear it in a recording.

But this figure deserves a closer look.

The district's assertion is based on a comparison of incidents between the 2007-08 school year and 2009-10. But its math compares raw numbers without accounting for a significant drop in enrollment during that period and an unusual spike in incidents after a highly publicized assault.

The widely accepted standard for measuring crime used for the FBI's Uniform Crime Statistics divides total crime by population to yield a crime rate. Under that method, the district's serious-incident rate dropped 22 percent, from 4.1 incidents per 100 students to 3.2, The Inquirer found.

Perhaps more important, the 2007-08 school year had a significant spike in incidents unmatched in the last decade. The spike came after the principal at a South Philadelphia elementary school failed to report an assault on a student, prompting a district crackdown on reporting.

Incident reports rose about 50 percent daily for several months, said James B. Golden, former district safety chief.

"The principals said: 'You want reporting? We'll give you reporting,' " Golden said.

There were 14,743 incidents - violent and nonviolent - reported that school year, more than any year in the last decade and up 14 percent from the previous year, according to state reports.

The next year, 2008-09, the year Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman arrived, incident numbers dropped a nearly commensurate 11 percent.

In addition, the district has been shedding students and schools, which automatically drives down its incident numbers.

The district's enrollment has changed dramatically during the last decade. Since 2000, enrollment has dropped by 57,000, to 155,000. Most recently, the district decided to cast off more of its low-performing schools to charter operators. The list includes several troubled neighborhood high schools such as Audenried, Simon Gratz, Olney East, and Olney West. These schools rank among the district's most violent.

The Inquirer also came up with a violence rate for every school. That analysis included all serious incidents excluding drug, alcohol, and fire.

As a group, the neighborhood high schools experienced 17 percent more violent incidents in 2009-10 than they did in 2005-06, according to The Inquirer analysis.

Notably, these high schools account for 84 percent of district schools cited by the state as "persistently dangerous."

Taking a five-year snapshot of serious-incident data smooths over the reporting spike and spans two administrations.

Doing that shows a more modest decline in the serious-incident rate from 3.6 incidents per 100 students to 3.2, or 11 percent.

And that doesn't take into account the teachers, administrators, union officials, and parents who told The Inquirer that schools were not reporting serious incidents, which raises questions about the 11 percent improvement.

But school officials continue to boast of improvement. At a City Council hearing last month, Associate Superintendent Tomás Hanna said serious incidents were down 11 percent over 2009-10 in a year-to-date comparison.

The district declined to provide The Inquirer with numbers to calculate a crime rate for the period.

Numbers aside, the district's violence picture is largely what it was five years ago. Then and now, three out of every 100 students are the victim or perpetrator of violent school crime.

Inquirer staff writers Susan Snyder and John Sullivan contributed to this article.

The link to this database is currently broken. We hope to bring it to you as the new pulitzer.org continues to evolve.

Cases of students fighting, hitting teachers, making threats are discovered much later.

Tamika McNeill, who had just turned 12, contemplated killing herself last April after classmates at Cleveland Elementary School grabbed her in the cafeteria, wedged their hands under her shirt, and tried to fondle her breasts.

"It made me feel like: End it all right there," said Tamika, then a sixth grader, who had been teased and taunted for months before the attack. "But I knew that it would make my family feel worse."

Administrators at the elementary school, in Tioga, didn't take the incident as seriously. They failed to report the assault to the district's central office, a violation of district policy, until 21/2 months later and permitted her attackers to stay in school.

"They didn't handle it the way they should have," said Tamika's still-angry mother, Eloine, who with her daughter discussed the incident with reporters. "She had to endure a lot on top of being assaulted. . . . They [her attackers] were threatening to hurt her if she told the truth. They were threatening to jump her after school and her little sister."

A yearlong Inquirer investigation of violence in Philadelphia schools uncovered dozens of cases like Tamika's - 183 during the 2009-10 school year alone: Cases of students assaulting each other, punching teachers, kicking school police officers, and threatening to harm staff.

The incidents came to light - weeks or months later - only when city police issued arrest reports, prompting district officials to ask principals about them.

Teachers and union officials, meanwhile, spoke of constant pressure from senior district and school administrators - sometimes subtle and unspoken, sometimes blatant - to hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.

"My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported."

And when crimes aren't reported, the public doesn't get a true picture of school violence.

Lodise said the 183 cases had come to light only when city police made arrests.

Tamika's mother said Cleveland administrators had told her they had a good reason for suppressing notification of the assault on her daughter: They didn't want to disrupt students during state testing.

Ackerman said she was dismayed to hear the details.

"Where were the teachers? Where were the principals? If this had been dealt with at the school level - and I'm not trying to point fingers," she said, then paused. "Getting to central office two months later puts her in harm's way for a very long time."

Principals get wide latitude

It wasn't until June 22 that school police finally wrote a report about the Cleveland incident that stated: "School did not report this incident. . . . Spoke with AP [assistant principal] Renee Waring [sic]. Ms. Wearing was aware of the incident and thought it had been called into the ICU," or incident control unit.

Wearing did not respond to telephone calls seeking comment.

School District policy says principals or their designees must report all serious incidents to the district's central police office, where overall crime statistics are tabulated.

Yet district officials concede that not every incident has been properly recorded, and that Tamika's case is an example. At the same time, they deny any pressure from district headquarters to underreport.

Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison said principals had long had broad latitude in running their schools. So, depending on the principal, schools vary widely on how they report and handle violence and whether they call city police.

"There is a tension because some principals want to say, 'I understand, and I think we can help,' without involving the formal system," said Gillison, who oversees city police. "What we're saying is . . . it's not necessarily going to hurt if that report is made."

Ackerman also has said publicly that she doesn't want a school-to-prison pipeline.

In the last year, Lodise said, there has been a noticeable change in whether incidents are reported to the city police: The district has increasingly left it to assault victims to press charges.

His 635-member force of full- and part-time officers is unarmed and generally does not make arrests, though it does detain suspects.

Last month, in response to questions from The Inquirer, district spokeswoman Shana Kemp said: "Individuals who are assaulted, parents, students, teachers, and staff must file individual criminal charges. Not the school."

One area that appears to be handled differently is aggravated assault. Under state law, assaults on teachers and other school personnel are automatically classified as aggravated assaults and are supposed to be reported to city police as a matter of course.

Last year, 690 cases of teacher assaults were documented. Yet the district directly notified police only half the time, according to district records. In some cases, teachers didn't want to press charges, district officials said.

James B. Golden, the district's former chief safety executive who was removed last summer after five years, said that when in charge, he had followed a simple rule:

Aggravated assaults - defined as causing "serious bodily injury" - were reported by school personnel to city police when the crime occurred in front of witnesses and could be documented.

The victims of simple assaults were directed to contact police on their own, he said.

Gillison similarly said that in clear cases of serious assaults, schools should contact city police and not leave that to the victims.

About 21/2 months after Inquirer reporters talked to Golden, Ackerman replaced him with a city police inspector, Myron Patterson, who reports to Ackerman and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

She also asked the city police to help the district develop a uniform reporting system and, with Mayor Nutter, named a commission of top city officials that plans to make recommendations for the fall.

The new leadership arrangement was intended to get the district and city police to work more closely and cooperatively. But Gillison - to whom Ramsey reports - said some schools still were not contacting city police.

In an incident at M. Hall Stanton Elementary School in North Philadelphia on Oct. 26, principal Malika Brooks intervened to prevent a seventh-grade girl from arrest after she "intentionally struck" school Police Officer Robert Miller in the head with a telephone receiver and kicked him in a leg, according to the incident report filled out by school district police.

Miller, the report said, wanted to arrest the girl, but Brooks prohibited him from calling city police and pressing charges. Instead, the girl, 13, was suspended and taken home by a parent.

Brooks did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Gillison said the school had made a mistake - police should have been called.

Unreported incidents

By examining district data and school police incident reports for five years dating to the 2005-06 school year, The Inquirer identified numerous examples of tardy notification, failure to report, and statistical discrepancies pointing to the active suppression of information that would reveal how violent Philadelphia schools really are:

On June 14, 2010, a seventh-grade boy assaulted a female nonteaching aide at Feltonville Arts and Sciences Middle School. The assault was not reported until June 21. The principal told the control desk, "It was an oversight."

On June 10, 2010, outside a classroom at Kenderton School in Tioga, a fourth grader punched a teacher in the face. The teacher suffered facial bruising, according to the school police report. Kenderton officials didn't report the incident until 11 days later after a city Police Department report showed up.

On April 14, 2010, at Fairhill Elementary School, a girl reported that a classmate had grabbed her breasts in class. The assistant principal was told of the assault when it occurred but did not call city police or inform the principal. The school police officer, Jose Crespo, reported the incident nine days later. District spokeswoman Kemp said "personnel action" had been taken against the assistant principal for failing to report.

On March 29, 2010, a seventh grader assaulted a female teacher after hours at Locke School in West Philadelphia, but it wasn't reported until April 19 when the district's incident desk called the school. Kemp said the incident had happened before spring break and had been reported afterward, but the break began March 31 and concluded April 2.

The victim did not file a police report, and the student's parents removed him from the school for the remainder of the school year, Kemp said.

Also March 29, four fifth graders robbed a classmate after dismissal just outside Pastorius School in East Germantown. A teacher saw the robbery, but the school failed to report it. It was recorded after the incident desk called the school April 8.

On Dec. 11, 2009, a ninth grader assaulted a 10th grader shortly before dismissal at Paul Robeson High School in North Philadelphia. The assault wasn't reported until Jan. 15. "Principal believed it to be a mutual fight, and that fights are not to be reported," the school police report noted. The principal suspended both students

The Inquirer sought comment from principals at all of these schools, but only Robeson principal Hiromi Hernandez responded, disputing the account.

"We do an honest job," she said. "We're not trying to hide anything. That's the truth."

A former assistant U.S. attorney said that for years, the district had downplayed violence at the expense of the welfare of its students.

"You can't address the problem until you're honest about it," said Jack Stollsteimer, who was a watchdog for violence in the Philadelphia district before the state eliminated the position in 2009. He doesn't believe the district's assertion that violence has declined and, now that his position is gone, said no one was there to hold school officials accountable.

"I don't have any faith at all in what they say . . . and now that nobody's watching, they can say whatever they want," he said.

John Delaney, a deputy in the District Attorney's Office, said district officials must measure violence accurately before they could assess the problem and plan for improvement. Delaney, former head of the trial division, is now the office's liaison to the schools.

The School District is "an institution that lives and dies on report cards," he said. "The kids who go there, their progress or lack of progress is measured and reported. . . . Well, the goal should be that every school should be safe."

Is violence declining?

While district officials continue to tout a decline in violent incidents the last two years, teachers, union officials, and school police officers say their daily experiences contradict the numbers.

"If there is a drop, people don't feel it in the buildings," Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said last summer.

At a September meeting of the School Reform Commission, which oversees city schools, the district introduced a new safety effort with a goal of reducing the schools on the state's "persistently dangerous" list from 19 to zero in two years. That would be a historic achievement; the district has never had fewer than nine. Some schools have been on the list for nearly a decade.

Those on the front lines read that goal as putting more pressure on schools not to report crimes.

Lodise scoffed at the notion that crime could be reduced so significantly at these schools: "How do you do that?" he asked. "If it's an assault, it's an assault."

Teachers regularly complain that school officials need to deal more aggressively with the behavior that causes the problems.

"There's zero follow-through on anything," said a teacher at Roosevelt Middle School in East Germantown, who like many teachers interviewed, feared retribution if named. "We've had kids hit teachers and not gotten suspended. . . . Nothing happens."

Keith Newman said he had been orally reprimanded for calling 911 when a fight involving 50 students broke out after school outside Morrison Elementary, where he previously taught.

"My principal came along, and he helped me break it up," Newman said. "Afterward, he reamed me out for calling 911. He said, 'Only the principal can call 911.' "

That principal was Christopher Byrd, who became principal of Cleveland this school year, after Tamika left the school.

Tomás Hanna, an associate superintendent, said any employee could call 911 if a crime was committed. "There's no having to clear it through the principal," he said. "That is totally unacceptable."

Anger at school response

Robin Taylor Sr. is one parent outraged at the lack of response by schools.

Taylor, a U.S. customs officer, faulted Sayre High School in West Philadelphia for the handling of his daughter Amber's injury. He said the principal hadn't called an ambulance for Amber, then 16, who suffered a broken arm and wrist when she inadvertently got in the middle of a fight between other students.

Amber, a sophomore, was on her way out of class when a fight broke out just outside the room Nov. 9, her father said. A male student threw a girl into the door, which swung open and violently struck Amber, causing the injury.

Linda Taylor, Amber's mother, said she had first received a phone call from principal Khalia Ames telling her to meet Ames and Amber at a hospital. Soon after, she said, Ames called again, asking how far away Linda Taylor was and saying she wasn't calling an ambulance. Instead, Taylor had to pick up Amber at school and take her to the hospital herself.

Ames declined to comment, and Kemp, the district spokeswoman, denied that the principal had refused to call an ambulance.

Amber did not report violence against her on the day of the incident, Kemp said.

The next day she returned to school with her parents and said a boy had slammed her arm in the door, Kemp said.

In a meeting with Amber's parents and the other students and their parents, Amber said all the students had been "taunting" each other, according to Kemp. One of the students was moved to another class, a solution that satisfied the parents, Kemp said.

Robin and Linda Taylor disputed Kemp's account, particularly the fact that they had waited a day to report the incident. If Ames had called her the day Amber was injured, Linda Taylor said, how could she not have known about the incident?

'It's up to the parents'

Roberta Foxwell was angered that Woodrow Wilson Middle School in the Northeast failed to call city police to report an assault on her son, Jonathan Rojas, the day it occurred in October.

Rojas, a seventh grader, suffered a broken finger when another student assaulted him in the first-floor hallway, she said. The boy swung and missed, and when Rojas swung back in self-defense, the boy grabbed his hand and bent back his fingers, Rojas said.

His mother had to go to police and press charges.

"They told me they don't get involved with the police," she said. "It's up to the parents to do what they have to do."

District spokeswoman Kemp said that police had been called the day after the incident, and that school police had told Foxwell that she would have to go to the police district to file the charges. Rojas' attacker was suspended for two days, and mediation was held between the families, Kemp said.

Pressure to keep quiet

When incidents climb at a school, principals get pressure, too, from regional bosses and other administrators.

"My administration used to be very strict with discipline," said Jennifer Freeman, an English teacher and union representative at Martin Luther King High School in East Germantown. "This year, they're afraid for their jobs. They're being told things, and they're laxing up. They don't want to suspend. They don't want to have a high failure rate. The climate in my building is changing."

Teachers at King say assaults and threats against them are mounting and not being taken seriously.

This fall, a student hurled a clipboard at a teacher but received only a one-day suspension, said Freeman.

"The teacher was told it's not an assault because [it] didn't hit you," she said.

At the end of last school year, a teacher accidentally opened a set of double doors and bumped a student, Freeman said. The student became irate and attacked the teacher. Administrators at King said it wasn't an assault because the teacher had "provoked" the student by bumping him with the door first, Freeman said.

Former King principal Kristina Diviny, who left her job in January to become principal of Christiana High School in Delaware, said that when serious violence had occurred, students had been disciplined on her watch and incidents reported.

"I'm never willing to sacrifice our climate for numbers," she said.

Michael Lerner, recently retired head of the district's principals union, said his members face difficult situations every day.

He cited an example: A fight breaks out. The loser alleges he or she was assaulted. Is it an assault?

Or perhaps an employee "provokes" an assault by a child, he said. Or maybe a child has learning or emotional disabilities.

"It isn't all that simple," he said. "There are so many mitigating factors in many of these cases that it isn't black and white. It is a very, very difficult position for many principals. I know for the most part they do report."

Surprised at the data

Some schools showed a dramatic reduction in serious incidents during the last school year. Interviews with teachers at those schools and an examination of other records show discrepancies.

Roosevelt Middle School was among the most improved schools from 2008-09 to 2009-10. Its serious incidents dropped from 49 to 19.

But four teachers, who met with an Inquirer reporter on condition of anonymity, said administrators routinely discouraged reporting of incidents and downplayed their seriousness.

"In the classroom, kids can curse at us, throw things, and fight, and nothing happens to them," one teacher said.

"We're told it's . . . a matter of classroom management," said another. "We're told, 'Fix it yourself.' "

Hanna, the district associate superintendent, however, attributed the improvement to new "behavior-support" programs and to principal Stefanie Ressler, who has been there for several years. Ressler did not return calls for comment.

Harding Middle School in Frankford, which came off the persistently dangerous list in 2009-10, also was among the most improved in the entire district. Its incidents were cut by more than half, from 93 to 42 in 2010.

"I'm surprised at the data," said Lisa Haver, who taught at Harding last year and has since retired from the district. "I didn't see any drop in violent incidents. It seemed to be the same as the previous years."

The School District keeps separate compilations of incidents and suspensions. A comparison of the data for 2009-10 reveals inconsistencies, raising questions about how accurately information is reported.

For example, Carnell Elementary in Oxford Circle reported 17 suspensions for sex acts through May 31, but noted four morals offenses.

Richmond Elementary in Port Richmond cited 15 suspensions for sex acts but only two morals offenses, and 10 suspensions for weapons but only one weapons incident.

District officials offered no explanation for Carnell. At Richmond, spokesman Fernando Gallard said, information was entered incorrectly into the computer.

Olney High School West and Olney High School East share a building, draw from the same neighborhood, and have almost the same enrollment - about 900 in 2009-10.

Yet East reported 102 serious incidents last year, 31 percent more than West, with 78.

Several educators at both schools said administrators on the West side underreported incidents and were more lax with discipline.

The district in 2005 split the building, one of its most disruptive and academically troubled high schools, into two schools with a wall down the middle. They hoped smaller settings would lead to improvement.

The new Olneys didn't qualify for the persistently dangerous list because schools must have at least two years of data to qualify for the list. They have since returned.

Reporting the incidents

For years, the district has struggled with how to report crime consistently and fairly.

A case at Sharswood Elementary in South Philadelphia in January 2008 illustrates how one incident and a directive from the central office can significantly influence the level of reported violence.

The principal failed to report an attack on an eighth-grade girl in an anti-bullying class, which spurred a crackdown on reporting by the administration. The result was a spike in reported incidents that has not been matched in any other year during the last decade.

"The principals said: 'You want reporting? We'll give you reporting,' " said Golden, the former school safety chief.

Sometimes teachers report incidents that seem more like horseplay, said Benjamin Wright, the district's assistant superintendent of alternative education.

He cited a case of an elementary student who dropped a play cell phone. When a teacher confiscated it, he grabbed her wrist.

"She called 911," Wright said. "That kind of stuff doesn't fly with me."

He also maintained that it's not an assault if a teacher is inadvertently struck breaking up a fight.

Tamika's struggles

Tamika, the student who was groped by classmates in the Cleveland cafeteria, had become a routine target for classmates. They teased her about her training bra and made fun of her because she is underdeveloped for her age, her family said.

A boy put her in a headlock during writing class, punched her, and broke her glasses.

A student grabbed the glasses off Tamika's 8-year-old sister and stomped on them after finding out the girls are related.

Once, students followed Tamika and her mother home from school. "I don't care if she's with her mom,' " Eloine McNeill recalled them saying, " 'I'll walk up and punch that bitch in her face.' "

McNeill, 39, said she had spun around on her heels.

"That's it. This will be the last time," she told them. "If you hit my child, you're going to get the whooping you should have got at home."

They just laughed, McNeill said.

The worst abuse happened in early April when Tamika went into the cafeteria. She had sensed something was wrong because students were staring at her.

So she wore her backpack on her chest for protection.

"Bra stuffer. Bra stuffer," she heard someone yell.

Then several students came at her. A boy tried to wrestle her knapsack away. He held her hands behind her back, she said. Two other students wedged their hands between the backpack and her body, one going up her shirt and the other going down in it.

They grabbed her chest, as she yelled for them to stop.

Tamika pulled away and ran into a bathroom. She collapsed to the floor, crying, she said.

A female school police officer who had followed her in asked what was wrong.

She said she didn't feel she could trust anyone. The teasing had gone on for too long. Tamika and her mother said they had complained to school workers about the problems at least a half-dozen times.

As soon as the officer left, Tamika ran home - the one place she felt safe. Her mother wasn't home, so Tamika called her on the phone, sobbing as she relayed what happened.

While waiting for her mother, she drew a picture of a face, tears streaming down it, and wrote a poem:

In the schools, they're always bothering me.

But if they just take the time to see how much of a good friend I can be.

I'm smart and I'm really fun, and I like to play

and you can speak to me all day.

But no one wants to talk to me.

No one wants to say hi unless they're saying bye girl, please or goodbye.

I just hope one day I'll have a friend I can trust,

but I hope it's soon because I think I might combust.

When she heard what had happened, Eloine McNeill called city police and returned to school with Tamika that afternoon to register a complaint. Police met them at the school.

She was dismayed to find that no one at Cleveland had even noticed Tamika was gone, though an hour had passed:

"I said, 'Did her teacher call downstairs to say one of her students didn't return from lunch?' None of that occurred."

In the days after the attack, the school didn't remove Tamika's attackers from her classes or stop them from harassing the girl, McNeill said.

Nor did it notify district officials at the central office - that wouldn't happen for 21/2 months.

City police from the Special Victims Unit took Tamika's complaint on April 9 but didn't interview witnesses until April 22.

Near the end of the school year - about two months after the assault - the school organized a meeting for Tamika and her mother with the attackers and their parents in an effort at reconciliation.

About the same time, arrest warrants for two boys - fellow sixth graders - were finally issued, one in June and the other in July.

Under a "consent decree," the students were ordered to perform 25 hours of community service, spend time with a court-appointed advocate, follow a curfew, and submit to random drug screens, according to court officials.

The drawn-out process was an ordeal for Tamika. She stopped going out for recess because her mother was too worried. Instead, she sat in the school office. She never wanted to take her coat off. She felt "violated," she said.

The bright girl who had a knack for drawing began to like school less. She would cry frequently, wondering why the classmates who attacked her were allowed to remain in school.

"It was hard to walk past them," she said softly.

Tamika, now a seventh grader, has since moved to Kenderton School, which is only a slightly longer walk than Cleveland, and she's happier.

"The word needs to get out on how violent the schools really are," her mother said, "and they really need to take it seriously."

Children ages 5 to 10 assault staff and classmates. Some commit sex offenses.

By Susan Snyder, John Sullivan, Kristen A. Graham, and Dylan Purcell

Tabitha Allen blames herself for her 10-year-old son's violent behavior.

Growing up and living in a drug-infested, hooker-inhabited neighborhood, the 33-year-old mother of five is angry about life.

"My anger reflects off my children," Allen explained one morning in the North Philadelphia rowhouse she inherited from her grandmother. Her son - a thin, almost gaunt, boy with long eyelashes - punched a teacher last June at Kenderton Elementary School, a K-8 in Tioga. He knocked the glasses off her face and blackened her eye with a blow that packed unexpected power.

As a 10-year-old, he had reached the minimum age to be arrested, and ended up with a simple assault charge in Family Court, where he was put on probation. He was removed from Kenderton and transferred to a classroom for disruptive elementary school students in Logan.

Only last week, Allen said that her son was disciplined for having a BB gun at his new school. She said it was a misunderstanding and that the gun belonged to another student.

