Annapolis High School has taken a couple on the chin in recent weeks, no question about it.
There was the Monday morning fracas in which the fellows from Newtowne 20 and Eastport Terrace came to school and promptly began finishing the unpleasantness they had begun at the mall that preceding Saturday.
Two anxious days on Riva Road ensued, as the cops nosed around, an armada of bureaucrats arrived from the Board of Education to help patrol the halls and rumors of additional violence and even gunplay spread through the student body like wildfire.
All this, even as WMAR-TV was airing "America at Risk," an hour-long documentary detailingthe lives of young Annapolitans caught in the web of drugs and violence spun by bad breaks, parental indolence and their own pathologicalnarcissism.
That one of the subjects was an admirable young man who'd resisted the lure of the evil streets, or that the young woman involved had found the resolve to begin the climb upward, seemed smallcomfort in light of the show's clear message: hostile, violent, unguided, desensitized, drug-infested souls are out there in ever-increasing numbers, and their presence bodes ill for our city, for our school and for society at large.
The urge to defend one's own is powerful, so let me succumb. There are hundreds of Annapolis High kids fromall segments of the community who are sophisticated, well-intentioned, achievement-oriented and altogether admirable.
No one has proven that the troubled youths depicted in the film are any more indicative of the whole than our National Honor Society kids, our chorus and orchestra members who performed Mozart's "Spatzenmesse" in concert last November, or the two academic hot-shots we packed off to Dartmouthlast fall.
Our teachers are not hiding under their desks. Qualityeducation is very much available to those who want it, and the "siege mentality," as yet, manifests itself more emotionally than physically.
But the reality in our schools grows more stark each day. Violence is on the upswing, and the possibility of something really bad happening is becoming less remote. With 17 weapon confiscations and 21reported assaults in Anne Arundel schools in January alone, the conclusion is both unsettling and inescapable.
Once again, it's up to the schools to do what they can to
clean up society's mess. As some of my compatriots noted in frustration after the fight, we get intoeducation to teach kids about the subjects we know and love and windup being expected to stem the tide of social anarchy and teach in our spare time.
But if not us, who? Parents? Not of these kids.
Like it or not, it's in our lap. To yearn for the day when schools were for learning, guidance counselors just got you into college and theschool psychologist merely administered the occasional IQ Test, is to yearn for a day that will not return any time soon. That wasn't Donna Reed or Ozzie Nelson I saw greeting those kids when they returned from school.
And because the problem is in our lap, it must be dealt with forthrightly and unambiguously, before it grows in size and intensity. Violence simply has no place in schools and its perpetrators must be excised immediately from the mainstream. They must be isolated, dealt with, and, if need be, cut loose.
The "Boys will be boys," or "How can we give up on these kids now" or "Aren't we violatingthe principle of equity?" litany will no longer suffice, and it's time we acknowledged it. When pistol-packing, dope-dealing purveyors ofbrutality show up on a teacher's doorstep disguised as students, thehand-wringing "kids as victims" rhetoric will simply not wash.
But, as every teacher knows, direct action is hard to come by in the education community. Board of Education dispositions tend to set disciplinary policy in the same manner that weather vanes determine the weather. With the path of least resistance enshrined as the principal paradigm of policy-making, and a droning mantra of simplistic slogans substituting for meaningful discourse, the board simply moves trouble-makers around from school to school until they get arrested, quit in frustration or finally do something bad enough to jolt even a "metacognition" specialist back to reality, however briefly.
On the otherhand, what can we do that is within reason? However tempting it might be to deal with the problem by taking the gun away from a kid who brings one to school and promptly shooting him with it, there are probably some legal ramifications there to be avoided.
At the very least, a kid who brings any kind of gun capable of doing any kind of harm to another human being should disappear immediately from Anne Arundel County public schools. Gone. Out. Goodbye. Done. Written off. History.
And a stringent, uncompromising, bureaucrat-proof policy mustbe adopted countywide to deal with thugs who habitually communicate with their fists. This business of beating someone's face into whipped cream on Monday and reappearing with impunity on Thursday after a three-day suspension/vacation has got to go.
Students caught smoking in school for the first time immediately get packed off to four anti-smoking classes which they must attend -- no questions asked.
Couldn't a similar program be enacted to deal with school violence? Theprincipal of MacArthur Middle School seems to be having some successwith a conflict resolution program. At the very least, shouldn't that be extended systemwide? I mean, if forced to choose between a little second-hand smoke and a fist in the face, give me a brush with lungcancer every time.
But an effective program to combat violence inschools will require backbone, sufficient resources and a clear understanding of what's really going on in the trenches. And, in this county and in this state, that means we've got a real problem.
There are powers-that-be at the board who, after sizing up the array of problems we face, respond with plans to cut our allotment of administrators and guidance counselors. At the same time, they continue to flushlarge sums of money down the fiscal toilet for the Maryland School Performance Program, superfluous personnel and pet programs of no conceivable use to anyone who actually carries their books into a school house 180 days a year. If these priorities stick, we might as well name Dr. Kevorkian as the new superintendent.
At Annapolis High, thefuror over students wearing hats has subsided. Scores of hats were confiscated and the issue of head wear ceased to be, once students sensed administrative resolve. See? We've already rid ourselves of one kind of
hood. Now it's time to go after the other.
Phil Greenfield is a teacher at Annapolis High School.