Allen's son typifies a disturbing side of violence in Philadelphia schools.

A yearlong Inquirer investigation found that young children - from kindergartners to 10-year-olds - have been assaulting and threatening classmates and staff members with increasing ferocity and sophistication.

A number of the attacks had sexual elements - there were 187 morals offenses during the last five years in schools with grades no higher than fifth, and 1,118 in all elementary schools, including K-8 buildings. About 60 percent were classified as indecent assault.

Children 10 and under account for nearly 18 percent - more than one in six - of all students committing offenses reported in the entire district, according to 2009-10 data submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Education and obtained by The Inquirer.

The Inquirer looked at violence in that age group because, by law, children under 10 are not arrested.

A sampling of incident reports filed by school police during the last five years, coupled with interviews, offers chilling accounts:

In October 2010 at Dobson Elementary, a K-8 in Manayunk, a classroom assistant was spat on, punched and kicked - all by a kindergartner. The aide suffered torn ligaments and tendons in a hand.

At Southwark Elementary, a K-8 school in South Philadelphia in October 2010, a 10-year-old boy "body slammed" into his teacher with such force that she suffered a concussion as she fell to the ground.

In June 2009, a Douglass Elementary student issued a startling warning to a second grader at the K-8 school in North Philadelphia whom she was choking: "I know where you live, and I will burn your house down."

In April 2008, in a third-grade classroom at Taylor Elementary, a K-5 school in Hunting Park, one child held a knife against a classmate's throat and threatened to cut off his head if he snitched.

At the K-8 Morris Elementary in North Philadelphia in February 2008, an angry 9-year-old punched his pregnant teacher in the stomach.

In December 2007, on the playground at Richmond Elementary, a K-5 school in Port Richmond, a 10-year-old girl's classmate forced her head down to his groin.

During the 2009-10 school year, an Inquirer analysis shows, eight of the top 10 highest rates for morals crimes in the district were recorded in elementary schools.

More than half of the 177 elementary schools - including K-8 buildings and other early learning schools - reported a morals crime in 2009-10. Ninety percent have dealt with at least one sex crime in the last five years.

Overall violence rates rose in nearly half the elementary schools, according to a five-year Inquirer analysis of the district's raw data through June 2010.

Likewise, of the elementary schools that include at least one grade above fifth, about half reported increases in violent crime rates over the previous year.

Eleven of the district's 41 schools with no grade above fifth saw their violent crime rate increase in the last year.

Three of those schools - Smedley, a K-5 school in Frankford that became a charter in September; Cayuga, a K-5 school in Hunting Park; and McClure, a K-4 school also in Hunting Park - had a violent crime rate for 2010 that was higher than the district's overall average, including high schools.

Concerns have arisen even at some of the district's most highly regarded elementary schools.

Pollock, a K-6 school in the Northeast, was recognized as a national Blue Ribbon school by the U.S. Department of Education in 2007 for its consistent increase in test scores.

But last spring, a group of staff members and parents wrote to Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman about violent acts occurring there among young students.

"The fights and bullying that go on here every day and the lack of discipline being taken by [the principal] is horrible," they wrote. "We have had students swing at us, curse us out, threaten us that they will get our kids during school when we are breaking up fights in the morning and after school."

District spokeswoman Shana Kemp said conditions at the school had improved, thanks to principal Marilyn Carr.

"Principal Carr has done a great job of engaging the community as a part of her efforts to improve the climate at the school," Kemp said, "and we hope that that continued community-building will lead to even greater improvements in the climate at the school."

Facing young violence

The school system is also overwhelmed with young students living amid poverty, violence, and disorder, some of them largely unparented.

Often, the district has failed to heed the warning signs of violence in its youngsters and figure out a systemic plan to address the problem, with dire consequences.

"By the time they get to middle school and high school, [violence] metastasizes like cancer," said Charles A. Williams 3d, director of the Center for Prevention of School-Aged Violence at Drexel University.

During the last several years, district officials began a handful of programs they say make for a good start, including a bullying and violence prevention curriculum in K-12, said Benjamin Wright, assistant superintendent of alternative education, who oversees discipline in the 155,000-student district.

More than five years ago - when Paul Vallas was still running it - the School District also created alternative classrooms for violent and extremely disruptive third and fourth graders within regular elementary schools scattered around the city. It hired Abraxas, a Houston company, to oversee these special classrooms.

Children in kindergarten through second grade who commit violent offenses remain in their schools - sometimes in the same classroom - and get help. Or they can be transferred to another elementary school.

Transfers at that age rarely happen, Wright said. The district, he said, doesn't keep records in its central archive, but he maintained that no more than five cases occurred in the last school year.

He opposes sending children that young to alternative schools or classrooms. They are in school to learn good behavior, and it's not right to banish them to a disciplinary setting, he said.

"In kindergarten, you're supposed to teach kids how to act when they're going through school," he said.

Wright says the problem is due in part to poor responses by staff, who inflame rather than defuse bad behavior.

Take the case of a young student who refuses his teacher's directive to take his seat. "Does that mean that child's being disobedient? No, that means the child is bored.

"So you might want to say 'OK, I'll give you five minutes to move around and then I'm going to ask you to take your seat.' "

If the child still won't sit, let him stand but say, "You must keep working," he suggested.

Wright also blamed the staff's unequal treatment of boys and Hispanic and black students.

"A boy can't do what a girl does in some schools. A black or Latino kid can't do what a nonblack or Latino kid does," he said.

He also said that adequate counseling and resources were available and that the staff received ample training to deal with problem students.

But teachers say their schools lack enough training, psychological services, and coordination with other agencies to address the problem.

In a recent survey of more than 750 teachers and aides, conducted in a partnership by The Inquirer and Temple University, nearly equal numbers of educators in elementary, middle, and high schools said the problems of violence and disruptive student behavior are getting worse.

Violence worsened during the last three years, said 53 percent of the respondents who work at elementary schools. In middle schools, 57 percent said it was worse, and in high schools, 59 percent.

Those working in the elementary schools, the survey showed, are as likely as those in middle and high schools to see bullying, fighting, and physical attacks on students every day.

Attack in a school library

Keron Howard, 8, wasn't safe in the school library.

He was reading Pirates of the Caribbean at J. Hampton Moore School in the Northeast when several classmates - who had been teasing and bullying him for months - approached. He said one third-grade boy slammed him to the ground, another kicked him in the stomach, and a third put him in a headlock.

"We all hate you, Keron," he said one of the attackers - a girl - told him.

When he went home that night, he complained of such head and stomach pain that his grandmother, Mildred Fisher, took him to an emergency room. The Feb. 2 attack was the last straw for the retired day-care operator.

Fisher had complained to the school several times over the last year and a half about her grandson's bullies. She also had called the district's safety hotline and complained to an official at the central office.

Asked about the incident, district officials said Keron did not report to teachers that he was injured, and staff members did not see an assault. An investigation found that "some type of physical action occurred," according to Kemp. Three boys were disciplined and the school also offered to put them and Keron in different classrooms, or transfer Keron to another school.

"I feel like he's entitled to an education at a public school," Fisher said, "but there was no way I was going to send him back there. It's not right that I have to worry about him being in school."

Even though she couldn't afford it, Fisher placed Keron at a $4,000-a-year Lutheran school.

The move was worth it, she said.

"I can see the change. He's getting better marks. He's paying attention. He's in a better mood going to school and when I pick him up."

Teachers, staff attacked

Sometimes, teachers are the victims.

Takia Conner was four months pregnant, and some students in her special-education class at Morris Elementary School were becoming jealous. They would say she wasn't their friend anymore and point to her stomach.

"They were having a hard time with me having a child of my own," she recalled.

A 9-year-old boy, who was in foster care and had a history of aggression, rushed at her one day in February 2008 when she denied him something he wanted.

He punched her square in the stomach - so hard that it knocked the wind out of her.

"He wasn't sure he'd done anything wrong," said Conner, who has since left the area and teaching.

"We really don't know what to do with second graders whose first instinct is to throw punches," she said. "Everyone thinks they'll outgrow it."

Conner said that in the past, she had repeatedly asked for more help with the boy. It was only after the attack that an aide was assigned to shadow him during the entire school day.

"I honestly believe the School District, as well as other districts, needs to take a look at the whole student, the whole body of needs from mental health to behavior, and employ the proper professionals to help," she said.

A school psychologist should be readily available, she said, but her school had to share one. And the school's counselor was strapped for time, filling in for regular classroom teachers, a duty counselors are routinely drafted to perform.

Hearing of the case, Wright said pregnant teachers should know how to protect themselves.

In this case, he said, the teacher should have given the boy what he wanted at the time and then called for help

"If I'm in a school, and I'm a teacher, and I'm pregnant, make sure I don't put myself in harm's way, because the kids are going to be kids," Wright said.

Tracee Sigler, a classroom assistant, was attacked four times this school year - most recently by a 5-year-old kindergartner at Dobson Elementary who kicked and punched her. She tore ligaments and tendons in her hand and required surgery.

Sigler was only at Dobson for three days before the kindergartner lashed out.

Wright was skeptical.

"He probably only weighs 65 pounds. I can hold that kid off until some help comes," Wright said.

At the beginning of the year, in three separate incidents at Alexander Wilson Elementary in West Philadelphia, Sigler was punched, cut and stabbed

One student was responsible for all three injuries, she said. Her pleas to the administration to remove the boy, a sixth grader, went unheeded.

"I'm a single parent," said Sigler, "and I can't be in a position where I'm afraid to go to work because I might not come home.

Sigler said school employees should receive training on how to defend themselves from attacks: "We need to know how to protect ourselves," Sigler said.

She returned to Dobson for one day in February, only to find that her attacker was still at school. She quit and has moved out of state

In October, at Southwark Elementary in South Philadelphia, a 10-year-old special education student was having a full-fledged tantrum. He flipped furniture over, threw a chair, ran into the hall, and began kicking lockers. Then he started attacking classmates.

When his 5-foot-1 female teacher intervened, he "intentionally body slammed" into her in an attempt to get at another student, according to a school police report. She was knocked into a brick wall and hit her head on a door knob as she fell, losing consciousness.

"I woke up on the floor," said the young teacher, who asked not to be identified.

The teacher provided medical reports on her condition to The Inquirer, and teacher union officials corroborated her story

Her principal, she said, told her to "get it together" and continue teaching that day, which shocked her.

Greg Shannon, a district administrator, however, rebutted the teacher's account. He said he spoke with principal Margaret Chin, who told him she did not direct the teacher to return to the classroom. Chin declined to comment.

The teacher said she tried to resume work, but began having memory and dizziness problems. Later that day, she went to the office in tears.

At colleagues' urging, she sought medical attention on her own; it turned out she had a concussion.

She later went to the police station to press charges against the student. The student remained in the school for several weeks, she said, but then was removed and sent to a disciplinary school.

She has left Southwark and now teaches at an elementary school in Kensington.

Glynnis Gradwell, a teacher at Ellwood, a K-6 school in East Oak Lane, said the district should create special-admission schools for students with good behavior. It's not fair that their education is hindered by constantly disruptive students, she said.

"Disorder hurts all the other kids who are there," said Gradwell, who emphasized that student behavior and morale are better at Ellwood than they were at her previous school, Pennell.

Sexual violence

Violence sometimes takes on sexual overtones, which teachers must handle, but often don't anticipate.

For student victims, such assaults can go beyond physical injury and become psychologically devastating. What happened to Aisha Coltrane's daughter is a case in point.

A classmate grabbed the girl, then 10, and forced her head down to his groin while the two were on the playground at Richmond Elementary in Port Richmond.

An internal School District police report from Dec. 12, 2007, coded it as a morals offense/indecent assault. Coltrane was unhappy with the punishment the school meted out.

"He was only suspended for one day and the next day he was back in school," she said of the offending student.

The boy was even allowed to stay in her daughter's class, Coltrane said, adding: "He still was messing with her in the schoolyard."

The taunting took a toll.

"It made her an angrier person," Coltrane said of her daughter, who is now 13.

Six years ago, in an effort to deal with sexually oriented attacks by young children, the district hired the Philadelphia-based Joseph J. Peters Institute, which counsels victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse. The institute screens district students 10 and under.

Most cases involve touching or attempting to touch another student, said Thomas F. Haworth, director of the child and adolescent programs at the institute.

Young children who commit violent sexual acts sometimes have been abused themselves, or have been exposed to the acts either through the media or in their homes or neighborhoods, experts say.

The children are acting out what they've seen, and therefore a therapeutic rather than disciplinary approach is needed, they say.

"In children who are prepubescent, for them to demonstrate advanced knowledge of sexual behavior, to exhibit adultlike sexual behavior, is pretty much an earmark that they've had some exposure or contact of a sexual nature," Haworth said.

The institute screens about 60 children a year, which he acknowledged is only a portion of the district's cases. Screenings are conducted only with parental permission, and some parents find the prospect too intrusive, Wright said.

The screenings seek to determine how the sexual exposure occurred, Haworth said. It's rarely through abuse by an adult or older child - a category that accounts for only 5 percent of the cases, he said.

School personnel are advised to closely monitor the children, by keeping them in sight and having them go to the bathroom independently or under supervision.

"We can't be freaked out by the behavior," he said. "We have to manage it like we manage other behaviors."

Developing coping skills

At the elementary level, support and coping skills are what violent students most need, experts say.

"Punishment's not the answer," said Paul Fink, a psychiatrist who has worked with the district. "You need to ask what happened. Talk to the child."

Schools, too, particularly in urban and poor areas, must recognize that many students suffer from post-traumatic stress because they have been exposed to violence.

"If you keep those feelings in, eventually the child is going to explode. That's what the school sees. That's what the neighborhood sees," said Judith Cohen, medical director at the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh and a professor of psychiatry at Drexel.

Children feel they can release their anger in school because it's a safe place, unlike the neighborhoods where many of them live, Cohen said.

She cited the case of a first grader in Pittsburgh public schools who hit her teacher. The child had been raped repeatedly by a male in the home since she was a toddler.

Only genuinely violent youngsters should be removed from the classroom, said Myrna Shure, a professor of psychology at Drexel. Too often, schools target highly disruptive students as well, she said.

But schools can't do it all, said Williams, of Drexel's violence prevention center.

"Parents are not doing what they need to do to prepare these kids, to manage their behavior, to manage expectations," he said. "Far too many parents have completely abdicated their responsibilities as parents."

Struggling with anger

Tabitha Allen admits she wasn't on top of her children's lives the way she should have been, especially after her grandmother got sick and an aunt died.

"I took my mind off my kids," Allen said.

Allen, a high school dropout and unemployed, had all five of her children before she was 25. Two of her teenagers she describes as "Bonnie and Clyde."

"They don't know how to walk away from stuff. They don't know how to let stuff go," she said.

Her youngest, the 10-year-old who assaulted the teacher, takes after them, she said.

So it was no surprise to her when she learned he had hit his teacher.

Earlier, the teacher had intervened when the boy hit a classmate. That led to a fist fight in the hall between the boy and the teacher, she said.

Her son had been suspended repeatedly for fighting, she said. This time, he faced legal charges and landed on probation. Kenderton kicked him out and sent him to a disciplinary classroom at a K-6 school in Logan, about a mile and a half from his house.

The classroom is run by Abraxas. This year, there are 10 such sites based at elementary schools and serving 240 children in grades three to eight, said Wright, of the discipline office.

Each self-contained classroom is staffed by a teacher and a behavior specialist. Students are evaluated after 30 days to determine if they can return to a regular school. In addition to academics, the students receive counseling and character-building courses.

Allen said the school is too strict. When her son enters the school, he is patted down for weapons, she said. His classroom is in the basement, she said, and he is not allowed out for recess.

"He ain't no convict. This isn't jail," she complained.

Allen also said she was at a loss about how to help her son, who has ADHD and sees a psychiatrist.

She did her best to discipline her children, she said, and learned how to "beat them at their own game."

When her son missed her imposed 10 p.m. curfew, she made him sit outside until 2 a.m. - in the cold.

When her 13-year-old was locked up for trying to steal sneakers, she let him sit in jail for a while. She did the same to her 16-year-old daughter after she got into a fight and was detained

And when her 15-year-old son said he was going to kill himself, she hung a rope and told him how best to do it.

"I said, 'It depends on how you jump,' " she said. "You got to jump right."

Allen struggles with her own anger. She said it comes from "life. Period. Me growing up in a neighborhood like this, seeing all the drugs."

She pointed to her front door.

"I got a whole hooker row right here on the corner," she said.

Allen lives on North 10th Street, near a Police Athletic League building - an oasis where her 10-year-old plays basketball and football.

On a recent visit, Allen showed off a remodeled kitchen, new floor, and two couches still wrapped in plastic.

She said the next phase would include a remodeling of her 10-year-old son's bedroom, which on an earlier visit had one poster of a pop band on the wall - a legacy of his sister - a crumpled air mattress patched with duct tape, and a television cart with a small TV and video game console.

Although things appear to be improving at home, one thing stayed the same.

The boy said that if he could change anything about his life, he would pick a different school.

By Susan Snyder, Kristen A. Graham, John Sullivan, and Dylan Purcell

Veteran Philadelphia school teacher Lou Austin endured 40 minutes of terror as the 15-year-old ninth grader jabbed his index finger into Austin's temple and threatened to kill him while swinging a pair of scissors menacingly.

Austin didn't even know the youth, who ransacked his classroom - flipping desks and attempting to set fire to books - at Lincoln High School in Mayfair on Valentine's Day. He'd merely asked him to step away from his classroom door and go to his own class when the youth exploded.

Austin's experience illustrates the dangers and frustration that teachers in Philadelphia public schools face daily. During the 2009-10 school year, 690 teachers were assaulted. Over five years, from 2005-06 to 2009-10, more than 4,000 teacher assaults were reported, a yearlong Inquirer investigation has found.

And that doesn't include incidents of threats, disruption, and utter disrespect.

"All I could do was to stand there with my hands behind my back, accept the abuse, and hope this did not infuriate him even more," said Austin, a Philadelphia teacher for 15 years who graduated from Lincoln in 1984.

His story also illustrates how teachers must cope with violent, disturbed students with little backup from the district.

The assaults can turn decidedly dangerous.

Violence against school staff in Philadelphia gained national attention in 2007 when Germantown High School teacher Frank Burd was attacked by a special-education student with a history of disruptive behavior and emotional problems.

The ninth grader was cutting class and roaming the halls when another student pushed Burd, knocking him into the special-ed student. The teen reacted by punching Burd - a man he didn't even know - three times in the face. Burd fell and broke his neck. He never returned to teaching.

The case prompted a district crackdown on violence against teachers, including the establishment of a teacher-safety hotline and more stringent penalties for offenders. City police promised to respond to all calls of assaults at schools and to make arrests if the victim approved.

But four years later, teachers continue to be used as punching bags by wayward students, much to the chagrin of their union.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, met with School Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman in November after two teachers in one week suffered concussions when they were assaulted by students.

"It's been a very challenging first semester," Jordan said later. "We've been getting reports from our members about the kinds of assaults that are taking place in schools and the lack of follow-though on discipline.

"There has to be follow-through to be sure teachers are able to teach and kids are able to learn."

His meeting with Ackerman led to a joint memo on Nov. 8 to the School District staff, reminding them to take a hard line on bullying and assaults.

"Some students have decided to be a disruptive force in our schools," the memo said, adding that the School District "will not tolerate this behavior and is reemphasizing its zero-tolerance policy in two major areas: Acts of student violence against adults and bullying."

The memo said that an assault on staff would result in a 10-day suspension, transfer to an alternative school, and possible formal expulsion and criminal charges.

But, The Inquirer found, that's clearly not an iron-clad rule, especially in cases involving special-education students.

Special-ed students

Under state and federal law, school officials must take a student's disability into consideration when deciding on punishment and consequences. In most cases, they must look at the appropriateness of the student's special-education program and whether the behavior was a manifestation of his or her disability, which can include learning, emotional or physical problems.

If the school was not giving the student adequate help, then a change in the child's program or education services may be the right consequence, according to special-education experts.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that a student can't be disciplined.

Most special-education students can be suspended for as many as 15 school days each academic year - and longer if the district gets a parent's permission or takes it to a hearing. Students also can be transferred to disciplinary schools in some cases.

But the regulations are not easily interpreted.

"Special-education law is complex and confusing, and that's why many people mistakenly believe that schools are unable or prohibited from dealing with behavior problems involving kids with disabilities," said Len Rieser, executive director of the Education Law Center, a nonprofit in Philadelphia. "In fact, schools have options, but school personnel are not always clear on what they are."

An Inquirer investigation in the aftermath of the attack on Burd found that special-education students were responsible for an inordinate number of assaults on teachers and other school staff.

In 2007, special-education students accounted for just 14 percent of the city's school enrollment, yet committed 43 percent of the 7,547 assaults on staff during the previous five-year period. The numbers haven't changed much. From September through February of this school year, 1,628 assaults have been reported in the district, and about 39 percent included at least one special-education student as an offender, School District spokeswoman Shana Kemp said. About 14 percent of the student body is in special education, excluding gifted students.

The 2007 investigation also found that the district routinely failed to provide services to special-education students, and therefore felt it could not follow through with discipline if the students assaulted a staff member.

In the case of the Lincoln student, Kemp said a suspension would not have been appropriate.

And she said that even though the youth faces a criminal charge, he could end up back at Lincoln - his neighborhood school - because of his status as a special-needs student. The district would make a decision along with other behavioral and mental health agencies after his case was adjudicated, she said.

"The young man had emotional disturbances. We can't refuse a student entry into a school based upon that situation," she said.

Austin learned that the teen had been allowed to enroll at Lincoln in January without teachers' knowing his history. He was perplexed.

Kemp said the district - by law - can't release medical details about the student to staff.

In the Lincoln incident, the teen initially was charged with aggravated assault, criminal mischief, possessing an instrument of crime, terroristic threats, simple assault, and recklessly endangering another person.

On Feb. 25, he made an admission to simple assault and terroristic threats charges, both misdemeanors. Disposition of his case is pending.

A right to defend

Under the teachers' contract approved in January 2010, teachers were granted the authority to use force to defend themselves.

The contract says a teacher "may use reasonable force to protect himself/herself or others from attack or injury or to quell a disturbance which threatens physical injury to a teacher or others."

Reasonable force is defined as the same level of "physical control" a parent could legally use to deal with a child.

Teachers gave union leaders a standing ovation when they announced the provision before the contract vote.

But even with this new provision, teachers remain cautious because of past experience.

Barry Strube, a physical education teacher at Olney High School East, spent two months in a disciplinary room - dubbed the "rubber room" or "teacher's jail" - while his case was being decided after an incident in January 2010.

It started when a student in his health class refused to sit down. Strube said he put his hand on the student's shoulder and the boy "burst up," threatened to kill him, cursed him out, and tried to hit him, he said.

"I grabbed him by his book bag, spun him away from me, and took him across the hall to the discipline room," said Strube, who has taught at the school for 16 years.

The student complained to the administration that Strube had hit him. The student later admitted he had lied, Strube said.

Strube was allowed to return to teaching, but said he was suspended for three days, and told he should have somehow called for help. The school also tried to take away his football coaching position, but the union filed a grievance and won, he said.

"It's absolutely ridiculous that they're accusing me of doing anything," Strube said. "I don't know what else I could have done. I was doing what I thought was a good thing - getting him out of the room as quickly as possible."

Kemp, the district spokeswoman, said Strube "was provided due process" but declined to elaborate, saying it was a personnel matter.

Jordan, the PFT president, says too often teachers are blamed when violence occurs.

"Incidents are reported and, instead of following up, teachers are questioned as to what is it they did in order to cause the behavior to occur, which is really the wrong approach," Jordan said.

The union provides training to its 11,600-member teaching force on how to defuse disruptive situations and handle problem behavior. It recommends, for example, that teachers avoid blocking a student in a classroom because he or she will "lunge" to get past the teacher, and it will result in physical contact.

"Let the kid go, pick up the phone, tell administration 'So and so just left my room very angry,' " Jordan said.

One teacher's defense

Sometimes, however, teachers have no choice but to defend themselves.

Matthew Mundy, a world history teacher at Martin Luther King High School, was punched and kicked by a female student on a rampage on the second day of school last fall.

The girl entered his classroom and informed Mundy, "I'm going to break every f- ing thing in this place," after he reprimanded her for failing to sit in her assigned seat.

He called the dean of students, the principal, and the school police on the phone, but no one answered. The girl disappeared only to come back at the end of class, pound on the door, curse, and write on the window with a marker. When he opened the door, she rushed in and attacked. He tripped her to get her on the floor and stop the onslaught.

School police arrived and handcuffed the girl. Adding insult to injury, she spit in his face on the way out the door.

Some call it quits

Even when teachers are not the victims, they're profoundly impacted by the violence they see.

Sean Fennessy, a former teacher at Olney High School East, took two days off after witnessing a brutal attack on a student in his classroom in March 2010. A male student rushed into his room during class change and pummeled a student, Fennessy said.

Fennessy, 26, watched in horror.

It took several minutes for school police to arrive. In the interim, the victim fell to the floor between two desks. His attacker had time to throw 20 to 30 punches before fleeing.

"It was such an affront to me," Fennessy said. "I considered my classroom a sacred space."

Fennessy became increasingly disillusioned with the school's administration and leadership on educational issues, too.

He quit last June.

Another who quit was former Beeber Middle School teacher Lynn Larrick.

A 6-foot-2, 250-pound eighth grader told her he would have his mother "f- her up" last school year. When she went to document the threat, he taunted: "I probably have about 10 pink slips, and I'm still here."

Another day, he grabbed a girl's notebook and jumped up and down on it. When Larrick tried to send him out of the room, he told her he had been suspended earlier in the day anyway. As he left, he aimed his finger at her and pretended to shoot her.

There were other incidents, too. Her blood pressure climbing high, Larrick decided to leave the district on her doctor's advice.

Unable to get satisfaction from the School District, she wrote to President Obama.

"No one seems willing to address the issue of negative behavior in our neighborhood public schools," she said in the letter, dated March 25, 2010. "It is the elephant in the room."

Others stay

Kate Sannicks-Lerner, a first-grade bilingual teacher at Elkin Elementary, a K-4 school in Kensington, said that in her career, she's been bitten, kicked, punched, and spit on by unruly charges.

Most recently, she was kicked, slapped, and cursed out by a first grader who didn't want to leave a classroom.

She took the boy to the office and wrote out a disciplinary slip. The child, she said, was back in school the next day. But he was remorseful, she said, unlike some other cases she has had.

"He brought me flowers and a card," she said.

The violence doesn't surprise her "because of the community I serve. It's part of their daily lives."

When one of her former students was just 3, he witnessed his mother being shot to death while his infant brother lay in her lap.

"Why he acted out is no surprise at all to me," she said.

Her school, she said, needs more resources to help all the students who require it.

"Our administration is very proactive, or as proactive as they can be," she said, "but it's just an overwhelming situation."

She said last week that conditions had worsened.

"I'm really concerned that the students who need academic support and behavioral support are really slipping through the cracks," said Sannicks-Lerner, the union representative at Elkin.

Unlike some other teachers interviewed who were afraid to be identified by name, Sannicks-Lerner said she does not fear retribution from the administration for speaking out.

"I'm willing to go down for the people who have no voice," she said.

Austin's ordeal

Austin, the Lincoln teacher, sympathizes with students who have problems and knows how important school can be. He got involved in band and bonded with teachers.

"Lincoln helped me to get through," he said.

But Austin could see that the teen who confronted him that February day had major problems and didn't belong there. When Austin closed his classroom door, the teen paced angrily outside the room for 20 minutes, peering in the window. He rushed in at the end of class when Austin opened the door. "He got in my face . . . trying to bait me into a confrontation," Austin recalled.

Austin raised his hands to protect himself. The student slapped them down and struck a boxer's pose, he said. He asked a colleague to call for security.

The teacher watched in horror as the student for 15 minutes flipped desks, attempted to set fire to books, took items out of Austin's desk, and hurled them against the wall. It was in the desk that the teen found the pair of scissors he began to wave at Austin

"Throughout his violent outburst, he repeatedly referred to being 'put away for three, then four, years but not again,' " Austin said. "When help finally arrived, he threatened to stab anyone who approached him."

The principal, school police, and Austin had to wait for Philadelphia police to arrive.

In the aftermath, Austin worried for his safety, wondering if the student would try to retaliate.

Austin tried to go back to school two days later but couldn't.

"I had a dream about school. It was a chaotic atmosphere where I had no control over what was happening," he said. "It made me feel very anxious."

He returned a week after the incident.

His was the fourth teacher assault at Lincoln in two weeks, he said.

Conditions have worsened as the central office pressures schools to lower out-of-school suspensions without viable alternatives, he said.

"The school environment continues to decay because the students have become empowered by the lack of consequences for negative behavior," Austin said.

Lincoln principal Donald Anticoli would not comment. Austin emphasized that he doesn't blame Anticoli or the rest of Lincoln's administrative staff for the problems.

"We do the best with the directives that we're handed," he said.

His union representative, Austin said, told him that School District administrators were upset that Anticoli had moved to suspend the teen for 10 days and wanted to remove the teen from the school.

"To my principal's credit, he made it clear that that kid would not be back, that [he] should have never been placed at the school," Austin said. "He backed me 100 percent."

Austin said he feels sorry for the youth.

"What does the future hold for him? He is the real victim," Austin said.

PDF of Teachers Speak Out graphic

An effort to help students and limit violence is seen as little more than paper-shuffling.

By John Sullivan, Susan Snyder, Kristen A. Graham, and Dylan Purcell

Rashaan Carr should have been in class at Martin Luther King High School.

Instead, he ended up wading into a crowd of fourth and fifth graders in a bustling elementary school playground, swinging a silver-and-white Louisville Slugger aluminum baseball bat, witnesses said.

Eleven younger boys were hurt.

"This was no nightmare. This was real," one victim said later that day.

But behind the melee is a more complicated, subtle, and elusive story, a yearlong Inquirer investigation has found.

It is the story of how a school district in one of the poorest and most violent American cities struggles to help troubled students, and how the district's intervention efforts too often fail.

Since Arlene C. Ackerman took over as Philadelphia school superintendent in 2008, she has made a program called CSAP - Comprehensive Student Assistance Process - the centerpiece of her effort to stave off students' deteriorating grades and behavior. The program is designed to apply a host of resources such as intensive tutoring and counseling, as well as identifying learning disabilities or behavioral disorders.

Use of the program skyrocketed from 16,534 referrals in 2008 to 51,166, including Carr, by the end of the 2009-10 school year. That means that nearly a third of the School District's 155,000 students are enrolled - and the district plans to expand the program even more.

"If used correctly, it's a major intervention that can work," Ackerman said. "I know that because I've seen it work in my own experiences."

But many teachers and administrators say the program is a bust - an exercise in paper-shuffling that is more about documenting students' failures. Judge Kevin Dougherty, the administrative judge of Family Court, said that from what he's seen, CSAP is a "fiction."

On Monday, Dougherty found Carr and two King classmates charged in the attack, Ralph Moore and Diquan Allen, delinquent in a juvenile hearing. He will sentence them next week.

They told Dougherty they were breaking up a fight on the playground, not starting one. As for the bat, they say they had cut school and armed themselves after tussling with a gang at King earlier in the day. Police said the real story was that they were settling scores as part of an obscure neighborhood feud. The judge rejected the boys' story.

The playground assault on April 30, 2010, marked the first time they'd ever been arrested.

But all three had long been in trouble in school. Carr had been suspended 17 times, starting when he was 7, for offenses ranging from fighting to indecent exposure.

All three were enrolled in CSAP at King. The School District declined to discuss their cases, citing privacy concerns, but their court files are open because they were originally charged as adults.

At a hearing this month, Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner pointed out that until the boys landed in court, only teachers and administrators were privy to their misbehavior. He wondered aloud, as he reviewed Carr's "stunningly bad" school record, how the district had let Carr's misconduct escalate from the time he was a young elementary school student.

"It's difficult for me to understand," he said, why Carr's violent misbehavior was "not addressed earlier with something other than just multiple, repeated suspensions."

Later, Lerner said, "It's clear to me that these kids and the community would benefit if the schools took a more proactive role in addressing these kids' needs before they become defendants in serious criminal cases."

Almost a third enrolled

Enrollment in CSAP is no great distinction at King, where 900 of the school's 1,100 students are enrolled in the program.

Kristina Diviny - King's principal until January - said her experience with the program had shown it to be a failure, because so many students are enrolled that it can't possibly help everyone.

"Did 900 kids get the resources?" said Diviny, who left in January to become principal of the high school in Christiana, Del. "There's not 900 kids' worth of resources.

She said the documentation sometimes is "CYA."

"It's almost impossible to really do it the way it needs to be done," she said. "I would say 10 percent . . . is real effective CSAP, because the rest is just a blanket."

She is hardly alone in her assessment. Teachers, students, parents, judges, and other experts agreed.

The Inquirer investigation found that the program is deeply flawed in significant ways:

It sweeps in far too many students for its resources. Students suffering from severe behavioral problems are lumped in with classmates encountering minor academic setbacks - even a grade dropping from an "A" to a "B" can be enough to qualify, said the district's head of counseling, Deborah James Vance. Fifteen years ago, there were only 4,600 students in the program.

It rewards schools for enrolling and providing services to as many students as possible who are eligible for CSAP. For example, in the 2009-10 school year - the last full year Diviny was principal - King exceeded its performance goals for CSAP by serving 93.8 percent of its eligible students. That put it in the top quarter of all high schools.

It does not deliver all the services it recommends for individual students, according to state reports and interviews with teachers and administrators.

It permits youngsters to languish without progress for months on end, as the case of the King students illustrates. The result: CSAP data analyzed by The Inquirer show that one-third of all students are in the program for multiple years.

Ackerman acknowledged in an interview that program guidelines are not always followed when placing students

"What I have found happens is that educators want to jump to put them in CSAP, or go around CSAP and get them some social and emotional services right away," she said. "Some of these issues are directly related to the lack of academic skills or the lack of the appropriate academic strategies and . . . classroom management strategies."

She said the district has the resources to provide services to children.

"You're speaking to somebody who knows this with my eyes closed," Ackerman said. "Now, can I guarantee that everybody is going to do it exactly the way I did it as a principal? All I can do is continue to try to give the support to principals and teachers so that it's implemented with fidelity."

Her chief accountability officer, David Weiner, said he is satisfied that in most cases, children are getting at least some of the recommended services.

"In some environments [CSAP] works extremely well," he said. "It works well at identifying the kids, providing supports for the kids, helping the children improve in academic, behavioral, social, and emotional issues."

Few dispute that under the right circumstances, CSAP can be effective.

District spokeswoman Shana Kemp pointed to the Anne Frank School, a K-5 elementary school in Bustleton near Northeast Philadelphia Airport, as an example of a school where CSAP works and students receive an ample array of services.

Frank's enrollment numbers are similar to King's - about 1,000 students to King's 1,100. But otherwise the two schools have little in common.

For starters, Frank has fewer than 100 children in CSAP, and they are fifth graders or below.

About half of the Frank students are classified as economically disadvantaged, while 75 percent of King students are. And just 6 percent of Frank students are in special education, vs. 27 percent at King.

In statewide tests, King scores well below the city average for reading and math, while Anne Frank scores well above.

A broken program

Experts who see CSAP's failures - the Rashaans, the Ralphs, and the Diquans - have complained for years that the program is broken.

These students regularly turn up before judges in the courts, or find their way to mental-health advocacy groups or legal-aid clinics and disciplinary schools. This has left critics increasingly dismayed.

At Monday's hearing, Dougherty decried that the district had done so little for the three King boys.

A total of 1,917 students were arrested during the 2009-10 school year, according to the district's figures.

In cases of in-school arrests, Dougherty routinely asks the district what help it has given a student headed for disaster. He said his inquiries are almost always met with a shrug.

The former director of the district's network of disciplinary schools described CSAP as "imaginary."

"People have become very skilled at documenting interventions for kids but the students don't get the help," said Gwen Morris, now an education consultant. "The kids who really need it, there are not resources there to give them."

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said teachers complain that CSAP is a largely pointless paper chase.

"Teachers complete all the CSAP paperwork, and it's quite voluminous, but after they do it, there is no follow-up," Jordan said. "So the following year, they begin again with the same students and the same process."

Luz Hernandez, an advocate in North Philadelphia for parents with disabled children, said she has worked on hundreds of cases where CSAP fails to help. "Nothing changes," she said. "They just go from one bureaucracy to another."

Caroline Watts, a psychology professor who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and consults with district schools about safety and the CSAP process, said the district was failing to make good use of the program.

"Kids are getting stuck in CSAP and getting disciplinary actions rather than help," she said.

Absences, suspensions

Rashaan Carr's immersion in CSAP did little to change his behavior. He was repeating ninth grade at the time of the playground attack.

During his first time around as a ninth grader, he had about 50 absences and was suspended almost once a month. Two of those suspensions were for five days, once for fighting and the second time for a morals offense.

Carr was almost certainly referred to CSAP then - every ninth grader is, as a matter of course, according to school counselor Crystal Little. But Carr's file - provided to The Inquirer by his mother, who got it from the school - has no record of his being enrolled in CSAP that year.

Little said all ninth graders must take a class that teaches them to make good decisions, as well as bolstering self-esteem and building "career awareness."

Counselors and teachers say freshmen can meet with upperclassmen who serve as "peer mentors," with whom they can discuss personal issues.

"We have several programs that accommodate every issue for students," she said. "It has been my experience that oftentimes students do not take advantage of those programs."

The district declined to make Little available for an interview, allowing her only to answer written questions provided by The Inquirer. The responses were then sent to the paper through Kemp.

When students in CSAP such as Carr need more than just academic support, they are asked to keep a behavior log, which records how they behave each day in class. They must bring the log to class, have the teacher complete it, and then give it to their parents to sign.

Jennifer Freeman, the union representative at King, said the log was a weak intervention at best. In many cases, she said, students and parents don't participate.

"We tell parents that the behavioral report works best if there are consequences at home," she said.

The following year, 2009-10, Carr's school records show that he was repeating the ninth grade. But Carr and his mother had a different impression. They thought he was a sophomore.

After all, he said, "I was with my friends in class."

In fact, Carr was in King's "UpGrade Academy," where he was to "make up failed courses in school year 2009," according to his school file.

Enrollment in UpGrade Academy was part of his progression into CSAP's next level, known as Tier II. He was referred for not performing to his ability, poor behavior, and failing to comply with the school's dress code.

Carr, his referral said, exhibited poor study skills and did not complete assignments, and his grades were declining.

But as far as the district was concerned, his enrollment in UpGrade Academy meant he had met a CSAP goal.

Carr would also receive some additional classroom support. His teacher would repeat directions to him, give him immediate feedback and verbal prompts, and, according to the file, "utilize a variety of instructional modalities."

As for his disruptive behavior, the team recommended that Carr be mentored and that he attend an in-school group session with a guidance counselor.

Carr recalled two such sessions, in which he sat with other boys and wrote out his career goals.

The file shows that Carr's mother, Jamie, was sent a letter notifying her when her son was placed in Tier II. The record shows she was not contacted again until her son was suspended for the attack, about six months later.

During those months, Carr's behavior did not improve. In November, Carr was suspended for a day for disrupting class and reckless endangerment.

He would be suspended three more times for cutting class and disruption. He was absent, late, or suspended 38 times. He failed almost all his classes.

Ordinarily, if a student does not respond to the intervention within 60 days, CSAP counselors are supposed to meet with parents to discuss other options, including Tier III, which might determine if the child needs to be placed in special-education courses. As for Carr, he never made it that far. A court psychologist later diagnosed him with Axis I Oppositional Defiant Disorder, a diagnosis that might have made him eligible for special educational services.

Prosecutors would later marvel at how school officials suspended Carr 17 times without calling police for offenses ranging from assault to indecent exposure.

"If you look at his school records," prosecutor Debra Naish said, "it's one of the worst ones I have ever seen, full of multiple suspensions for conduct that could have - and I don't know why it didn't - result in criminal charges. Inappropriate touching, indecent exposure, mutual confrontation, threats, fighting, assaultive behavior; so this is more than a lack-of-self-esteem issue."

'An angry young man'

Carr, a husky youth, has a knack for fixing things around the house, said his mother, a single parent who has worked as an editor at a data firm in Horsham for 10 years. She owns a house in the Olney section and makes sure her three children are in by 6:30 each night.

Carr hardly knows his father.

Quiet and guarded in conversation, he rubs his hand down from the crown of his head and over his eyes when he talks

A psychologist who interviewed him after he was arrested said Carr has an intense need for people to understand his difficulties - the sort of problem CSAP ought to address - yet is reluctant to talk about them.

"Rashaan is an angry young man who understands that he needs psychological counseling in order to avoid situations that make him vulnerable to rearrest," the report concluded. It also said he is strongly motivated toward achievement despite his behavioral difficulties.

Carr is so desperate for guidance that he asked the psychologist to be his mentor.

"Rashaan believes his father does not like or love him. He asked this examiner if he could have this type of relationship" with him, the report said.

His mother said she would have "welcomed" a mentor for her son - an intervention recommended for him in CSAP, but one Carr and his mother said he never received

King has four counselors, but they don't have time to see all the children who need them. Counselors across the district complain they are constantly overworked - they all regularly fill in for classroom teachers.

Diviny said she had four counselors - that's 900 hours in a school year for all 900 CSAP cases if each student gets an hour.

"There's probably 200 students on the waiting list who need a behavior specialist, but she can't handle that kind of caseload," Diviny said.

King has one such specialist - whom Little described as "awesome" - but the school is only allowed to refer 40 students at a time.

And even when a student is helped, it may go for naught. Diviny recalled the case of a student the school spent countless hours helping, only to see him wind up in jail.

Data dispute

Each year, the School District files an accounting of its CSAP program with the state Department of Education, which compiles an annual report card. It paints a disturbing portrait of the program.

For example, in the 2009-10 school year - the most recent year studied in the state report - the report showed that of 671 youngsters identified as in need of "crisis intervention," fully 40 percent never received it.

The data were similarly dismal for a host of other CSAP services, reporting that the provision of services fell short in areas ranging from guidance advice to mentoring. Among other findings, the state report said that of youngsters in need of in-school group therapy, fully 44 percent failed to receive it.

School District officials say the state report was unfairly bleak.

In fact, the officials said, most students listed as receiving no help had received at least some services. The district said that when the state produced the report, it gave the district no credit for assisting a student unless the youngster had received every recommended service. Students who got only some services were listed as having received none, they said.

Weiner, the district's accountability officer, also said he had recently called state education officials, who had acknowledged that the reporting problem rested with them and that they were planning to fix it. Weiner said he could not remember the name of the person with whom he spoke

But Myrna Delgado, the state official whose staff issues the reports, disputed all that.

Delgado said no one on her staff or her data consultants could recall receiving a call from Weiner. She also disagreed that the report was flawed.

Further, she said, the state had merely reported the results as provided by the Philadelphia district.

"We don't change data," she said.

Weiner said that after The Inquirer raised questions about the program, he looked at a sampling of more than 100 cases and concluded that virtually all those students had received at least some help. However, beyond the sample, Weiner said, the district did not have a hard count of how many CSAP students had received all, some, or no services. To get the answer, he said, he would have to physically look through each case.

Susan Tarasevich, a Pittsburgh-based education expert who has trained providers for similar programs and studied the results for 20 years, said Philadelphia was the only district that appeared to have such a reporting problem.

She called the district an outlier.

Weiner conceded that some schools were better than others at implementing the program

"It's a work in progress," he said. "People have to fully understand what CSAP is and what it's going to look like. Because of some of the challenges we've encountered, we are changing CSAP moving forward."

Rewards program

Even now, the district gives principals an incentive to drive students into the program.

Under Ackerman's annual school accountability system, principals are graded by the district and rewarded by receiving a higher mark for placing more children in the program

CSAP is one of the grading categories in these reports - crucial to principals' careers - along with student test scores, truancy, and tardiness.

The bulk of the CSAP grade is based simply on how many students a school has placed in the various tiers of the program. Every school - even high performing schools like Masterman or Central - is given a target number of how many students to enroll.

The grading does take into account whether any services are actually delivered, but principals themselves are responsible for tracking the results.

For example, at Tier II, the district gives a school credit for providing an intervention when the CSAP team holds a meeting about what to do for a student and enters the case into the district's database, according to a document provided by the district.

"You have numbers you have to hit, so the emphasis has been on getting kids in the program, not getting them help," said Freeman, the King union representative.

"It's just a way schools can inflate their grade on the annual accountability reports," she said.

Watts, the Penn psychologist, said the accountability system incentivizes the wrong things. If the district delivered more services to children in need, it would see a reduction in violence, she said.

Now, she lamented, "compliance is more about paperwork accuracy rather than what the paperwork is intended to deliver."

Tough struggles for two

Ralph Moore's mother, Angela Young, said that when she returned her son to school after his suspensions, nobody ever mentioned that there was a program to help him. She said she was unaware that her son had been placed in CSAP, both in ninth and 10th grades.

She views her son, now 17, as a shy and easily manipulated boy. She said she wished that the schools, rather than the streets, had set his course in life.

When Moore was born, he was immediately placed into foster care. The state had already removed his six siblings from his mother, who struggled with addiction.

For six years, Ralph Moore had no contact with his mother. But Young, who now works as a hair stylist and also baby-sits, fought to get her life together and regained custody of her children.

His test scores show Moore is smarter than most of his classmates, but had trouble adjusting to school and repeated kindergarten.

He was small for his age and desperate for friends, said Young. When she bought Moore toys, he usually gave them away.

Eventually, Moore began to perform well at his elementary school. The summer before he entered King, he worked for the Indochinese-American Council as part of the summer youth-work program in Philadelphia

The director wrote in a letter to the court that Moore was trustworthy, hard-working, self-motivated, and responsible.

Still, Moore's father - Ralph Sr. - said his son was a follower "more than anything" and can be intimidated by larger classmates.

King, which has been on and off the "persistently dangerous" list for years, was a jarring experience for Moore. "I could never concentrate," he said. "There was always fighting, people acting up."

He said he wanted to learn but feared being labeled a bookworm, which would open him to abuse.

To keep his friends, Moore said, he felt he had to make mischief without getting into too much trouble. He also worried about the One-Fours, a street gang

Moore's ninth-grade teachers during the 2008-09 school year noticed he was missing class and failing his course work. He had 28 unexcused absences and was late 16 times. In March, he was suspended for two days for being disruptive.

He was placed in CSAP, although he said he doesn't know when.

In just the ninth grade, 200 of 300 students at King are in CSAP Tier II. More than 100 were repeating the ninth grade.

Like Carr and Moore, Diquan Allen was frequently in trouble and in CSAP - on paper, at least. It's unclear what help he received.

Allen was raised by parents until they separated when he was 6. He moved with his mother back and forth between Philadelphia and Baltimore. "I did not know where I was going to stay," he said

A psychologist who interviewed him for his court case said he was suffering from chronic depression as well as post-traumatic stress syndrome. He had been beaten and abused when he was younger, he told the psychologist.

Once, he said, he put a knife to his own throat because he was about to be defeated by "invisible people."

He said he often felt lonely and unwanted: "My nerves are bad. I feel empty. I need guidance. What pains me is looking back at my life."

A fight, then the attack

On the morning of the playground attack, Diquan Allen got into a fight in the hallway at King with the One-Fours gang.

Moore and Carr watched as the boys scuffled. The One-Fours promised they would get the three later that day. The boys said they went to security officers and told them they were scared and wanted to skip an assembly in the school auditorium, where the One-Fours would likely gather.

They were told to return to the auditorium, but left school instead.

They walked to Carr's house near the Olney Transportation Center and grabbed a bat. They went to buy Chinese food and ran into two girls they knew from King, who weren't in class either. The girls invited the boys to a barbecue.

On their way to the party, the boys passed Howe Elementary, in the Fern Rock section, and stopped to watch the children play. Moore said it appeared as if the children were fighting.

Allen said he thought it was a play fight and funny. "We were all laughing at them," he said.

The boys walked into the schoolyard, and a school aide told them to leave because they were scaring the students.

"The kids were hitting each other, we didn't hit them," Carr said.

The young students who testified at a preliminary hearing said the three boys attacked them without provocation, striking some in the face. One identified Carr. Another pointed out Moore and Allen and said they laughed as the attack happened.

Though no one was seriously injured, police saw victims with bumps, swollen eyes, and lacerations. The younger boys said the impact of the attack lingered. One boy testified that he was afraid to go upstairs alone in his own home.

Another boy told how he watched his friends buckle after getting hit in the back.

After the King students were charged as adults, their lawyers had to convince a Common Pleas Court judge that they should instead be tried as juveniles.

Their argument was that Carr, Moore, and Allen had never been in trouble with police before, and all came from hard-working families with parents who care.

All the boys needed, psychologists concluded, was help - the sort of help that could have come through CSAP.

"I see a school record that makes me ask if anyone is paying attention," said Carr's attorney, Nikia Way Khan, whose mother was a teacher at King in the 1970s. She lasted only one day.

The judge agreed and sent all the cases to Family Court.

Judge Dougherty saw it much the same way when he found the boys delinquent. He lamented the lack of action on the part of the School District.

"Now you're going to get the help you need," he told them.

For now, all three boys are done with the Philadelphia public schools.

They will be removed from their families and their neighborhoods, the judge said, and sent away to facilities where where they can get counseling - and an education.

They are being applied haphazardly across the Phila. School District, but not being used on a wide scale.

By Kristen A. Graham, Susan Snyder, John Sullivan, and Dylan Purcell

Ask nearly any student at A.B. Day Elementary what the school rules are, and he or she will rattle them off without a second thought:

Be respectful. Be obedient. Have a positive attitude. Be responsible.

The rules are tacked up to bulletin boards. They are displayed in the hallways. They're important, said fifth grader Jeremy Reynolds.

"We try to be nice to people," Jeremy said. "We try to be good and not bully."

In the Philadelphia School District, effective violence prevention programs have flourished in small pockets, at Day and elsewhere. But the district has failed to replicate them on a large scale.

Demand for them is growing, however. Citywide, students have urged the district to embrace antiviolence efforts.

There are no magic formulas, but Day - a school much like the district as a whole, with an African American majority and three-quarters of its students considered economically disadvantaged - is better because of these violence-prevention measures, said the principal, Karen Dean.

"We're not a perfect school," Dean said, "but when things happen, we deal with them, and we report them."

At Day, which ranks low for violence among elementary schools, incidents have dropped since the 500-student K-8 school moved toward the PBS model seven years ago. Day had 14 violent incidents in 2003-04, for instance, and just two in 2009-10.

The school, on Crittenden Street where East Germantown borders Mount Airy, stands in marked contrast to the high school it feeds - Martin Luther King, which has a higher violence rate and was as recently as 2007-08 on the state's persistently dangerous list.

Day has what many schools do not: A long-term principal, stable teaching force, formal staff training in antiviolence programs, and the will to keep them in place.

Dean and her team have seen funding for different programs wax and wane, but they seek out lessons in best practices whenever they can find them, and carry over what works from year to year, the principal said.

Teachers, students, and staff all agree on the school's rules, Dean said, and, more than adults just reciting them to students, they teach in their classes specifically what good behavior looks like in the lunchroom, in the hallway, moving to another classroom.

It's obvious to anyone who walks through the school.

Academics have also improved since the school began focusing on violence prevention. In 2003-04, 33 percent of Day's students met state goals in math and 30 percent in reading. In 2010, 69 percent met goals in math and 61 percent in reading.

"The child can focus on learning, and the teachers can teach. It really helps with classroom management. It gets better every year," Dean said.

Deputy Superintendent Leroy Nunery said that the district was "just at the very beginning of implementing a comprehensive approach" to violence.

And Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman acknowledged that the district still had "a long way to go" in getting all of its schools to implement programs effectively.

Over the years, multiple violence-prevention programs have been hailed as models, but then they have either fallen out of favor with the district's administration, failed to spread, or been implemented haphazardly.

The district lost a $600,000 grant to implement Positive Behavior Supports over disputes on how to carry the program out. The district pressed ahead and now, some experts say, the program is floundering.

At Washington High and a handful of other schools, students are defusing problems through peer mediation, but the approach remains underused, some say, and the district has laid off the two staffers responsible for training others.

Restorative Practices, another program that focuses not on punishing offenders but on repairing harm done and addressing underlying problems, helped calm an out-of-control West Philadelphia High. But administrative changes ordered by Ackerman last school year meant the program faded away after three years. Some staff say the loss of the program has contributed to an increase in violence.

The nationally recognized program "I Can Problem Solve" got some traction in Philadelphia beginning in the 1970s but ended for lack of administrative support in the early 1990s.

"There have been so many good ideas about what to do about violence that have gone by the wayside," said David Fair, a former Philadelphia Department of Human Services deputy commissioner and United Way executive who has dealt with the district for 20 years. "There's this addiction to trying the flavor of the month, instead of bringing to scale the things that are proven to work."

Tomás Hanna, an associate superintendent, said the district was trying to expand proven programs. This year, teams of senior staffers are concentrating on the district's "Focus 46" schools - those deemed most troubled

Each school is graded on its progress in addressing various problems, from safety flaws to lagging academics. Ackerman has said that violence can often be traced to students who are performing poorly.

"You've got some schools that are working it, and you've got some that are struggling," Hanna said.

The district has also implemented two antiviolence programs in 139 of its 268 schools - Second Step for grades K through 8, and School Connect for high school grades.

Still, Hanna said, the district doesn't believe any one program should be foisted on every school.

"We want to make sure that schools are providing an environment where teachers can teach and young people can learn, but for us, this notion of a cookie cutter is problematic," Hanna said.

Problems with program

At one point, the district was much clearer about its support of at least one program, PBS, a nationally recognized, data-driven program that calls for schools to develop and teach clear, consistent school rules, and reinforce good behavior.

There are interventions for students with chronic behavior problems, and incident data is examined closely

PBS requires ongoing training, resources, and staff buy-in, but when fully implemented, it often leads to a reduction in violent incidents and a better school climate, research shows.

Beginning last school year, United Way offered a $600,000 challenge grant over three years to implement PBS in 10 district schools. The money would go to an outside organization, in this case the nonprofit Public Citizens for Children and Youth, to administer a pilot program, with help from other city nonprofits.

The district said it would have had to pay an additional $400,000 for coaching.

There were problems almost from the start, from central office staff turnover to differences in vision for the scope of the program, according to Fair, who was a United Way vice president at the time.

At first, the district insisted the pilot happen in 20 schools, not 10, he said.

Then Hanna told Fair that Ackerman was having second thoughts about PBS as a demonstration project.

"She thought that a lot of this was common sense, that we should just do more training and eventually the staff would adopt this by osmosis, I guess," Fair said.

There were disagreements over how much training and oversight the program required.

In a statement, Ackerman held to her position that the program can work even if the district doesn't follow the United Way's model. In fact, her Imagine 2014 strategic plan for the district includes that strategy.

"Much of what is prescribed in PBS are in fact things that a good school principal should already be implementing in his or her school," Ackerman said.

Hanna and Ackerman said the pilot targeted the wrong schools, bypassing the neediest, and that its timetable was too slow - it would have taken up to five years to bring the program to scale districtwide.

"Don't get me wrong, we value partnerships," Hanna said. "We didn't disagree on the what - ensuring a safe environment for all. We disagreed on the how, and the how quickly."

Now, the district is doing without the United Way grant, which was revoked last year.

Fair said he couldn't tell his donors that PBS, now compromised in his eyes, would work.

"I really have no confidence in any approach that assumes you can implement something in 250 schools at once, with all the blockages and problems and funding challenges of a big school system," he said. "Dr. Ackerman wanted to do it overnight, and with no money. It was absurd.

PBS is "successful only when it is implemented with all of its parts, including coaching and data analysis," said Shelly Yanoff, director of the nonprofit that was poised to administer the grant. "When it's 'Name five rules' and doesn't do much else, it can't fulfill its promise."

Philadelphia's limited execution of PBS is typical, said John Bailie, an official with the International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem, Pa., which administers another violence prevention program that has been dropped by the district but is used elsewhere.

"There's tons of good ideas out there," Bailie said. "Almost none of them get fully implemented. That's why schools look at one program after another. They say, 'We tried this program last year and it didn't work,' but really, they never put the program in place."

Peer mediating

It started with a pencil flying across a ninth grade classroom early this school year. One George Washington High student was hit; the student who threw the object laughed, and so did another girl. Tensions ran high, and there was talk of a fight.

The situation could have escalated into a major incident.

Instead, it ended in a small room in the Northeast Philadelphia school's ground floor, where Washington seniors Daquan Cooper and Amira Coleman - trained mediators - talked the three freshmen girls through the situation

Ultimately, the ninth graders arrived at their own solution - agreeing to be civil in class and steering clear of each other in the hallways - then signed documents saying they would keep their word or risk consequences. Unless they act out again, the problem remains confidential, with no parents notified or disciplinary record

"It was a misunderstanding," Cooper, 18, said of the pencil incident. "By the end, they agreed to go their separate ways and everything was fine."

The neighborhood high school on Bustleton Avenue has successfully used peer mediation for 25 years. About 300 incidents - all nonviolent disputes - were mediated last school year, and teachers say that because students are more comfortable confiding in peers than adults, the program successfully circumvents a no-snitching culture.

The school also offers Peer-Group Connections, a popular class for seniors who are trained to welcome at-risk freshmen to Washington and encourage them to avoid conflict.

"I had problems when I first came into high school," student Keisha Weeks, 17, said. "No one should have to go it alone.

Washington is a diverse school with 2,000 students, 58 percent of whom are considered economically disadvantaged. And its violence rate is low among neighborhood high schools. Last year, it recorded 50 violent incidents or 2.3 incidents per 100 students.

While Ackerman's Imagine 2014 five-year plan calls for all district schools to adopt peer mentoring, it has stalled.

Staffers at 92 schools got training last year, but the program hasn't taken off, said Curry Bailey, who along with Sharon Arnold trained the staffers.

Bailey, Arnold, 33 climate managers, and 17 nonteaching assistants were laid off during the last year.

Peer mentoring "has been a grossly underutilized program in the district," Bailey said. "Dr. Ackerman has tried to standardize the instruction piece, and that's great. But the other side is lagging. You can't measure everything by test scores - the schools have to be safe.

While the district isn't doing any new training this year, a just-released report said that 24 schools have working programs. Hanna said the district hoped to expand peer mentoring next year.

Prevention matters, insisted Bailey.

In 2004, 16-year-old Jalil Speaks was shot and killed by a classmate near Strawberry Mansion High School. An unpaid debt sparked the quarrel between the two

Bailey talked with some of the students after Speaks was killed.

"That death could have been stopped," Bailey said. "Most of what ends up in tragedy, the big stuff, starts over something small. And most of it can be prevented."

More than tough talk

Effective antiviolence programs work because they deal with children's social and emotional learning, said Myrna B. Shure, a developmental psychologist and Drexel professor whose research on violence prevention and problem solving for children has been recognized by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Children should be taught conflict resolution beginning at the youngest grades, Shure said.

"Kids whose teachers rated their behavior as more aggressive, more impatient - they don't relate well to others," said Shure. "They're not sensitive to others, and they have trouble problem-solving."

For decades, Shure's nationally acclaimed "I Can Problem Solve" curriculum was a successful prevention tool in the district. But it fell out of favor and is no longer used.

Schools that don't pay attention to children's social and emotional learning often pay the price in violent incidents, said Jonathan Cohen, president of the New York-based National School Climate Center.

"Everyone's worrying about reading, science, and math tests, and they're not recognizing the underlying social and emotional issues, which aren't being measured," Cohen said. "This, I believe, is one of the underlying causes of violence in public education."

Another dropped program

The Restorative Practices program, which focuses on treating students with respect, repairing harm done by violence and fixing problems, was credited, in part, with turning West Philadelphia High from one of the city's most dangerous schools into a much calmer place.

But after a district shake-up of the school, the program - which focuses in part on offenders taking responsibility for their actions and facing their victims - is gone and violence has inched up. The school's violence rate was 2.3 per 100 students as of Dec. 31, up from 1.1 in the same period last year.

Students also see value in the program, which is not found in any other district school. Bailie's group, however, just received funding for some training at South Philadelphia High.

The student group Youth United for Change recently called on the district to implement Restorative Practices "in all schools."

Another student organization, the Philadelphia Student Union, has launched the "Campaign for Nonviolent Schools," which calls for proactive anti-violence programs such as Restorative Practices, more student supports, and youth voice in school safety teams. Organizations around the city have signed on to the campaign, which the district has vowed to support.

Restorative Practices - which costs about $50,000 per school for a two-year training - is also used in Mastery Charter schools in Philadelphia and in Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and Tucson, Ariz., districts.

"In Philadelphia, if we had some traction on funding, we'd have many schools lined up to work with us already," said Bailie, director of trainers at the International Institute for Restorative Practices. "When there's high-level support and a plan to carry out a program, it can really make some dramatic changes."

Ackerman has expressed support for the program. And in an interview, associate superintendent Hanna said the program was "on our radar to put it on the menu of options. It's not as widespread as we'd like it to be."

Confronted with a violence problem, administrators often resort to tough talk - zero tolerance, a hard line on crime, Bailie said. But, he added, there needs to be more.

"I can get some good behavior out of increased monitoring and a little bit of fear, but it's not long-term and it doesn't address the root problem," Bailie said. "Cultural programs like restorative practices are far cheaper than security cameras and police officers."

By Kristen A. Graham

Palm trees aside, a tan stucco school more than 1,100 miles away can teach the Philadelphia School District some lessons.

Violence plagues the neighborhood surrounding Boynton Beach High School. Many students who can opt out of the school choose to do so, heading for private or charter schools.

But there are no metal detectors at Boynton Beach, a school that serves mostly students who are poor and black or Hispanic.

And there are just two police officers for the 1,800 students - and relatively little trouble within the school's walls.

Though the name Palm Beach County may conjure up images of extreme wealth, the sprawling area in southeastern Florida, whose school district, with 171,000 students, is larger than Philadelphia's, has plenty of trouble spots, too.

"We have some of the same challenges as Philadelphia - gangs, drugs, and poverty," said Alison Adler, the Palm Beach County School District's chief of safety and learning environment.

Keeping order demands a concerted effort.

"People think there's a silver bullet, but there's not," said James P. Kelly, county chief of school police. "It's a systematic approach, and we've built it over time. We're consistent, we focus on building relationships, and we correct behaviors. That does cut down on discipline referrals and the ultimate criminal acts."

Kenneth S. Trump, a national school security expert, calls Palm Beach the gold standard - the district that best prioritizes school safety and balances law and order with violence prevention.

"The key is, you have to have a balanced and comprehensive approach," said Trump. "It's not an either-or."

But Palm Beach is a rarity. Often, school systems treat safety as an afterthought and fail to focus on prevention until it's too late.

"Suddenly, there's a crisis, and parents and the media come knocking, and school safety gets bumped to the front burner," Trump said. "But in six months, if there's not another major incident, it falls to the back burner again."

Prevention is just as important as law enforcement in Palm Beach, said Kelly.

"We take care of the back end - the people who insist on being arrested," Kelly said. "But it's more than just putting armed guards in a hall, and security equipment. The best way to be is proactive, and we're given ample room to do that."

Palm Beach County employs safe-school case managers, whose sole job is to get to know students and prevent trouble. These professionals, many of whom have a law-enforcement background, work in the district's middle and high schools, attend dances and football games, visit students' homes, keep in touch with other police agencies, and monitor gang activity.

The Florida district has a huge and successful youth court that handles low-level offenses and routinely keeps teens out of the formal justice system. And the district invented single-school culture, a program in which staff and students agree on school rules that are enforced consistently.

In contrast, Philadelphia and other districts tend to focus on student behavior only when things go wrong. They focus on punishment, which is often meted out unevenly.

Philadelphia uses single-school culture, but inconsistently.

Single-school culture

Palm Beach has come a long way.

The area surrounding Boynton Beach High - and the school itself - were particularly troubled a few years ago, Adler remembers. Police cars were often parked outside the school.

Keith Oswald, Boynton Beach's dynamic young principal, arrived three years ago.

"We had a lot of disciplinary issues - fighting, gang issues," Oswald remembers. "We gave out more F's than any other school. Kids used to see graduation as an option."

But a focus on consistency in school rules and discipline helped spur a rebirth at Boynton Beach, a school that despite its large size feels calm, even at class changes and in the cafeteria during lunch periods. Last year, the school earned a B on Florida's report card, up from the D grade it had earned since 2002-03.

And incidents of crime and violence are down - there were 99 total incidents in 2009-10, down from 150 in 2004-05.

Oswald and Adler credit the school's adoption of single-school culture, a program Adler developed and that is copyright by the Palm Beach district and used around the country. Its motto: "This is the way we do things around here."

Single-school culture, which has been around since the mid-1990s, is mandated in every Palm Beach school, though some, like Boynton Beach, implement it better than others.

Plastered everywhere around Boynton Beach High are posters reminding students to DREAM - Dress appropriately, show Respect, Electronics off and away, positive Attitude, Motivated to succeed.

The approach may sound like common sense, but it takes a great deal of work to get support from all the adults and students, said Adler.

"If you train once, it's a drive-by," she said. "To work, it has to be an ongoing thing. We follow up in lots of ways."

Students definitely get it.

"This school was a bad school, and I was very afraid," a senior boy with a goatee said during a reporter's recent visit.

But now, "teachers don't play about the rules," a junior boy said. "They say, 'When the bell rings, the door swings.' "

A ninth grade girl smiled shyly when asked about her school.

"I feel good right here," she said. "Safe. Kids aren't hanging around the hallways."

Teacher Brian Sandala worked at Camden's Promise Charter School for two years. This year, he took a job at Boynton Beach High to be near family, and he's impressed with the school.

"Everyone knows what it takes to be a Tiger," Sandala said, referring to the school's mascot. "When students see that teachers really believe in the school's culture, they want to be part of it, too."

Consistency is key, Palm Beach school officials say. Discipline is progressive, and there's no guessing on what principals should do. Everyone follows a matrix that lists which punishments can be meted out for which offenses, and when the action must be reported to police.

If a high school student is "physically aggressive" in class, for instance, administrators must make a behavior referral for the student and assign a one- or two-day out-of-school suspension, which administrators are encouraged to use sparingly because they favor in-school discipline.

At the principal's discretion, they can assign additional consequences, ranging from time in an "in-school intervention program" to loss of extracurricular privileges.

"We used to have a kid in one end of the district caught in the bathroom smoking get two days in-school suspension, and in the other end of the district, that same offense would be a 10-day suspension. Not anymore," said Dave Benson, assistant director of the district's Safe Schools Institute.

Philadelphia's student code of conduct does include a discipline matrix, but it hasn't had the same effect. Discipline still varies widely from school to school.

At her school, the matrix is an important tool, said Kathleen Weigel, principal at Atlantic Community High School in Delray Beach, also in Palm Beach County.

"It's been a godsend for us," said Weigel.

Like Boynton Beach, Atlantic enrolls predominately poor and African American students. But in recent years, it has reduced its suspension rate by half and increased its graduation rate to 88 percent. The school has relatively low violence rates for the 2,300 students.

Weigel said the formula was simple: "If you take your school and start to build a culture of trust, you'll be on the upside of every incident that's going to happen."

Key to what her school has been able to achieve, Weigel said, is the genial man known as "O" - Lorenzo Odum, the school police officer assigned to Atlantic High. He sits in on Weigel's leadership team meetings. He mentors 20 students a week.

Odum is the only officer at the huge school.

He is a sworn officer who carries a weapon and has arrest powers - unlike school police officers in Philadelphia - but he's a nurturer just as much as a law enforcement official, said Weigel.

"I know everything that's going on in this school," said Odum, who worked for the local police department before becoming a school police officer. "Students don't see me as a brute with a gun waiting to arrest them. I have a calming effect on them."

He does have to get tough, but that's the exception, Odum said.

Adler's program has taken root in Philadelphia, to a degree.

A few years ago, after Adler discussed single-school culture at a state education event in Harrisburg, a Philadelphia School District official grew excited about the program's possibilities.

"It started to resonate with the people in Philadelphia," Adler said. "They thought they could take back some of their toughest schools."

But there was no follow-up with her, she said.

Ericka Washington, deputy of attendance and truancy, said the Philadelphia district has implemented the program in its schools.

Some staffers were first trained at the state Department of Education event in 2007, Washington said. They then returned to Philadelphia and trained others in the model, focusing on the state-designated "persistently dangerous" schools.

In 2009, the state Department of Education brought a single-school culture event to Philadelphia, and more district staffers were trained.

"We have central office staff that's trained in both single-school culture and PBS," Washington said. Positive Behavior Supports, or PBS, is a program that focuses on violence prevention, consistent school-wide rules, and rewarding good behavior.

But the district agrees that it has a long way to go to fully implement the program. Doing that is included in Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman's five-year strategic plan.

She also cited single-school culture as helping to "improve climate and safety in all schools" in court testimony related to a landmark desegregation case.

District officials say the program works at Wagner Middle School in West Oak Lane.

Principal Maya Johnstone said consistency was the byword.

"You walk into any classroom, and there are automatic routines - you can tell by how kids walk the hallways, how they enter the classrooms," Johnstone said. "It's not, 'I can wear a hood in Ms. Johnstone's class but not in Ms. Smith's class.' Everybody's on the same page. We have the same vision, and we come up with it together."

More than 75 percent of Wagner's students live below the poverty line, but the school scores well above district average on state exams. Violence has dropped from 27 incidents in 2005-06 to 11 in 2009-10, for a rate decrease from 3.6 to 2. Single-school culture is a big part of that success, Johnstone said.

But many district staffers say they've had no training in the practice, and no clear idea of what it means or sense that it affects what goes on inside their buildings.

"I know what single-school culture is," Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan said. "But I know most of my members don't know what it is."

After assaults, a Phila. girl switched to a cyber charter school.

By Kristen A. Graham, John Sullivan, and Susan Snyder

First, Naveda Walker was assaulted by a classmate at Beeber Middle School in West Philadelphia last year.

Then, the teen was jumped leaving school while her mother helplessly listened on the other end of a phone conversation.

Days later, a group of youngsters went to the Walkers' Overbrook rowhouse and announced they were there to fight Naveda.

Fed up with the violence her daughter faced and the Philadelphia School District's inability to stop it, Wanda Walker said, she pulled her daughter from the district. Now, Naveda is a ninth grader at Agora Cyber Charter, an online school.

"I got frustrated with the district altogether. I was fearful for my daughter's safety," Walker said. "I'm not rich, so I couldn't just get up and move. I had to try something different for her."

At first, the 14-year-old wasn't happy with the isolation of a school day away from her friends, alone at home with her laptop and books.

But since she started an Agora program that allows her to take some classes in a classroom four days a week, she's much happier - so much so that her mother just reenrolled her for next year.

"It's a better decision than going to a public school," said soft-spoken Naveda, whose pretty face recently helped her land modeling jobs. "It's more focused - the work and the students."

And she said she felt safer.

Naveda's choice is not uncommon, said virtual-school operators and national experts, although the evidence is largely anecdotal.

"I have heard - especially with our Philadelphia students - that violence is an issue, a reason they come to us," said Sharon Williams, head of Agora Cyber Charter. "Safety is a reason why parents are keeping their kids at home."

The largest group of students enrolled at Agora are from Philadelphia - 20 percent of the school's 6,420 students. Pockets of students are from other urban areas around the state - Pittsburgh, Reading, Lancaster, Allentown, Erie.

Nationally, about 200,000 students attend online schools full time. They take computer courses led virtually by a teacher and study at their own pace.

Many are enrolled in cyber charters, which receive public funding for each student. Pennsylvania has 12 cyber charters enrolling about 20,000 students.

Experts say one factor fueling the growth of virtual learning is parents' desire to get their children out of dangerous schools, particularly in urban centers.

"We do find that students choose online courses so they can have environments where they can focus on learning and not have the distractions that can take place when there's bullying or violence," said Susan Patrick, chief executive officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.

A panicked phone call

Naveda's trouble at Beeber started in December 2009, when as a newcomer she became the target of cruel chatter from other girls. The tension erupted one day in English class.

Naveda told the group to stop harassing her, focusing her attention on a ringleader, Jykera Cooper.

"I'll smack you, little girl," Naveda remembers Jykera saying. The girls fought.

Naveda's glasses were knocked off her face. She tried to fight back.

"Jykera was looking for anything to pounce on," said Lynn Larrick, the girls' teacher. "She went over, and she started hitting Naveda."

Jykera admitted fighting, but said she had been provoked.

Jykera and a friend were suspended. Naveda was sent home but not suspended.

Rattled, Naveda's mother made her promise to call her every day when she arrived at school and when she left.

One day, Walker got a panicked phone call from her daughter, who was on her way home. Another group of girls was after her, Naveda said.

Walker told her not to fight. Ignore them, she said. Don't get on the bus. Go to your grandmother's house.

She asked to speak to Naveda's friend Shawna. By the time Shawna took the phone, the girls had attacked, Walker said.

"Miss Wanda, they just hit her," Shawna told her. "They knocked her down." The girls grabbed Naveda by the neck. They punched and kicked her face.

Walker was terrified. Her daughter was being pummeled, and all she could do was press the phone tighter against her ear.

Naveda suffered a concussion.

Furious, Walker filed a police report.

Trouble escalated. Naveda ended up in another brawl when 20 girls showed up at her house to fight. Eventually, the bad blood engulfed 30 neighbors in a melee.

Naveda was anxious. Walker kept her daughter in the house most of the time. She was so worried that she arranged for Naveda to see a therapist.

Walker finally removed Naveda from the district after another attack at the school, she said.

District spokeswoman Shana Kemp said Beeber had handled the situation correctly. The girls in the first incident were suspended, and peer mediation was used, Kemp said.

The district could not act on the attack on Naveda's way home from school because Walker had never taken the police report to Joseph Starinieri, the Beeber principal, as requested, Kemp said.

Online education, Walker thought, would be a way to keep her daughter safe.

"Here, on a computer, you can be whoever you want to be," Walker said. "They don't know who Naveda Walker is. No one is laughing at you."

Walker said her daughter was thriving at Agora and particularly at the Learning Center, housed in a suite of rooms at an office building in East Falls.

Inside Naveda's English class last week, about a dozen students sat at long tables with their laptops. Posters and charts decorated the walls.

Teacher Kirshe Frye-Matte talked about persuasive writing to the students, who were in different grades. After a whole-class talk, the teens worked in small groups.

Going to the Learning Center is optional. If she preferred, Naveda could conduct her learning only online, with different teachers for every subject and tests and papers, as in any other school.

"I like it," Naveda said, "more than my old school."

'It's just a lot going on'

Jykera wasn't always a fighter, she said.

As a sixth grader at Beeber, she didn't fight when taunted. But she found that strategy futile, she said - eventually, she felt she had to defend herself.

"I always had to fight somebody, because that person don't like me. I felt I shouldn't have to do that. It's just a lot going on," Jykera said, pushing away tears.

Her mother was shot in the head in 2000 and needs assistance. Jykera helps care for an autistic sister. Her older brother is always in trouble, she said.

"I can't really teach her things," said her mother, Kim Forde. "I can't help her with a lot of things. But she's real good on the computer."

Jykera has a beautiful voice. She finds refuge in singing, but even music can't erase her problems.

Eventually, Jykera said, students from other schools began showing up at Beeber to fight her. She felt she had to brawl to prove herself.

It "made them look at me like I was a bad child. Nobody never talked to me to understand why I was acting the way I was."

After being suspended 10 times in seventh grade, she was sent to a disciplinary school, transcripts show. She missed 48 days of school that year, and returned to Beeber for eighth grade in 2009-10, the year she encountered Naveda.

Jykera said she had been having a tough time that school year and acted out in Larrick's reading class because she had been confused.

She started this school year at Overbrook High, one of 19 district schools on the state's "persistently dangerous" list. But last week, she moved to another district disciplinary school, her mother said.

Jykera's mother said she had requested the transfer because her daughter was being bullied via text messages and Facebook.

Her mother said it was time for a change for Jykera. She wants the teen to enroll in a cyber charter next year.

Students were hurt in two clashes, but the incidents were not deemed violent because of the districts definition.

By John Sullivan and Susan Snyder

Punching, kicking, and pulling out hair, the 10 girls attacked one another in a brutal battle that erupted seconds after an exchange of words outside Bridget Finnegan's third-period Spanish class at Martin Luther King High.

Concerned that a pregnant girl was caught in the middle of the March 30 melee, Finnegan waded into the confused and noisy disturbance, pulling apart combatants who continued to yank on each other's hair. One girl had been kicked in the head and was bleeding from the cut, she said. Another was whacked in the face, her glasses shattered. Others showed bruising and signs of battering.

About a week earlier at Overbrook High School, 17-year-old Montez Wilmer was injured so badly during a scuffle with another student that he had a seizure and eventually spent four nights in a hospital, undergoing surgery for a broken eye socket. "My whole life flashed before my eyes," he said from the hospital.

Yet, as far as the School District of Philadelphia was concerned, neither event registered among the legion of violent incidents it records each year - 4,541 alone during the 2009-10 school year.

A continuing Inquirer investigation into violence in Philadelphia public schools shows that another tier of incidents - coded as "fighting," "disorderly conduct," or "minor altercation" - can also involve violence and result in serious injury, suggesting that city schools are even more dangerous than the district portrays.

Though data for the current school year are unavailable, there were nearly 3,000 cases in this lower spectrum during the 2009-10 school year, according to a state report using district data. There were 1,040 reported incidents of disorderly conduct, 928 incidents coded as fighting, and 959 minor altercations.

The King and Overbrook incidents were coded as disorderly conduct (fighting). How many of the other cases reached the same level of violence is unknown. The district does not make reports public, citing confidential student information.

Moreover, some violent incidents may not be reported at all - or for some reason aren't recorded by the central office, casting doubt on the reliability of the district's reporting system.

Asked about the March 30 fight outside Finnegan's room at King, the district initially said it had no record of the incident. City police also had no record.

Asked again last week, district spokeswoman Shana Kemp finally said on Wednesday that she had tracked down a report of a fight outside King Classroom 106, which seemed to fit the time and location.

The March 25 Overbrook case was reported on time.

Under the district's violence index, disorderly conduct, fights, and minor altercations do not qualify as "violent" or "serious" incidents, nor are they counted when compiling which schools are "persistently dangerous" under federal law and state guidelines. In Pennsylvania, only aggravated assaults, sexual assaults, robberies, and weapon possessions for which there are confirmed arrests count toward determining whether a school is persistently dangerous.

Avoiding the persistently dangerous designation is a point of pride in Philadelphia, where 19 schools are on the list. Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has a stated goal of reducing that number to zero, and an extra arrest or two at a school like King - long plagued by truancy, low test scores, and violence - can tip the balance.

In recent weeks, Rhonda H. Lauer, chief executive officer of Foundations Inc. - the New Jersey nonprofit that ran a jobs program, developed an urban farm, and provided other services to King at a cost of up to $600,000 a year - boasted that the school had not been on the list since 2007-08 and said that was one of the reasons her company should be able to run King as a charter.

For the 128 teachers and 1,100 students at King, the reality can seem quite different.

"I'm not blaming any one source, but to not classify what happened outside my room as anything other than a serious incident is a disgrace," Finnegan said.

Indeed, teachers say March 30 was a day when violence ruled at King, in the city's East Germantown neighborhood. There were multiple fights - the school district has acknowledged at least four - plus a fire, a 45-minute evacuation, and an hourlong lockdown during which teachers and students were unable to leave their classrooms. All told, 24 students were suspended for fighting.

The tumultuous day came as The Inquirer was in the middle of publishing its seven-part series "Assault on Learning," which found serious violence in city schools and widespread underreporting of incidents. The March 31 installment focused on King, and documented how Ackerman's signature intervention program - and enrolling about 90 percent of the King student body in it - had failed to stem violence or put students on the right course academically.

Yet by the district's official calculations, nothing violent was going on at King on March 30 - with the exception of the fire.

The day began with the fire alarm interrupting a state standardized science test, according to a King teacher who wrote a graphic chronicle of what happened and shared it with The Inquirer. (The teacher asked not to be named, fearing retribution.)

The fire was in a locker, and the school was evacuated for 45 minutes while it was extinguished, according to the account.

Also during the day, there were at least six "rather violent fights," some of them bloody, the teacher wrote.

The melee outside Finnegan's room happened about 11:30 a.m. She said one of her students exchanged words with three other girls. Then, as Finnegan directed the student into class, the girl pulled her hood over her head and knotted the drawstring.

The fight was on.

Students streamed out from classrooms and joined the fracas, while teachers tried to pull the brawling students apart, Finnegan said.

"I think the incident was serious," Finnegan said. Aside from the visible injuries, she worried that "the damage that you can't see . . . can be more serious. Anyone could have experienced a concussion or a strained neck."

Finnegan called security, but officers were slow to arrive because they were involved in quelling other outbursts in the school, she said. When security staff showed up, they took six girls to the school police office, picking up a seventh later, Finnegan said.

King's interim principal, James Murray, did not return a call for comment.

About an hour later in the first-floor lunchroom, another brawl broke out, involving more than a dozen students, teachers said. Five were suspended in that fracas.

The violence was so alarming the school was locked down, forcing teachers to keep students in their classrooms for more than an hour, teachers said.

Combined with the fire evacuation, that meant King students lost nearly two hours of class time that day.

"One of the school police officers, after the last of the big fights, sat outside smoking, pointing out the blood stains on his uniform, mentioning the names of the several individuals who created this gruesome collage," the teacher wrote.

Jennifer Freeman - an English teacher who is the teachers union representative at King - said there were other "scattered" fights at King that day. None was as serious as those outside Finnegan's room and in the cafeteria.

She disagreed with the district's decision not to code some of the incidents as "serious" or "violent."

"If a fight is bad enough that we have to go on lockdown to get back in order, how is that not a serious incident?" she asked.

But it was coded in the school police report as "disorderly conduct (fighting)."

According to the school police report The Inquirer obtained, it happened at 12:45 p.m. in the first-floor lunchroom and involved five students "who did not belong in the lunchroom."

There were no serious injuries, Kemp said.

When first asked about the March 30 incidents, the district mentioned only the lunchroom fight and the locker fire. Later, it acknowledged a second fight involving two boys, both of whom were suspended.

Pressed again about the fight outside Finnegan's room, Kemp said the district would take a closer look. On Wednesday, she said there were four fights that day, resulting in the 24 suspensions.

All the incidents were reported by the school on the day they occurred, she said, blaming a glitch on the central office's failing to record them. "We don't know why it [the central office report] hadn't updated," she said. "They're looking to figure that out."

Adding the newly discovered fights, King has reported 92 violent and nonviolent incidents this school year, down from previous years.

Teachers, however, say that what happened on March 30 is a perfect example of why the district's claim of declining violence lacks credibility.

Though none of the events was classified as violent, they were evidence of worsening conditions at King, Freeman said: "They've gotten progressively worse as the year went on, and a lot of that is because of the whole turmoil of the school."

King has been at the heart of a political battle in recent weeks after two charter school operators - including Foundations - pulled out of the running to operate King next year under the district's Renaissance program, meant to turn around underperforming schools. At stake was a five-year contract worth at least $50 million.

The withdrawals came amid charges of conflict of interest and political wrangling involving School Reform Commission Chairman Robert L. Archie Jr., whose law firm previously represented Foundations, and State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), a longtime supporter of the nonprofit and recipient of $80,000 in campaign contributions from its executives. Mayor Nutter launched a city investigation into the case last week.

The King staff has been feeling the pressure of not knowing whether the school will become a charter, who will run it, or whether the same teachers will be employed there next year, Freeman said. The district announced on Wednesday that King will remain under district control and become a Promise Academy, which means it will get a new principal next year. The school day will be extended and classes will be held on Saturday twice a month, the district said.

"It's so chaotic and if the teachers are feeling it, imagine how the students are feeling. It's no wonder they're acting out," Freeman said. "It's no wonder they're displaying these behaviors."

Fight at Overbrook

Montez Wilmer, 17, thought he was going to die on March 25 in the hallway outside the cafeteria at Overbrook High. He hadn't had a seizure before and didn't know what was happening to him.

Wilmer spoke from his room at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia four days later, his eye stitched closed after doctors repaired his broken eye socket. They also treated him for a concussion.

The tussle started as a verbal spat in the lunchroom. Wilmer, a junior, was talking with friends when someone told the other boy that Wilmer was talking about him. The boy came over and got in Wilmer's face, Wilmer said.

"I kept pushing him away," said Wilmer, a husky, 5-foot-11 football player. "One of the lunchroom ladies broke it up."

When lunch was over, someone told the boy that Wilmer was going to slap him, which Wilmer denied.

"He threw his hands up at me like we were going to fight," Wilmer said. "So I threw mine up."

The boy swung at him, Wilmer said, adding that he jumped to avoid being hit.

Witnesses agree that Wilmer took a swing back at the other boy, missed, lost his balance and fell to the floor. He cracked his head on the wall and started bleeding.

While on his knees and trying to get up - he and his mother say - his opponent, also 17, punched him in the face with a closed fist.

"I started bleeding, and when I was trying to get up he punched me . . . and that's when I went into a seizure," Wilmer said.

Philadelphia School District officials counter that there was no punch - just a fall - that happened during a mutual fight. Both students were suspended for five days, and the incident was properly coded, Kemp maintained.

"The academy leader [a teacher] saw the whole thing," Kemp said. Academy leaders are teachers who oversee groups of students.

A female student, whose parents asked that she not be named, corroborated Wilmer's story, however. She said she saw the other boy punch Wilmer when he was on the floor and that's when Wilmer went into the seizure.

Wilmer's mother, Christina Turner-Johnson, 42, an employee of the Philadelphia Water Department, got the news on her cell phone. A student called her best friend, and the friend called her.

She rushed to the school and found her son being treated by paramedics. No principal or school official had called to tell her what happened, she said.

"I was hysterical. There was blood everywhere," Turner-Johnson said. "He had a four- or five-minute seizure. He could have gone into a coma. He could have died."

At the hospital, surgeons put a plate in Wilmer's face, she said. Without it, doctors told her, his eye would sink when it healed. He also was treated for a concussion.

Turner-Johnson was angry that the district didn't deem the incident an assault on her son. She and Wilmer have since gone to police and pressed charges. City police are investigating, a police spokeswoman said.

It wasn't the first time her son faced trouble at Overbrook. There was an altercation last year and her daughter Angelique, now 20, suffered a fractured nose when she went to Wilmer's aid, Turner-Johnson said.

Earlier this school year, Overbrook officials told her they thought Wilmer was associating with a gang, she said. She told them the boys were part of a dance group, not a gang, she said.

"He's friends with a couple of them," she said.

On April 7, Wilmer and Angelique were at a neighborhood recreation center when they were confronted by family members of the boy in the tussle two weeks earlier, Turner-Johnson said. There was a physical scuffle.

Wilmer returned to classes at Overbrook on April 11. Teens went after him again at the recreation center after school that day, his mother said. One of the boy's cousins hit him in the back of the head on the side of his face where the plate was implanted, she said.

Turner-Johnson said she was seeking a transfer to another school for her son, who wants to be an architect. But for now, Wilmer has returned to Overbrook for half-days.

"This," she said, "really is getting out of hand."

An Inquirer review found little urgency to improve safety blueprints at the most dangerous Phila. schools.

By Susan Snyder, John Sullivan, and Dylan Purcell

A group of girls grab a classmate and push her and pummel her until she falls to the floor, covering her face with her arms in a vain effort to protect herself.

As she struggles to stand up, another girl in a black leather jacket and gray hoodie kicks the fallen victim in the head, causing her neck to snap forward.

The Jan. 4 attack in an Edison High School hallway - captured by a witness' cellphone camera and widely seen on the Internet - is graphic evidence of the explosive violence that all too often engulfs Philadelphia public schools, traumatizing students and teachers and stifling learning.

In a city where even kindergartners commit assaults, as documented in the recent Inquirer series "Assault on Learning," Edison, a North Philadelphia school with 1,700 students, stands out as one of the district's 19 "persistently dangerous" schools.

That designation - pinned on a school Edison's size after 20 student arrests for violent acts such as aggravated assault - is supposed to trigger a host of rules and requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law and state regulations, including that the school devise an action plan to enhance safety.

But an Inquirer review of two years of plans detected no particular urgency on the part of city schools to devise effective plans - even though Philadelphia has more such schools than any city in the country and Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has declared the situation an "emergency."

While some of the plans are detailed and thoughtful, the majority are sparse, with Edison's being a prime example. Its text consists largely of three lines:

Goal 1: Installation of cameras.

Goal 2: Improve school climate.

Goal 3: Student mentoring/peer mediation.

Moreover, the state Department of Education, which is supposed to monitor the plans, has traditionally had "a hands-off policy toward the Philadelphia School District," said Jack Stollsteimer, the former state-appointed watchdog of school safety in Philadelphia. "They were allowed to get away with anything."

Because the district is state-run, the Education Department had a conflict of interest in monitoring it, Stollsteimer contended.

State officials said that the district had largely improved, and that the plans were more about making small changes rather than turning a school around overnight.

Tim Eller, the Education Department spokesman, said the state "will continue to work with the School District to ensure its plans are appropriate to aid in improving the safety of students."

Stringent state

On paper, Pennsylvania is one of the most stringent states in its interpretation of the No Child Left Behind mandate, which lets each state define what constitutes a persistently dangerous school.

Other major cities with well-documented problems of violence, such as Los Angeles, have no schools on the persistently dangerous list, and only 44 are on the national list this year. Philadelphia accounts for 43 percent of them.

In Pennsylvania, aggravated assaults, aggravated sexual assaults, robberies, and weapon possessions that result in an arrest count toward the designation. Schools are allowed a certain number of incidents each year, based on their enrollment, before being kicked into the dangerous category.

In another quirk of the law's application, Philadelphia schools on the list - many in largely poor, high-crime neighborhoods - have a hard time breaking free because the size of their enrollment increases the probability that 20 students will be arrested for violent acts in a year. No other Pennsylvania schools are classified as persistently dangerous.

Ackerman has pledged to remove all city schools from the list within two years, a feat not accomplished since the list started in 2003. Edison has been listed the last four years. A few schools have remained on the list since its inception.

For students, there can be real consequences if their schools are on the list. They have to be offered the opportunity to transfer to another public school in the district, including a charter school.

For administrators, there has been another apparent response to Ackerman's directive. The Inquirer has documented instances in which incidents resulting in hospitalization for serious injuries were coded not as aggravated assaults, which would result in arrest and count against the 20 total, but as disorderly conduct or fights, which would not.

Another consequence is that the plans may get short shrift from Philadelphia school administrators who view them as a charade to appease politicians.

"They're thin because people are filling out and documenting what they need to please the district and the government," said Ed Monastra, a retired Olney High School principal who has since filled in as principal at several other district schools.

Stollsteimer agreed that Philadelphia administrators "had to send in the reports to comply with the law, but they knew that there was nobody who was going to actually analyze the reports, nor would there be any consequences if the reports were insufficient."

The School District does not keep good track of the plans, which must be filed annually as long as a school is on the list.

In fulfilling an Inquirer Right-to-Know Law request for the plans, the district initially failed to provide them for five of the 19 schools, although it supplied midyear update reports for two of those schools. Questioned by The Inquirer about the absence of the plans, the district several days later produced the missing reports.

Plans differ

The plans vary widely.

Some focus on attendance. Others on the dress code.

Strawberry Mansion High School, which recorded nearly 12 violent incidents per 100 students last year, said it provided extra support to teachers who had "a history of involvement in assaults."

Fels High School, where more than seven of every 100 students experience a violent incident, lists the school's goal as reducing the number of violent incidents 10 percent.

"Through a schoolwide system we will reduce the numbers of students running randomly in packs throughout the building," the plan says, without describing what the system is.

Some plans would surely have earned a failing grade if students had turned them in.

In its 2009 plan, administrators at Frankford High misspelled the school as "Frankfort" and spelled academic two different ways in the same paragraph.

Here is the school's surprisingly brief plan to eliminate tardiness:

Have posters and policy printed up and posted

Inform staff, parents and students of policy and procedure

Aquire [sic] shirts for sell

Train staff on

Edison, Strawberry Mansion, Fels, and Frankford are all among the city's 32 neighborhood high schools, where familiar urban ills often spill into schools. In the "Assault on Learning" series, The Inquirer reported that the violence rate spiked 17 percent at these schools in the five years ending with the 2009-10 school year.

The average violence rate at the schools was 5.1 incidents per 100 students. Edison surpassed that with a rate of 6.1, making it one of the district's most violent schools; its rate has increased in each of the last four years.

Edison's sprawling brick building with cascading rooftops is in the 100 block of West Luzerne Street, across from a cemetery. The school is only about a block north of Roberto Clemente Middle School, which feeds into Edison.

During the 2009-10 school year, Clemente ranked No. 1 in the rate of violence among the city's middle schools, with 8.4 violent incidents per 100 students.

Clemente's plan said it would ensure the safety of students as they moved from the lunchroom back to class: "Prepare a gauntlet of staff member [sic] to ferry students along hallways."

Since September, Clemente has been a Promise Academy, an overhauled district school with extra resources and a longer school day and year.

District officials say the action plans have helped improve safety in the schools, but acknowledged they are striving for "more consistency" in preparing them.

"Every school's culture is different, so the plans won't be identical in nature, but we are working toward providing schools with proper guidance to meet their needs," said Shana Kemp, a district spokeswoman.

In addition, safety teams at the schools address issues as they arise, Kemp said.

The Inquirer called principals at all of the persistently dangerous schools, including the principal of Edison, Marilyn Perez. Most did not return calls. Those who did referred questions to the district's Office of Communications.

Monastra said, "Obviously, a good plan is essential for the staff and students to know what to do in emergency situations, but a good plan without a good administration is really ineffective."

Vare Middle School offered one of the most detailed plans, a seven-page report with goals and strategies for carrying them out. One of its goals, for example, was to reduce tardiness, student hall walkers, and the number of students who repeatedly get suspended.

Among its remedies were to reallocate funding to support three additional noontime aides, offer "de-escalation training" in how to deal with violence, order additional "walkies" for new staff, and refer hall walkers for more in-depth help.

Two critics

The district's plans - and the state Education Department's inadequate monitoring of them - have been criticized by the state's auditor general, as long ago as 2008, and by a safety consulting firm hired by the department last year to evaluate persistently dangerous schools.

In a 2008 audit of the state Education Department, Auditor General Jack Wagner's office found that state education officials did not bother reading the reports or verify whether schools had implemented them.

"We believe that there is still a problem with the Department of Education not properly monitoring to make sure the action plans correct the problems," Wagner said in an interview last week.

Safe Havens, a Georgia firm, said in a report obtained by The Inquirer that there was "no apparent substantive connection or consistency" in how schools designed the plans. While evaluating them, the firm sought a district "benchmark sample plan" to use as a guide, but was told none would be available, the report said.

The report contained recommendations for how the district might make the schools safer, including installing security cameras.

Ackerman did move to place security cameras in 20 schools - 16 on the persistently dangerous list - after being criticized for failing to rein in racially charged violence at South Philadelphia High School that pitted black students against Asians.

After putting cameras in South Philadelphia High under an emergency contract, Ackerman bumped aside a suburban contractor in favor of a minority firm to install the rest of the cameras on an emergency, no-bid contract worth $7.5 million. Her staff members awarded the work to IBS Communications of Mount Airy after Ackerman supplied them with the firm's business card.

While the suburban contractor would have completed the work by Nov. 30, IBS was given until June 30 to do the work.

The District Attorney's Office used the cellphone-camera video - not a school security tape - to successfully prosecute two girls in the Edison attack.

Ackerman defended the emergency bid, saying in a December interview, "If something had happened, we would have been in the papers for failing to act."

Abysmal achievement

In 2009-10, the most recent year for which data are available, Edison High recorded 117 violent incidents, including 80 assaults and 26 weapon possessions. Student achievement is abysmal.

Fewer than a quarter of the school's 11th graders scored advanced or proficient in math on the most recent state exam. Just more than a quarter did that well in reading.

The Jan. 4 attack was exceptional only because it was captured on video at the school.

It began about 12:30 p.m., when a group of students gathered on the second floor near a stairwell. Two female students reported that several girls had stopped them and had begun beating them, according to a School District police report obtained by The Inquirer. The video captured only one girl being attacked.

When the blows stopped, the female victim, wearing a red sweatshirt, leaped up and fled down a stairwell.

In court later, she was reticent, embarrassed that the attack had gone viral on the Internet, one official at the hearing recalled.

Freshmen Jessenia Rivera, 16, and Ironely Acosta, 15, were initially charged with simple assault. But after the District Attorney's Office viewed the violence on the video, the charge was bumped up to aggravated assault.

The reason behind the attack did not emerge in court. The victim testified only that she had been beaten.

However, Nydia Sánchez, the mother of Acosta, and Maria Rivera, the mother of Jessenia Rivera, said in separate interviews that the victim had hit their daughters first. That, they said, wasn't captured on video.

Both attackers were sent to juvenile detention.

But violence at the school continued.

One month to the day after the hallway attack, another large crowd gathered in the lunchroom at Edison.

When a school police officer tried to break up the group, a 15-year-old boy pushed the officer, nearly knocking him to the ground, according to a School District police report obtained by The Inquirer.

Inquirer Investigation: More than a dozen officers have faced drug, assault, theft, and other charges.

By Susan Snyder and Dylan Purcell

On the first day of school in early September, Philadelphia School District police officer Janis Walke strode into the courtroom in uniform, then waited to hear when her case would come up.

She wasn't there to testify against a student - it was Walke herself who was in trouble. On Aug. 3, she had been arrested for purchasing crack cocaine, court records show.

And it wasn't the first time. Walke also had been arrested for crack possession in May 2008, pleaded no contest, and was put in a program called "probation without verdict," reserved for people who admit they are drug-dependent and present evidence of dependency in court.

Four months after her arrest - and only a month after she was put on probation in August 2008 - she became one of the school district's newest police officers. Under school policy, she wasn't tested for drug use.

Her case is by no means an aberration for the school police, an unarmed force of 386 full-time and 50 per diem officers who are hired by the school district's human resources department and operate independently of city police.

Record checks conducted by The Inquirer turned up more than a dozen school police officers who have been arrested on drug, assault, theft, and other charges in recent years - either before they were employed by the district or while they were on active duty.

One case involved assault by motor vehicle by an officer - still working for the district - who was charged with "knowingly, intentionally, and recklessly" driving a car into a man's leg, "causing bruising requiring medical treatment," according to court records.

In another instance, which did not result in arrest, a uniformed officer was spotted on surveillance video swiping Naked orange juice and frosted Entenmann's chocolate doughnuts from a Roxborough Wawa while he was supposed to be on duty at the local high school, according to an internal district document. The store agreed not to press charges if the items were returned.

Liam S. Boyle - a former officer who was hired despite a prior arrest for heroin possession - said it was easier to get a job as a school district policeman than to be hired at Walmart. A Walmart employee had flagged his previous arrest during the hiring process.

"I get the school district job. Yet I can't get the Walmart job?" he asked.

The caliber of school police officers is crucial as the district struggles to contain violence. The recent Inquirer series "Assault on Learning" reported that more than 30,000 serious incidents had taken place in the city's schools over five years and that on any given day, 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or became victims of other violent crimes.

Beginning this fall, school police have been given new authority to report crime in schools to district headquarters and city police, after the series showed many violent incidents were not being recorded. Previously, that responsibility largely had been assumed by principals.

Yet, school district records show that one of the officers identified by The Inquirer as having arrest records was brought up on disciplinary charges of ignoring reports of sexual assaults on students and another was called to account for a "security breach" for letting into the school an "irate man" who talked of attacking students with a gun.

In April, following the series, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey spoke of the possibility of putting city police in some schools. "We can't ignore the fact that we have a problem, and we have to regain control of the schools," Ramsey said at the time.

But no plan has materialized, and the school force has been thinned - from 635 part- and full-time officers during the 2010-11 school year.

One reason the district often does not flag cases against its officers is that some of them, such as Boyle, have been put in a pretrial diversion program under the supervision of the probation department. Those cases are not considered convictions in the legal system.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said background checks turned up no record of convictions prior to hiring for Walke, Boyle, and most of the other officers that The Inquirer asked about.

But in response to The Inquirer's questions, the district has launched an investigation into one current officer who had an outstanding bench warrant until Friday for his arrest and reviews of the cases of two other current officers with arrest records.

State Sen. Jeff Piccola, a Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee and sponsored a new law that tightens background checks for school employees, was stunned at the cases uncovered by The Inquirer.

"In this job market, you would think with 9 percent unemployment ... they could find people who didn't have serious criminal backgrounds," he said.

Of Walke, he said: "A woman like that should not be anywhere near a child." And of Boyle, he said: "Walmart standards are higher than the Philadelphia school district's. Walmart should have given him a second chance."

Elsewhere in the country, school police - many of whom are fully commissioned police officers - have to meet far more stringent standards than in Philadelphia, where officers aren't required to undergo drug or psychological screenings. In Houston, candidates for the armed school police force also have to take lie-detector tests and face inquiries to family members and neighbors about their personal backgrounds. That's in addition to an exhaustive criminal background check.

"We go all the way back into their lives for about 10 years and see what they have done and try to determine whether or not they will be successful as a police officer . . . working in a campus environment," said Jimmie Dotson, chief of the Houston Independent School District police department.

In Philadelphia, officers undergo Federal Bureau of Investigation, child abuse, and state criminal background checks, said Andrew Rosen, of the district's human resources office. But the district looks only at convictions when hiring - not arrests - and may still go ahead and employ the applicant if the crime isn't cited as a disqualifier in the Pennsylvania School Code.

The code, a state law, covers the hiring of school employees and does not distinguish school police officers from teachers or janitors. As Boyle's case shows, they may be treated more leniently in Philadelphia than job-seekers in private industry.

Until October 2010, Philadelphia school police were not even required to report if they were arrested while on the force - and records show that several officers continued to work, even after facing probation or penalty for those arrests.

Once The Inquirer began asking questions, Myron Patterson - a Philadelphia police inspector on loan to the district to oversee the school force - sent out a directive, reinforcing a 2010 policy requiring officers to divulge arrests.

"This stoked us," Patterson said.

Patterson said he was pushing to institute mandatory drug testing for new hires - an issue that he said had to be worked out through the district's human resources department. But he does not see the need for psychological evaluations or increased training, noting that school police are unarmed and more like security guards. School police now get four weeks of training compared with 32 for city police.

He also noted many officers - though he couldn't cite a number - were retired city police officers.

Others differ with Patterson about hiring, screening, and training requirements.

Private studies - including one conducted by a state-hired consultant - have been critical of how prospective officers are screened for hiring and their subsequent training and conduct.

"We suggest the screening of candidates, job requirements, training, assessment, and supervision of school police officers be reevaluated," said Safe Havens, a Georgia security consulting firm that assessed school police operations in 25 of the district's most dangerous schools in spring 2010. "This issue is important enough to merit prompt attention at the district leadership level."

At seven of the schools, analysts observed officers "yelling at students, or aggressively challenging them for 'offenses' that were minor in nature and could have been dealt with more effectively through a calmer approach," according to the report.

Former schools safety chief James B. Golden said he advocated for officers to get the same training as city cops.

"Ultimately, the district ought to move to professionalize its school police force. We would have well-qualified, highly trained school police officers, short of carrying firearms," said Golden, whose five-plus year tenure ended in August 2010 when he was replaced by Patterson.

The officers' union president, Michael Lodise, also took a strong position. He said that there should be an upgrade in training and better screening of applicants.

"That's something we've been pushing for," Lodise said. Too often, applicants who should not be hired "slip through the cracks," he said. New hires should be both drug tested and given a psychological evaluation, much like regular law enforcement, he said.

"We have psychologists in the schools, yet we don't have one at [district headquarters] to evaluate new hires," he said.

Boyle also questioned why the district did no drug screening.

"I mention that because there were a few people in my training class that I was wondering about," he said. "It was kind of strange to me, considering that you're working with kids."

Boyle - whose last assignment was South Philadelphia High School, rocked by racial violence in 2009 - said his arrest for heroin possession came up on a records check when he applied for a job at Walmart. He didn't get hired.

When he interviewed with the school district, however, his arrest "never came up," he said.

"It did make me wonder," said Boyle, whose father, William J., is a retired city police officer and a current member of the school force.

Hearing of cases The Inquirer uncovered - some of which occurred during his tenure - Golden said school police leaders should play a greater role in hiring.

"There could have been, and probably should be going forward, a closer working relationship around the vetting of new school police officers," he said.

Patterson said that since he took over, the department has addressed many of the problems raised in the Safe Havens report. He emphasized that he added a disciplinary liaison to investigate and deal with complaints about officers and instituted leadership training for supervisors and a dress code and grooming guidelines for officers, among other changes.

"We have a strong hand on this and we're pushing forward," he said. "Our personnel know that their behavior is being scrutinized, and if it comes to our attention, they're going to have to answer for it."

On the front line

The school police force is on the front line when it comes to quelling violent offenses in district schools, 19 of which were graded by the state as "persistently dangerous" in the 2010-11 school year.

Though they do not carry guns, school police are empowered to subdue and detain students - including handcuffing them. They must deal with drug offenses and confiscate weapons.

Some of the officers whose names were flagged by The Inquirer have been stationed at schools deemed persistently dangerous, such as FitzSimons High, or that have been the scenes of large-scale disruption in recent years.

One officer who was eventually dismissed last May after compiling a string of arrests for drugs and illegal weapon possession - Jamil Watson - most recently worked at Martin Luther King High, a school with a long record of violence.

On one day alone in March 2011 - when Watson was still a police officer - the school had at least four fights, a fire, a 45-minute evacuation, and an hourlong lockdown when teachers and students were unable to leave their classrooms. All told, 24 students were suspended for fighting that day.

The Inquirer found that several of the officers such as Watson identified as having arrest records continued to have problems in their school jobs and became the subject of district discipline charges.

"He had a problem with authority," recalled Kristina Diviny, the former principal of King who is now principal of Christiana High School in Delaware.

In November 2010, Watson was suspended for two days and put on probation with the school police for a year for "insubordination and improper conduct," according to a district disciplinary letter.

Walke, 47, got in trouble at Rhodes High School, where she was stationed last spring, over a trip she planned to Hawaii. She was suspended for 10 days and placed on job probation for a year after the principal's signature was forged on the vacation request forms, according to school district documents.

The district investigation determined that a colleague, also a school police officer, had forged the signature, according to district disciplinary records.

Boyle, 30, was fired by the school district after about a year for absences and lateness, he said.

Then there is the case of former Roxborough High School officer Cornelius Dudley.

On Dec. 10, 2010, he was caught on surveillance video swiping items from the Wawa on Ridge Avenue, according to a district document obtained by The Inquirer.

But there were warning signs before that.

Dudley had been hired by the school district in November 2001, despite his previous arrest for the theft of a PGW vehicle. However, that charge was dismissed.

In 2009, he was arrested on a charge of marijuana possession and was suspended from the force. But the charge also was dismissed for lack of prosecution, and he was reinstated, court and school district records show.

Then came the Wawa incident, outlined in district documents. He was videotaped taking the orange juice and chocolate doughnuts, along with Red Bull, lemon/honey tea, iced tea, and a 6-ounce bag of pistachios - all worth $12.22.

(He did pay $3.44 for a Philadelphia Daily News and a sausage, egg, and cheese bagel.)

Not only did Dudley, 43, abandon his school post without authorization, according to the documents, but the situation also caused a school district police sergeant to have to go to the Wawa to handle the matter.

"He left the school and committed a criminal act in full uniform and placing the school district in an embarrassing situation," an internal district report on the incident said. "Officer Dudley could not give a reasonable answer for his actions."

Dudley, according to the documents, denied the theft and said he was going to his car to get money and took the items with him.

Amid a school district investigation into the incident, Dudley was arrested in February for possession of marijuana.

He resigned in March 2011 and agreed that he would not seek employment with the district again, according to a district record.

A few weeks later, court records show that he was placed in the SAM program (for Small Amount of Marijuana), which requires attendance at a drug-abuse class and the payment of a $200 fine.

Dudley declined comment.

Some officers who get in trouble with the law, however, get high marks from their superiors. Diviny, the former King principal, recalled the case of Galvinus Thompson, who she said was one of her better officers.

In 2006, Thompson shot and killed Kenneth Brokenborough, a city police officer who he believed raped his sister. Thompson was in uniform as a school cop at King the day before he killed Brokenborough, Diviny said. In 2007, he was sentenced to 11 to 22 years for third-degree murder.

Eligibility

To be eligible for employment as a school district police officer, applicants must be 21 and a high school graduate. They take written and oral tests to assess their ability to respond to emergency situations and gauge their general knowledge. Then, they are placed on an eligibility list based on their scores.

Pay for a full-time officer ranges from $33,065 to $51,507.

On the district application, they are asked if they have been convicted of a crime other than a traffic offense.

Applicants such as Boyle, who have been placed in a diversion program rather than going to trial, are able to answer "no" to this question. Walke did the same on her application, said Gallard.

After his arrest, Boyle's case was designated for the ARD program, the acronym for Accelerated Rehabilitation Disposition. Many first-time offenders accused of nonviolent crimes such as drug possession, drunken driving or theft are put in the program, which has been extensively used by the Philadelphia court system for about 40 years as a way to lighten its heavy caseload.

Typically, people placed in ARD have to complete a rehabilitaton course under the supervision of the probation department and stay out of trouble for a length of time - a standard term is six months or a year. At that point, if they haven't gotten into further trouble, they are eligible to have their record expunged.

Defendants may also have to pay fines and court costs.

Boyle was arrested in 2008 on the heroin possession charge. He said he was driving a car with a group of his friends when a police officer pulled them over. Police found 0.12 grams of heroin in the search.

Boyle said the drugs weren't his, and he wanted to plead not guilty. But he said a public defender told him he would have little chance of beating the charge.

So he took an ARD agreement for first-time offenders, and he said he was told his record eventually would be expunged if he successfully completed probation.

He's disturbed that his arrest record is public.

"I was under the impression that it would be gone," he said.

Boyle said he heard about the school district police officer's job in 2009 from his father.

Once hired, he worked at Childs Elementary in 2009-10, then South Philadelphia High School that summer before being terminated in August 2010.

He said he believes he was a good employee.

Tommie Turner was similarly hired after going into the ARD program, records show. He began as a per diem officer in October 2007 despite the fact he had been charged with receiving stolen property a year earlier. Turner said he was driving a car with stolen tags, but said he was unaware of a problem with the plates.

Turner said he informed the school district about the arrest. On his application, he wrote that he had no convictions, Gallard said.

"They didn't even ask me about it. They were so short-handed," Turner said.

His training, he said, was abbreviated because the district wanted to deploy officers as quickly as possible. He worked at Clymer and Frederick Douglass elementary schools and Strawberry Mansion High.

In 2009, he was arrested on a cocaine-possession charge - which again he said was not his. He said he had loaned his car to a friend to move, and the friend had an addict help him.

The addict, Turner said, left a bag with white residue in his car on a day when he happened to be approached by a police officer. He had pulled over to call his girlfriend to see if they needed anything from the market, he said.

"I guess I was in a bad area," he said, surmising why the officer had approached. "To my surprise, there's the bag."

He pleaded no contest and received six months' probation.

Turner, who noted that he also has worked as a corrections officer, said he informed the school district that he had been arrested. He subsequently resigned because the district told him he could no longer work.

"I have a feeling if I didn't say anything," he said, "they never would have known."

A current school police officer - Aaron Wilson, 42 - was arrested by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office and charged with theft by false impression and tampering with public records in 2008. He was placed in the ARD program. A year later, he was hired by the school district as a police officer.

Reached at Meade Elementary School, where he is stationed, he declined to comment.

"I don't have nothing to say about nothing. All I know is who I am, and where I'm at," he said. "Whatever you found on me, sounds like you might be in the wrong area."

His lawyer, Kevin V. Mincey, confirmed that he had represented Wilson and that his client was a Philadelphia school police officer. He said he could not recall the precise circumstances of Wilson's case, but noted that the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office, which prosecuted it in Dauphin County court, worked with him so that the incident "wouldn't ruin his life."

Gallard said the district is reviewing his case.

Unflagged cases

Cases such as those of Walke, Boyle, Turner, and Wilson - because they ended up in diversion programs or are low-level misdemeanors - typically would not be flagged by the criminal record and child abuse checks the school district requires.

Nor would they run afoul of state law - or a recent extension of it - that prohibits school districts from hiring anyone convicted of major crimes including homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, felony drug offenses, or endangering the welfare of children.

As the result of a law pushed through the legislature by Piccola, those parameters were broadened as of Sept. 28, which means it will be harder for someone with a criminal background to be eligible for employment in a school district.

Among the banned offenses are convictions for luring a child into a motor vehicle, unlawful contact with a minor or soliciting of a minor to traffic drugs.

School employees also cannot be convicted of other types of felony offenses within 10 years of their employment application or misdemeanor offenses of the first degree within five years.

The new regulations also require current and prospective employees to fill out a form by Dec. 27, listing any arrests or convictions that they have had for crimes covered by the provision. Employees who refuse to disclose crimes or arrests face discipline, including dismissal.

Rosen, the district's head of human resources, said if applicants are convicted of other crimes outside those proscribed by the school code, the district considers the position that the employee is seeking.

"For cops, we look if they have assault convictions, resisting arrest convictions . . . things like that because of the nature of the job in dealing with people and especially kids," he said. "Those are the kinds of things that might raise the antenna that this might not be the right job for this person."

Then, there is the matter of Jamil Watson, who used the alias of Jamil Styles. At King, Diviny - the former principal - said Watson called himself "the undercover brother," an apparent reference to a 2002 film of the same name chronicling the adventures of a secret agent.

He was hired by the district in September 2009 - after he had already been arrested by police at West Chester University. He pleaded guilty to a marijuana possession charge, receiving a year's probation. That was his second marijuana bust in Chester County - an earlier case resulted in 30 days' probation.

Watson, 24, got in trouble again in December 2009. During a traffic stop, police said he produced a driver's license that was "altered, forged or counterfeit," and fled the scene at a "high rate of speed."

Court records show that he was eventually caught and charged with reckless endangerment, fleeing officers, false identification, illegal possession of a firearm with the manufacturer's number altered, and criminal mischief for striking a parked car.

On June 28, he was found guilty on four counts, was sentenced to three years' probation, and ordered to pay $500 in restitution to the owner of the parked car, records show. The gun was ordered destroyed.

Two weeks earlier, Watson had failed to show up for a school district disciplinary hearing stemming from the December arrest. His grandmother attended and said Watson was in jail, according to a district source.

Watson was not present because he had been taken into custody on May 26 after his bail was revoked for failing to show up for a pre-sentence review, according to a district disciplinary letter. As a result, he missed work from May 27 through June 13.

It wasn't the first time he'd been absent from work without authorization - there were four other instances during the 2009-10 school year.

He was fired.

Firing policy

If a current employee is convicted of a crime, the district's general - but not absolute - policy is to fire him or her, Rosen said.

Pending the outcome of the case, the district does its own investigation and decides whether to suspend the employee, he said. If the incident occurs at work, the district acts immediately, he said.

A case in point is Officer Dana Baker, 31, who was suspended after she was arrested in March for criminal conspiracy, simple assault, and false imprisonment. Her trial is scheduled this month.

According to court records, Baker and her husband are accused of attacking a woman, who the police report describes as another "wife" of her husband. The victim suffered a swollen eye, a bite mark on her thumb, and red marks around her neck, the report said.

In hiring Baker, the district disregarded a prior 2000 arrest for theft and receiving stolen property in Montgomery County. She was placed in the ARD program, court records show.

Gallard said Baker noted on her application that she had a prior conviction, but was hired anyway.

While Baker was suspended, The Inquirer found that other officers continued on the job after being arrested.

One was Eugene Hall, who has worked at Strawberry Mansion and FitzSimons high schools and Bache Martin elementary, and has been arrested four times, most recently on Sept. 3 for marijuana possession. Previous charges of simple assault and reckless endangerment had been dropped.

He has been suspended for lateness and poor attendance, and has faced accusations of insubordination and falsification of district documents, district records show.

There was also a complaint of a "security breach" violation when he was an officer at FitzSimons, according to a disciplinary report.

An "irate male" was permitted to enter the school at the station where Hall was supposed to be on duty. The man was looking for a student who allegedly spit on him from a window, according to the report. The man told a school administrator "if I had a gun I would of went up there and took care of those bastards myself."

Hall, 46, was terminated last month, the district said.

In another case, Eric Cosby, 55, was charged with simple assault, reckless endangerment, and possession of an instrument of crime in 2008 after allegedly driving his car into someone. He "knowingly, intentionally, and recklessly caused bodily injury to complainant," court records said.

He was subsequently placed in the ARD program for a year and ordered to undergo anger management, records show.

Cosby, who was hired by the district in April 1995, did not return a written request for comment. He is based at H.R. Edmunds Elementary School.

When Cosby was at Cooke School in 2009, he also faced disciplinary action when he was accused of calling two female students a "bitch" and an "asshole" and of asking the guardian of one of the girls if she wanted to go on a date, according to internal school district records. He also allegedly made a derogatory comment and gesture to two teachers at Cooke.

At Smedley School, also in 2009, he was cited for "lateness, disrespectful behavior, creating a disruptive educational classroom environment, unprofessional demeanor, insubordination, creating a hostile work environment, impeding the progress of an investigation, impeding the reporting of a serious incident, and leaving the school premises without principal approval."

A Vietnam veteran, he asserted that he suffered from post traumatic stress, district documents said.

Gallard said the district was reviewing Cosby's case.

In one case, an officer who was wanted on a bench warrant continues to work in the district.

Edward Larkins, 55, was arrested on charges of marijuana possession in November 2010. An officer at Drew School, he has been employed in the district since 1993.

Larkins said he heard a disruption outside his home in the 3300 block of Hartville Street in Philadelphia and grabbed a friend's coat to run outside and check.

"I put on the wrong jacket, and unfortunately it had that substance," Larkins said in a telephone interview. "I just got jammed with it."

He said he did not inform the school district of the arrest. Court records show that he was placed in the SAM program.

In March 2011, a bench warrant for his arrest was issued by Municipal Court for failure to show up for the required SAM class or pay the $200 fine.

Larkins also had faced disciplinary problems while on the job. He got in trouble for lateness and was also brought up on charges that he failed to report allegations of sexual assaults on students to his supervisor on three occasions while working at Stetson Middle School in November 2003, internal district records show.

"We are in the middle of an investigation due to the active bench warrant and arrest that we did not know of," Gallard said.

Larkins was summoned to a conference Thursday, but was out sick. On Friday, the warrant was lifted.

Rejected plea deal

Her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her police officer emblem on her light blue shirt, Walke arrived in the courtroom after 10 a.m. on Sept. 6. School had started about three hours earlier.

She was there to answer to charges that she had been caught with crack cocaine on Aug. 3.

Rejecting a plea deal offered by the prosecution, she accepted her trial date.

Approached by a reporter, Walke declined to comment.

She had shown up in court in her uniform because she had reported to Rhodes that morning for duty, but learned that she was among 190 per diem officers who had been laid off, according to a district source.

But Walke remains on a list of active employees and could be called back.

"If my friends beat me up, and hurt me, and wanted to kill me, would you do something about it?"

By Jeff Gammage

At first, Gbahtuo Comgbaye, a West African immigrant, was more puzzled than worried when his 6-year-old son started coming home from school with bruises on his chest and neck.

His concern turned to alarm on a mid-September morning as he helped his child, Menduawor, get dressed for the day. The boy tearfully asked, "If my friends beat me up, and hurt me, and wanted to kill me, would you do something about it?"

The story that emerged: Menduawor, a slight, soft-spoken boy, was being routinely beaten by three bigger first-grade classmates at Patterson School in Southwest Philadelphia. They told him, "We don't like your name."

Philadelphia School District officials said Wednesday that they were extremely concerned about the allegations, and promised to launch an immediate and thorough inquiry.

Comgbaye described his growing horror as his son came home from school bruised and shaken day after day. He said that his pleas to the teacher and principal brought no relief and that a phone call and subsequent letter to the district superintendent got no response.

At the end of September, the boy was beaten so severely that his mother took him to the emergency room at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Hospital records show Menduawor was treated for chest and abdominal injuries, which physician Sarah Wood wrote were caused by blows from a person or object.

The family filed a police report shortly afterward.

Afraid for their son's safety, the Comgbayes have not sent Menduawor to school in two weeks, and pledge he will not return to Patterson. They said school administrators have called to warn them that the boy was being marked absent.

"We take the allegations very seriously," acting Superintendent Leroy Nunery II said in an interview. "We don't have any tolerance for anything on the order of bullying or student-on-student violence. ... Our eyes are on this."

Comgbaye, interviewed at the family home, said he could not believe this was happening to his son - not in a neighborhood school, not in the United States, not after fleeing war-torn Liberia.

As he spoke, his son came into the living room.

"They keep beating me up," he said. "They pushed me, and I was bleeding."

Comgbaye said the incidents occurred in the classroom, in the hallways, and outside the school. Sometimes, it would be a quick punch, he said. Other times, the three stronger boys, all African American, would circle Menduawor and taunt him as they kicked and punched, he said.

He described his son as a quiet and studious child who had no trouble during kindergarten at Patterson.

The school is at 70th Street and Buist Avenue, on the border of the Eastwick and Elmwood neighborhoods, an area where there has been tension between African Americans and African immigrants. Members of the West African community said some African Americans have regarded the growing African-born population as an economic threat.

Refugees have been propelled here by political unrest, civil war, and genocide.

Comgbaye said that after Sept. 12, when his son began telling him about the beatings, other odd events suddenly made sense: One day, he had gone to pick up his son at school, and the boy ran to the car, jumped inside - and immediately wet himself. The child said he was afraid to go to the bathroom at school.

Comgbaye, referring to a file of letters and notes, said that once he realized what was happening, he wrote to the boy's teacher and asked for help. She responded, according to a copy of the note, "I will check this out. Thank you for writing to me! I appreciate that."

Comgbaye said he heard nothing more from her.

He decided that he or his wife, Rachael, would have to meet their son every day at the end of school.

On Sept. 27, he said, he was walking his son away from the school, holding him by the hand, when a bigger boy ran up and knocked Menduawor to the ground, leaving him cut and crying.

The assailant quickly ran away into a crowd of students. Menduawor said it was one of the three bullies who had been beating him.

The next day, Comgbaye said, he phoned the superintendent's office. Comgbaye, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2001, said he didn't understand the intricacies of local government or know the name of the superintendent, but wanted to contact the person in charge. He said he explained his son's situation to a woman in the office.

That same day, he said, he and his wife went to see the Patterson principal, Kenneth Jessup. Comgbaye said the principal told him, "We know about this already," and promised to move the ringleader to another classroom.

Comgbaye left to attend class at Holy Family University, where he is working toward a nursing degree. Later that day, he phoned the principal and was assured that the main assailant had been moved and would have no contact with Menduawor, Comgbaye said.

But that very day, Comgbaye said, their son came home from school more beaten and brutalized than ever. He and his wife learned that the boy who had been moved from class had joined his two accomplices as school was let out, then kicked and punched Menduawor "like a football."

The next morning, when the child complained of continuing pain in his stomach area, Rachael Comgbaye took him to Children's. Comgbaye said he later took the hospital discharge papers to Jessup, the principal, who said, "Oh my God, did I separate the wrong one?"

"I said, 'I'm not sending him here anymore,' " Comgbaye said he told the principal.

Efforts to contact Jessup for this article were unsuccessful.

On Oct. 1, Comgbaye wrote a letter to the superintendent, explaining all that had occurred and asking that his son be transferred to a "safe school where he will be able to learn."

He wrote that his son would not return to Patterson and that he was seeking help not only for his boy, "but for every child that has been and could potentially be hurt from the hands of troubled kids in this school."

Comgbaye said he received no response.

Nunery said the district has closely tracked incoming calls and mail and has no record of receiving either one from Comgbaye. "Doesn't mean it didn't happen," he said, adding that the district was now scrutinizing its files.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard called the alleged abuse "very disturbing" and reiterated: "A full investigation will be conducted on every single allegation raised by the father."

He and Nunery confirmed that communications had occurred between the father and the principal and that the principal had moved a child out of the class.

Gallard said the school has called the parents multiple times to say the boy must return to class. However, if a safety threat is identified, he said, the child could transfer to a new school without penalty.

Comgbaye said he was not sure what to do next. It's not safe for his son to return to Patterson. But the longer the boy is away from school, the more the child comes to think that he's the problem, Comgbaye said.

"I'm very, very, very upset," he said. "I don't know whether the School District wants for someone to die."

See a video interview with Gbahtuo Comgbaye about his son's ordeal at school at www.philly.com/beatings

Houston schools are similar to Phila.s. But policing differs, and violence is lower.

By Susan Snyder

The teenage boys were about to come to blows in the hallway at Yates High School over $10 one had purloined from the other's pocket - as a prank, he protested.

Willie Demby Jr. - all 6-foot-2, 235 pounds of him - quickly cooled down the dispute.

Demby, 44, is a school police officer for the Houston Independent School District, academy-trained and armed with a gun, a baton, and pepper foam. He could have arrested the offending student, but he didn't see the need - "98.5 percent of policing is conversation, 1.5 percent is physical," said Demby, who views mentoring students as an important part of his job.

With its armed and highly trained school force, Houston offers a substantially different model of school policing than Philadelphia, where leaders are pondering how to cope with widespread school violence. An Inquirer series, "Assault on Learning," documented 30,000 violent incidents over a five-year period.

In April, following the series, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey raised the possibility of putting regular city police in some schools, which are now guarded by 400-plus unarmed school police officers, who are trained for just four weeks before going on the job. Officers are not screened for drug use, and mentoring students is not part of their job description.

"We can't ignore the fact that we have a problem, and we have to regain control of the schools," Ramsey said at the time. So far, the city has shied away from introducing armed officers, opting this week to recommend better training and screening for school police.

This approach makes Philadelphia an exception among America's 10 largest cities. An Inquirer survey found that eight of them deploy armed police in schools in some form, and a ninth city - New York - uses fully qualified, but unarmed, police officers.

Houston's school system is similar to the Philadelphia district - the overwhelming majority of its students are African American or Hispanic, many of them impoverished. Its enrollment of 202,000 is about a quarter larger.

Yet, its school police force is much smaller than Philadelphia's - only 186 sworn officers, 105 of whom are school-based and responsible, not just for keeping order in the schools, but for tracking down truants. The rest of the officers are administrative or assigned to mobile squads.

While its methods may at times seem harsher than in Philadelphia - Houston school-police K-9 units conduct random sweeps for weapons and drugs - statistics suggest that its professionally policed schools are markedly less violent than Philadelphia's.

Houston reported 925 assaults, or 46 per 10,000 students, compared with Philadelphia's 2,696 assaults, or 175 per 10,000 students.

When Nutter and Ramsey raised the idea of armed police in Philadelphia schools, they faced fierce pushback. But educators interviewed in the Houston school system are pleased with the armed officers in a force controlled by the district.

"It was never a serious controversy in Houston, and it has worked well," said Gayle Fallon, the teachers' union president. "I'd rather have one of our armed police confront a student than a city officer. They are just so much more used to dealing with the kids, and less likely to overreact."

In Houston, as in Philadelphia, some local groups argue that armed police in schools will inevitably criminalize behavior that should be handled with discipline.

But consider what happened when Demby - the only officer at Yates, with its 980 students - intervened to forestall the budding fight. As the parent of four teenagers, he spoke to the boys in a stern but fatherly manner, rather than referring them for discipline.

"Don't you feel like you owe him $10?" Demby asked the offending youth.

"Yeah, but I'm not going to give him my last $10," the boy answered. He explained that his backpack had been stolen and that he no longer had the other boy's $10.

Demby told him to empty his pockets. Out came $8. Demby handed it to the victim, whose anger turned to sadness when he saw that the boy - who had been his friend - was broke. "I'm going to give him $2 back," the victim said.

Demby gave the boy the $2: "Sometimes you have to 'fess up to your responsibility, like a grown man."

An intuitive feel

The girl's emotions were still raw.

Her boyfriend, the father of her unborn daughter, had been shot to death earlier that week in an apartment complex parking lot in a gang dispute. Back at Yates, some of the students were cursing him to her face.

Demby intervened.

"If [Demby] wasn't there, I probably would have retaliated physically," said the girl, who is 17 and nine months pregnant.

While an authority figure, Demby has an intuitive feel for the students - he calls his own children his "hobby" - and for the neighborhood, the city's historic Third Ward, a center for African American culture and education since freed blacks began arriving in large numbers after the Civil War.

Demby earned his bachelor's degree in criminal justice at Texas Southern University, a historically black institution whose campus is right next door to Yates. He was previously a Houston city cop but also had jobs as a chemical-plant manager and a mortgage-loan officer.

He works out of a spartan office but is more often seen in the hallways of Yates, a low-slung, 1950s-era building of orange brick with large, red plate-glass windows.

The school is well-known for its athletes and entertainers. Its 2010 basketball team was ranked No. 1 in the country, and its famous graduates include football stars Dexter Manley and Santana Dotson and entertainers Phylicia Rashad of The Cosby Show and her sister Debbie Allen.

Like many neighborhood high schools in the inner city, Yates has had its academic ups and downs and its share of violence and disruption - in the last year alone, three principals have shuttled in and out.

Gang activity is a long-standing plague in the city. The Houston Chronicle reported that, since 2007, more than 100 people in Houston have been killed in gang attacks.

Armed school police were introduced in 1992, amid mounting concern about students' bringing weapons to city schools and the shooting death of a high school student on campus after a football game.

State legislation had paved the way for local districts to establish their own force.

The move was met with some trepidation.

"Crime and violence cannot be tolerated on Houston's school campuses," the Chronicle wrote in an editorial. "But much can be done to improve security before the Houston Independent School District places its own armed guards in schools."

The school board gave its middle schools and high schools the choice of armed officers, and 83 percent immediately opted for them.

Manuel Moctezuma, 49, a cop in the district for 20 years, recalls the transformation when he traded in his coat and tie for a uniform and gun.

"It made a big difference ... more respect," he recalled. "Before, it was: You're not a police officer. You don't even have a gun."

Today, every middle and high school in the district - whose students are about 60 percent Hispanic and a quarter black - has at least one officer. The department, including a K-9 unit, a gang unit, and an internal affairs division, runs on an $11 million budget. (In Philadelphia, the school police budget is $34 million.)

Schools are allotted officers based on multiple factors: neighborhood demographics, school size and crime rate, discipline actions, and gang activity.

While Yates has only one officer, high schools in Philadelphia have two to nine officers, according to district spokesman Fernando Gallard.

Some Houston schools also use security guards, for which the school police department recently took over the hiring and training.

The change to armed officers with the ability to arrest hasn't eliminated crime. In 2006, an intruder penetrated Westbury High and raped a student in the bathroom. In April, two gunmen opened fire at an after-school powder-puff football game (not district-sponsored) in south Houston.

But officers and educators say that, overall, schools are much safer than they had been and are better environments for learning.

Fallon, of the teachers' union, said teachers were glad to have the officers, especially considering the city's gang violence.

But Fallon, who grew up outside Philadelphia, said the communities were different.

"You have to put into perspective the fact that this is Texas and that, at one point, there was [proposed] legislation that would have armed the teachers," she said, noting that the union opposed it.

Hiring and training

The class-change bell rings at Wheatley High, and school police officer Mac Moore is planted firmly in the hallway.

"Let's go! Let's go!" he yells, then blows his whistle.

Like many of the school district officers, Moore, 51, formerly served as a Houston city police officer. He spent 23 years on the city force, his last stint in special operations escorting Enron executives to and from trial.

To be eligible for a job as a school police officer, applicants must complete six months of basic training, just like any municipal officer in Texas. They then get an additional 12 to 14 weeks of school-based training.

Applicants also face an intense screening process: They are tested for drugs and given psychological and physical exams and written aptitude tests. They are subjected to a polygraph test and background investigation, including criminal checks and questioning of neighbors and family. In the polygraph, they're asked personal questions about drug use, sexual deviance, theft, and their use of social media.

"We want to make sure they don't have anything out there on the Web that could come back to embarrass us," explained Jimmy Dotson, chief of the school district police force. "If they can't go to court and be a credible witness, then we don't need them as a police officer."

Dotson, a Vietnam veteran, earned his bachelor's degree in criminal justice from the University of Houston and served in the Houston Police Department for 24 years, the last seven as assistant chief. After a stint as police chief in Chattanooga, Tenn., he returned to Houston in 2009 and took over the school district police department.

Having high-quality officers is paramount, he said. Applicants who have used drugs more dangerous than marijuana aren't likely to get hired, Dotson said. And if they say they have smoked marijuana hundreds of times - or within the last 10 years - that could bar them as well.

In Philadelphia, where officers are not screened for drug use, The Inquirer recently reported that the school police had hired an acknowledged crack addict. In September, after the officer was arrested for crack possession a second time, she showed up at a hearing in uniform.

In Houston, officers are subjected to random drug and alcohol testing after their hiring - something that doesn't happen in Philadelphia - and must take 20 to 40 hours of training per year.

Pay for an officer ranges from $38,042 to $58,964. In Philadelphia, where the cost of living is higher, school-officer pay ranges from $33,065 to $51,507.

At Wheatley High, a predominantly black school with about 1,000 students, Moore prides himself on his relationship with students.

To show them he cares, Moore started a $350 scholarship. The award recognizes Wheatley's most-improved athlete.

"A lot of these kids have nothing to eat," he said. "They're homeless. Some of them can't read. You have to reach under to find out why these kids are acting out. ...

"It goes beyond policing," he said. "You're a father figure. You're an uncle. You're everything."

The relationships pay off in other ways, too, he said.

He estimates that as many as one in five students could be associated with gangs. He and his partner make it their business to get to know the heads of the gangs.

"We say, You've got to control your boys inside this school. We're going to hold you responsible for what they do," Moore said.

The biggest challenge, he said, is developing patience.

"If you don't have patience," he said, "you'll find yourself going to prison."

Fully armed officers

It was dismissal time at Worthing High. A group of about 60 students had gathered across the street in a local shopping strip when a fight broke out. Gun shots pierced the air.

School police officer Jason Watson, 30, called for backup, then drew his gun.

But he never had to use it. Confronted by Watson, the shooter surrendered.

That incident, more than a year ago, was a rarity for the district.

An officer fired a gun only once in the last five years, and it was while the officer was off campus and off duty.

Officers hardly ever draw their guns on campus, school district records show. And they haven't been fired upon in recent memory, district police officials say.

Over the last five years, officers displayed their weapons on campus 16 times and off campus 10 times.

Most of the officers said they had never had a student try to get their weapons, and on those rare occasions, the student was not successful.

The officers use holsters designed to prevent an intruder from gaining access, Chief Dotson said. The guns are equipped with primary and secondary releases, and officers are required to train with the weapon once a year.

Unlike Philadelphia, which has walk-through metal detectors at its middle and high schools, Houston uses only handheld detectors on students, if administrators suspect they may be carrying a weapon.

In addition to guns, the officers also carry an expandable baton and foam that acts as pepper spray. Of the weapons, they have used the batons most often on campus - 34 times over five years, the district said. They have fired the foam seven times on campus.

The on-campus use of weapons over the last five years was greatest last school year, with 16 uses or displays.

Since September, police have handcuffed or restrained students 113 times. A new law that took effect Sept. 1 requires school police departments to keep a record of the times they handcuff and detain students.

Educators in Houston say they are not bothered by having an armed officer.

"You can have any intruder who comes on the campus," said Deirdre Sharkey, principal of Attucks Middle School. "Just for security and safety overall, I feel like the campus officer should have a gun."

Police as enforcers

The officers - accompanied by Reno, a Dutch shepherd specially trained to detect drugs, weapons, and explosives - stop at Room 303, a science class. It's one of two classrooms randomly chosen to be searched on this Monday afternoon at Lee High, a 1,600-student school in a hardscrabble neighborhood ridden with gang rivalry, notably the Southwest Cholos and MS-13 out of El Salvador.

"I need everybody to empty your pockets," school police officer Paul Crosser tells the class. "ID on your desks. Backpack. Everything out of your pocket."

"Everything?" one student asks, looking bewildered.

"Everything," Crosser says. "Cellphones, wallets, money, love letters, you name it."

Students file out of the room and line up against the wall. They aren't permitted to talk or use the restroom.

Into the room romps Reno. The dog leaps up on the long table, trotting from backpack to backpack and sniffing. Soon, he sits in front of one.

"That's an alert," calls out the K-9 officer Stephanie Clinton, searching the items to find the student's name.

Crosser, 48, orders the teen to come into the classroom.

With Reno by his backpack, the 16-year-old enters the classroom.

"Is this your stuff?" Clinton asks.

He nods.

"The canine alerted to it. Let the officers search you over there."

Crosser asks him to take off his socks and shoes, then frisks him.

Clinton doesn't find anything in the backpack and figures it may have been exposed to marijuana smoke recently.

"If you hang around with people who smoke, you need to tell the officers right now," Clinton warns.

"I hang around with people who smoke," the boy says.

"When?" Clinton asks.

"Last week," he says.

Crosser finishes searching.

"Go back outside, and you're not to discuss this with anybody," Crosser tells him.

Two other students also are called in for searches. The officers confiscate a lighter from one, examine his tattoo, and ask him about gangs.

The search uncovers no illegal drugs or paraphernalia, but it serves as a chilling warning to students on what can happen if they bring drugs or weapons into the school.

In Pennsylvania, police can use dogs to search students' personal belongings if there is "reasonable suspicion" of crime. Dogs can sniff lockers if students have been warned in advance.

Houston's practice wouldn't fly here.

"It's a violation of people's privacy, unless there is some suspicion that there's a problem with a particular group of students," said Harold Jordan, a community organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia.

Lee principal Xochitl Rodriguez-Davila supports the dog searches.

"If students make poor decisions and bring marijuana or things they shouldn't bring to school," she said, "then, for the safety of the rest of us here on campus, we need to be aware of it."

More than policing

School police officer Manuel Moctezuma arrives at Roberto Piñon's house.

The ninth grader had missed some or all of 17 days of school at Davis High this year, and it was only Oct 10. As Davis' truancy officer, Moctezuma needed to find out why. (In Philadelphia, school workers - not police - visit the homes of truant students.)

Maria Piñon, 24, Roberto's sister, answers the door.

"These are all the days we show him being absent, unexcused," Moctezuma says. "You need to let him know he can be fined. We're trying to avoid that."

Piñon says her brother is having a problem: "He was skipping classes because there were some guys bullying him and saying that they wanted to beat him up."

Moctezuma looks surprised. Roberto didn't report that to a police officer.

" 'Cause he said he didn't want to be a snitch," Piñon explained. "I think they were gang members."

Moctezuma tells Piñon to have her mother visit the school as soon as possible, "so we can talk to her and take care of that situation."

At the 1,600-student Davis High, principal Jaime Castaneda is so pleased with the work of school police officers that he has reached into his high school budget to pay for two additional officers. (The district pays for the first.)

He credits Moctezuma with helping shrink the school's dropout rate. It went from 18 percent in 2006 to 3.4 percent in 2010, the best in the district.

"Basically, they control the building," Castaneda said of his officers. "They enforce the law. They mentor. They counsel. They look at the whole kid."

At a recent assembly, the student body gave officers a standing ovation.

"To me, that was a real indication of what our school thinks of our police officers. It kind of made me jealous," Castaneda quipped.

The role of officers varies depending on the officer and the principal.

At some schools, officers help check in students who are late. They respond to profanity and minor disruptions in the classroom. Other cops get involved only in incidents deemed criminal activity.

All the officers patrol in and out of the schools and handle arrests.

Some days are slow; others are busy.

"On Friday, I didn't get to eat lunch until 3," said Rodolfo Silva, 38, an officer at Davis.

The school had several substitute teachers that day who called for assistance, he said. He also arrested a teenage trespasser, likely there to help a cousin fight, Silva said.

The former city cop moved to schools because he wanted to work with youth.

"I like being involved in kids' lives," Silva said, "trying to guide them the right way."

Silva was featured recently on CNN for his role as a youth boxing coach. One of his female prospects, whom he has trained since age 11, has qualified for the 2012 Olympics, the first to allow females to compete in boxing.

A Houston Golden Glove himself, Silva agreed to train the girl if she kept her grades up and behaved.

"She fell in love with the sport so much that she did a total 180 and graduated president of her class."

Nearly half his job at Davis involves mentoring, he said.

"We get a lot of knocks on that door from students asking for advice."

That morning, a female student sought out Silva's partner, Patrick Haywood, 39, for advice on an older man who had been sexually harassing her at work. Another asked how to become a police officer.

Senior Cristina Guerrero, 17, said students felt safer with the officers and enjoyed interacting with them.

"They're superfriendly," she said, "and they get along with us and laugh with us."

Back at school, Moctezuma learns that Roberto has shown up for class. Moctezuma calls him to the office. They are joined by Silva and assistant principal Brandy Johnston.

"I just came from your house," Moctezuma tells the teen. "Your sister gave us some information that I think we need to talk about."

Roberto denies he has been bullied.

Johnston sees that he has missed some classes repeatedly.

"What's going on in geography?" she asks. "Is somebody bothering you?"

"Nothing like that," Roberto says. "In those classes, I don't feel comfortable. I'm behind, and I can't catch up."

Roberto's mother, Juanita Trego, arrives. She confirms through an interpreter that Roberto has been bullied and that he sneaks out at night.

Principal Castaneda said later that he would get Roberto into a program for at-risk students.

When to arrest

The call came in: disruptive student throwing chairs.

"Yeah, this is Unit 8. I'm en route," officer Landrum Price, a math teacher-turned-school cop, says as he hurries out of the principal's conference room.

Taking two, sometimes three, steps at a time, he hurried to an upper floor of Attucks Middle School, where he found the sixth grader with an angry scowl.

"Son, why are you throwing chairs?"

The 11-year-old explained in a whiny voice that a much bigger seventh grader had been "bullying" him.

Price shook his head.

"But you were throwing chairs. You cannot be throwing chairs inside the school. That's unacceptable. Period."

Another teacher showed up and told Price that no one had been bullying the boy: "He just freaked out."

"All right, come on, son," Price said, putting his arm around the boy.

Price, 45, said he would turn the boy over to administrators for discipline.

Under a new law in Texas, sixth-grade students or younger can no longer be cited or arrested for disorderly conduct or other lesser offenses, only for assault and higher-level crimes.

For older students, discretion on arrests largely lies with the officer, in consultation with the district attorney's office and school administrators.

Sometimes, principals get upset when an officer won't arrest, but Chief Dotson tells the officers to hold firm.

"We always tell them, If you're going to err, err on the side of caution," he said. "We don't want to have to be the gateway to the criminal justice system for our students."

Before officers make an arrest, they call the district attorney's office and ask if the charge will be accepted.

In Philadelphia, school cops call city police, who decide whether to take a student into custody, though the district attorney has the ultimate say in whether charges will be filed.

Houston officers use arrests in cases of aggravated assault, robbery, and other serious offenses. For minor incidents, such as disruption of class, officers often issue students a citation.

"Disruption of school activities," for example, carries a $380 fine, similar to the penalty for running a red light.

Officers can also issue citations for offenses like disorderly conduct. A judge can then dismiss them or require community service or probation. School police can also issue written warnings.

At Attucks, a 450-student school in a largely poor, black neighborhood known as Sunnyside, few incidents this year have resulted in arrest.

As of Oct. 11, Price had made three and issued one citation. Two were outstanding bench warrants. In the third, a disruptive eighth grader was arrested for cursing out a teacher and then evading Price when the officer came to assist. The citation was for fighting.

Last year, he arrested nine and issued about 30 citations, he said. The year before, his first at Attucks, was the most difficult. He had five felonies in one week, he recalled.

"It has been a tough battle," he said.

The protocol on arrests is clear, Price and Attucks principal Sharkey said.

Assaults and drugs are "nonnegotiables," said Sharkey. They result in arrest.

"Pretty much when you get into criminal mischief," she said, "Officer Price calls the D.A. to see if it is an allowable arrest."

Who's in charge?

At Yates, Kiera Turner, 18, is telling Officer Demby that she has been threatened. "I can't go back," she says.

"You're correct," he replies.

"It's like I'm running," Turner tells him.

The teen left her home in Louisiana because of differences with her family. She came to Houston to stay with a friend of her cousin's.

But now, that living situation has grown menacing, she confided to school counselor Temeka Jeffery, who summoned Demby for help.

Demby calls Turner's grandmother in Baton Rouge to see if Turner can return home. The teen cries. She doesn't want to go back, she tells him.

Demby hands the phone to school counselor Jeffery and rubs Turner's shoulder.

"Your grandmother says you're a hardhead," he tells her in a low, soft voice, tapping her forehead. "Is that true?"

Demby suggests a homeless shelter. She says no.

"We've got to get you out of here and make a fresh start," Demby says.

Jeffery said she was relieved to be able to call on Demby.

"It's always great to hear two sides," she said. "The counselors are the warm and fuzzy. The officers are cutting-edge, straight to the point."

While helping Turner, Demby was summoned by another administrator enrolling a student from a disciplinary school. The administrator wanted the boy, 15, to hear the school rules from Demby.

The teen had been in trouble for "excessive fighting" at his former school and has said he knows gang members.

The teen's grandmother, Patricia Graham, made a face at her grandson's admission.

"Please don't get involved with that. Please," Demby told the boy. "I'm going to do my job. I just want you to know: I will communicate with your grandmother."

He tells the teen he will write him a ticket if he catches him smoking pot at the local Burger King after school. On the second offense, he says, he'll lock the teen up.

"We're trying to be sure you're successful," Demby said. "The only way you're going to be successful is if you stay out of the mix."

Graham said she was grateful for Demby's warning.

"There's a lot of stuff going on," she said, "and he seems to be really concerned."

Special Report: The districts new leaders, city and school police, and others are tackling the problem. Violence is still too high, officials say, but some steps are working.

By Susan Snyder

The school day was well under way when the fight between two boys broke out on the fourth floor of Overbrook High School: A 17-year-old walking to class was punched multiple times by a younger boy.

At first, the unarmed school police officers who intervened didn't think the incident was serious enough to summon city police - they were planning to classify it as a fight or disorderly conduct.

But the school nurse called an ambulance because she believed the victim's nose was broken. The emergency call triggered notification of city police, who have the power to make arrests, and they coded the incident as an aggravated assault.

The Nov. 29 fracas is typical of the violence plaguing Philadelphia public schools, as documented in The Inquirer's seven-part series, "Assault on Learning." And it shows how intractable the problem can be, even as the School District's newly installed leadership confronts the severity of the situation and has begun taking a variety of steps to accurately document violent incidents and curtail them.

For Pedro Ramos, the new chairman of the School Reform Commission, making schools safe places to learn is "a threshold issue."

"Without it," he said, "you don't get to anything else. Safety will determine whether people even come through your door."

Some school and city officials believe that Overbrook - patrolled by eight unarmed school officers as the first line of defense, with two armed city police officers often on the premises and on call - can serve as a model for how city and school police can work together to improve safety, while allowing for discretion as to whether to make an arrest.

Everett Gillison, Mayor Nutter's chief of staff who oversees policing in the city, spoke especially of the rapport the city officers have forged with some Overbrook students as something to be emulated in other schools where city police are deemed necessary.

Yet even the level of policing at Overbrook and rapport-building has not stopped assaults such as the one that sent the bloodied teen to the hospital. It was one of two recorded at the school that day - and in both incidents school police were the first responders with city police summoned later.

By design, city police "don't engage too much," said Overbrook principal Ethelyn Payne Young, generally staying on the five-story school's first floor, tracking truants among other tasks. "If they get out there too much, they're mandated by the role to make arrests."

Test-drive phase

The Inquirer's series documented more than 30,000 serious incidents in the schools over five years, and violence still flares in the 146,000-student district, public officials agree.

The district has turned four of its most violent high schools - Audenried, Olney East and West, and Gratz - over to private operators and no longer counts them in its statistics, which it admitted had lacked credibility. As The Inquirer's series showed, schools were underreporting serious incidents, some of which had resulted in arrests.

The School District is taking several steps to report violence more reliably, but is still in the test-drive phase.

This fall, the district changed its crime-reporting system, vesting authority in its 436-member school police force rather than principals, and on Friday, began year-to-date postings of serious incidents for each school on its website.

"It's transparency," Chief Inspector Myron Patterson, who oversees the school police, said in an interview Monday. Posting will allow outside parties to more easily monitor whether all incidents are being recorded.

How to classify an incident is still subject to broad discretion - the Overbrook fracas is an example - with real impact on school statistics. An assault is considered a serious incident, and too many confirmed arrests for violence can give a school the stigma of appearing on the state's "persistently dangerous" list.

Overbrook came off the list for the first time this fall, based on a drop in such arrests during the 2010-11 school year.

Disorderly-conduct charges aren't viewed as seriously, but result in arrest, while a fight may simply lead to discipline meted out by the school.

The incident at Overbrook was eventually coded as an assault because of the severity of the injury.

As Ramos helps reshape the SRC - four of its five members have been appointed in recent months - he and fellow commissioners have created a special committee to focus on safety across a broad spectrum of issues, including policing.

"The focus on just the police part of it is an element, but it's not enough," said Ramos, a lawyer. "It's clear to me that the new SRC wants to see a clear, comprehensive, well-articulated vision and strategy around school climate and safety."

The district also has a new acting superintendent, Leroy Nunery II, appointed after Arlene C. Ackerman was ousted in the summer. During her three-year watch, Ackerman was accused of minimizing school violence, including racial attacks on Asian students at South Philadelphia High School that led to federal intervention.

"My watchword has been to execute in terms of school safety," Nunery said in an interview last week. "We can lay out all the great plans . . . but if you don't execute each and every step and try to correct whatever flaws are in the system, talking to each other from a planning standpoint won't get us where we need to be."

This month, the state appointed a safety watchdog to advocate for victims of violence in the city's schools - a position reinstated this summer after being vacant and unfunded by the legislature for more than two years.

Changes also are planned for how school police officers are screened. Gillison, the mayor's chief of staff, said Wednesday that an upgrade in training would be recommended. Also being looked at as a possibility is an expansion in the deployment of city police officers in schools - an idea Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey broached in April, days after the series ran.

The Inquirer's investigation showed that on any given day, 25 students, teachers, or other staffers were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or became victims of other violent crimes.

Additional stories explored other safety-related problems - malfunctioning security cameras that aren't monitored, poorly developed school plans to improve the most dangerous schools, assaults downgraded to lesser offenses, and a poorly screened and undertrained School District police force that resulted, in one case, in the hiring of an admitted drug addict.

On the first day of school this year, that officer appeared at a court hearing on a drug charge wearing her police uniform. She has been laid off.

Ramos said the series provided "a good exploration of a lot of the issues you will have to get through to get a good comprehensive strategy." But, he added, "it's really hard to find a silver bullet."

Even before the series was published - but after The Inquirer's investigation was well under way - Nutter and Ackerman appointed a blue-ribbon commission on school safety. The creation of the panel followed the attacks at South Philadelphia High, the impetus for the newspaper's investigation.

A draft report by that commission obtained by The Inquirer in September contained many of the same findings as the newspaper's series, including an inconsistent crime-reporting system.

With the state's appointment of Kelley Hodge, a former prosecutor, as the new safety watchdog, victims of crime will once again have an advocate in the city's public schools.

Jack Stollsteimer, a former assistant U.S. attorney who previously held the position, was cautiously optimistic. He had been highly critical of the district's handling of violence during his tenure.

"It should make a difference in that there is at least somebody watching this issue besides The Philadelphia Inquirer," Stollsteimer said upon hearing of the new appointment.

Disciplinary issues

The district also is taking a "deeper look" at its Comprehensive Student Assistance Process, its main intervention to stave off students' deteriorating grades and behavior, said Nunery. The series found the process in many cases was little more than paper shuffling and enrolled nearly a third of the district's students, even though there weren't enough resources to provide help.

The district has had discussions with juvenile court officials and the Department of Human Services to figure out ways to better coordinate services and ensure students are actually getting help, Nunery said.

In addition, Gillison said he planned to recommend to the district that it increase screening requirements for school police and upgrade training, including requiring them to attend the police academy for 32 weeks, as city police do.

The Inquirer found that more than a dozen of the district's officers had arrest records, and many of them also faced disciplinary issues on the job. School officers are given only four weeks of training - as opposed to city police, who must graduate from the police academy's 32-week program - and are not drug-tested or psychologically screened.

The district will begin more intensive background investigations of potential hires with the next new class of recruits, Patterson said. As part of the screening, investigators from the office of school safety will go into the applicant's neighborhood and interview acquaintances to determine if the applicant is suited for the job, he said.

The school police department's representative on the hiring panel also will make sure appropriate questions are asked of candidates to see if they are suitable for the job, Patterson said.

Drug-testing potential hires will be an issue for union negotiations, Patterson said. The current contract expires in 2013.

However, Michael Lodise, president of the officers union, said there's no reason to wait. He said drug testing was needed and he is ready to sit down and work out an agreement with the district.

Patterson said that the district also would rely heavily on new legislation that requires current and prospective employees to disclose previous arrests.

As for training, the district this fall began giving 20 to 30 officers per week additional training in district policies, weapon scanning, handcuffing procedures, and other areas, Patterson said. It had hoped to train more officers this year, but had to scale back because of budget cuts.

"We're working with the dynamic of limited resources," he said.

The district recently announced another round of layoffs as it works to close a $629 million budget gap.

Asked whether he supported having school officers attend the police academy, Ramos said that while better screening was "common sense" and more training was desirable, he's not sure police academy training is the right kind.

"Before you decide on that tactic, you should have a [safety] strategy," he said.

Patterson's department also "reinforced" its policy to require school personnel to monitor safety cameras in schools where the district made a significant investment in technology.

The blue-ribbon commission's report has not been released, but some of its findings - such as the change in the reporting system - already have been implemented. The final plan will be released within a couple of months after review by the new School Reform Commission, Nunery said.

The SRC also designated one of its four new standing committees to focus on safety and school climate. Ramos said the attention should make it clear that the district considers the issue of primary importance.

Commission member Lorene Cary, a novelist and creative-writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, will head the safety committee, which will convene early next year. In a recent interview, she said the committee at first would focus on "prevention" and finding ways to make schools more attractive and interesting to students.

"I don't want to say that straight-up security and school policing isn't part of the issue," she said. "But I want to look at other things that we can effect very quickly."

Nunery said the district needed help from the community: "We can't do it ourselves, or only by ourselves."

Kay Kyungsun Yu, chair of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which released a report and recommendations in the aftermath of the South Philadelphia High case, said the district's new leadership had been more open to working on solutions. District leadership already has accepted the commission's guidance in securing help from other agencies, she said.

"It was nice to be able to know that all the findings and recommendations contained in the report were being taken seriously by the district," she said.

Armed officers?

Shortly after the school-violence series concluded in April, Ramsey and Nutter said through a spokesman that they were exploring putting armed police officers in some city schools as part of a comprehensive strategy.

"There's no question, that's where they'd like to go," Mark McDonald, the mayor's press secretary, said at that time.

Both McDonald and Karima Zedan, Ramsey's spokeswoman, said discussions were "preliminary" and "in the earliest of stages." At the time, they noted that officers already were assigned to patrol areas in and around schools.

"This would be an expansion of services," Zedan said at the time, "and collaboration between the district and department."

Since then, Nutter and Ramsey have been emphasizing that armed city officers already have a significant presence in the schools and it's been so for decades.

The current setup was put in place when Ramsey arrived four years ago, they said at a news conference last month. A total of 16 officers are stationed at some of the district's 249 schools, though they are attached to police districts and at times perform other police work. An additional 24 are responsible for multiple school buildings and split their time. Forty more work as backup school officers, helping with arrival and dismissal and addressing truancy.

Nutter said the district and city "will collaboratively make any other plans . . . on whether the program will be expanded on an as-needed basis."

How that expansion would occur, what model it would follow, and how it would be paid for are all questions that need to be explored by the city and School District, Gillison said in an interview last week.

"We are in a tight budget situation," he noted.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, was surprised - but happy - to hear that some city police are based in schools. He recalled having officers at University City High School in the 1970s, but then losing them to budget cuts.

"They were people the kids could trust and depend on," he said. "As we raise our kids, we teach them police officers are our friends."

Shelly Yanoff, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, at first said she was surprised to hear that armed officers were stationed in schools. But upon hearing how they were deployed, she said she was fine with it as long as school officials maintained control of safety and there was no uniform policy on deploying officers.

"It's not a policy that has them controlling school discipline," she said. "They should not be an intrusive presence. School people should be in charge of their climate."

Hands on at Overbrook

City officers vary in the time they spend inside schools and at times are pulled for other assignments. For example, the day after the Overbrook assault, the city police officer assigned to the school was redeployed to focus on Occupy Philadelphia protesters.

"They are in when they have to be. They're out when they have to be out," said Sal Fede, an administrative sergeant in the 19th Police District, which includes Overbrook.

The goal during the school year is to keep them there all the time, Fede said.

Commanding officers at the 19th District say Officers Gregory West and Andrew G. Prosser, who are stationed at Overbrook, are the most "hands-on" in that district and probably the city.

They have an office in the 1,158-student building and have developed positive relationships with many of the students.

The 19th District also has officers stationed at Lamberton, a K-12 building, and starting this year at Beeber Middle School.

West said he was assigned to Overbrook in 2001. Prosser has been there four years.

Prosser said he spent about 80 percent of his workday inside Overbrook. He estimates he is asked to respond to calls outside the building about three times a week.

"Our situation is so unique that [school administrators and school police officers] are always asking for us to come to their school to set up," Prosser said.

Prosser, 44, a native of West Philadelphia and a School District graduate, begins his day at 19th District headquarters, where he picks up his equipment and checks in.

Like other city police officers, he carries a gun, a taser, pepper spray, baton, utility knife, and two radios - one on the school police band and one linked to city police communications.

He said he had not had to use his weapons inside the school building.

Prosser and West work with School District police officers to patrol around the school at arrival and dismissal. They watch for crowds where trouble may brew and shoo students from hangouts, such as the store across the street from Overbrook.

Once school starts, they go inside and spend most of their day on the first floor in or around their office unless they are called upon by school police to intervene.

City police weren't notified of the second assault case on Nov. 29 - a boy who slapped his girlfriend - until more than two hours after the incident, when the girl decided she wanted to make a complaint.

By that time, the boy had already been suspended and sent home by school administrators.

If charges are to be filed, School District police turn the students over to Prosser and West, an "exchange of custody," they call it.

Through Nov. 29 of this school year, Prosser made 27 arrests including disorderly conducts and assaults, all noted on his desk calendar. (West, his partner, had been on leave from his school post this fall, but returned Dec. 2.)

When Prosser makes an arrest, he does the paperwork in his Overbrook office, then takes the student to headquarters for processing.

Young, the school principal, said she liked having the officers as "role models."

"I'm the last wave," said Prosser, an officer for nearly 16 years, formerly on the narcotics strike force. "If you have to come see me, there's a serious issue."

Students question whether city police officers are needed inside school, but aren't opposed to them.

"It's not really a problem unless you're a problem," said Wali Davis-Grant, 17, senior class president.

Senior Nashai Berry-Hill, 18, sees school officers frequently in the building, but rarely sees Prosser and West: "We don't see the real police."

But Prosser has forged relationships with students whom he has encountered, such as the 17-year-old who unfairly got caught in a hall sweep.

"He told me to chill, talked to me. I chilled," said the teen, who now asks Prosser about police work.

Another student popped his head into Prosser's office - Prosser almost always keeps the door open to make students feel welcome.

"I just came to say what's up," the teen said.

"OK," Prosser said. "How are you feeling? You good? You apologize to everybody?"

The teen nodded. Prosser had arrested him for disorderly conduct.

Tyreese Ramsey, 18, a 2011 Overbrook graduate, greeted Prosser on the steps of Overbrook, his girlfriend and new baby in tow. He first met Prosser when he was having an altercation with a teacher and Prosser came to intervene.

"He ain't like the other ones, all snapping and stuff," Ramsey said. "He started talking. I thought I can be cool with this one."

West and Prosser give out an award to the most improved student each year. Former recipient Shakeerah Plummer, 20, now a junior English education major at Lincoln University, said she first met West when she got into an altercation, and he talked with her.

"From there on out, he checked on me. 'Miss Plummer. I'm watching you,' " recalled Plummer, now an academic standout who runs a mentoring program.

It made a difference. Students took West and Prosser more seriously than school police, she said.

"Everyone plays their own part," she said. "But at the end of the day, a police officer is a police officer."

A close watch

Senior Montez Wilmer said the school seemed calmer this year.

It wasn't that way last spring when he suffered a broken eye socket during an altercation with a boy outside the lunchroom. Wilmer and his parents were upset that the school coded the incident a disorderly conduct rather than an assault. School officials at the time said Wilmer suffered his injuries because he slipped and fell during the scuffle; Wilmer and his family contended it was when the other student punched him.

Wilmer, 18, said he had put the incident behind him.

"I just wanted to get my stuff together for my senior year so I can graduate and go to college," Wilmer said.

He comes to school on time and played for the football team.

But problems with other students loom. At a school safety team meeting of which Prosser is a part, Young said she had complaints from neighbors about loitering students. Prosser said he would ask for extra patrols in that area.

Concern was heightened the November day the teen was punched in the face. Rumors were swirling about an irate parent waiting in a red jeep outside the school to attack students at dismissal. City and school police blanketed the area, pushing students along home.

In his patrol car, Prosser followed two large groups five blocks from school. When they stopped, he put his lights on and parked.

"This is where the problem starts. So I'm going to sit right here," he said.

He gave them five minutes to disperse, then walked toward them - which sent them scurrying.

"Thank you, sir!" said an older resident, wearing an Eagles cap. "It's good to have somebody here to chase them."