Maryland school officials labeled five Baltimore middle and high schools "persistently dangerous" yesterday, making the state one of only seven in the nation to apply the federal designation to any of its schools.
All five schools were on the list last year and did not make enough progress in reducing student suspensions to get off the list.
A few state school board members expressed concern before the vote that the designation puts a harsh label not only on a school but its community. The federal government allows states to define a dangerous school - and Maryland has one of the broadest descriptions in the nation.
"I think this part of [the No Child Left Behind law] is a real problem because of the difficulty it creates for a local community," said Blair G. Ewing, a new member of the board from Montgomery County. He said the federal education law applies a pejorative term to describe a school without offering any assistance in resolving the problem.
"This labeling of schools doesn't fix anything," said Dunbar Brooks, the new board president.
Despite such concerns, the state board voted to apply the designation to Calverton Middle School, Thurgood Marshall Middle School, Dr. Roland Patterson Academy, Dr. W.E.B DuBois Senior High School and the Liberal Arts Academy at Walbrook Campus.
As a result of the designation, students in those schools have the right to transfer to another school if they wish. Fewer than 200 city students took advantage of the option last year.
The school at Walbrook has been closed by the city, and both Thurgood Marshall and Roland Patterson will be closed at the end of next school year.
Hamilton Middle School and Reginald F. Lewis High School were put on probationary status yesterday, meaning they will get the label next year if conditions do not improve. The Academy for College and Career Exploration, a small new high school, was taken off probation because of improvements there.
For a school to get on the list, 2 1/2 percent of its student body must have been suspended for arson, possessing a weapon or drugs, assaulting a teacher or other student, or sexual assault.
The number of incidents at the five schools varied from as many as 21 to as few as six. Walbrook had 10 incidents last year that were counted under the persistently dangerous category. They were six drug offenses, an assault on an adult and three attacks on students, city officials said.
At Thurgood Marshall Middle School, there were six incidents; five involved weapons other than a gun. The sixth was listed only as an attack on a student.
Baltimore's new school chief executive officer, Andres Alonso, said yesterday that he plans to focus on school safety and suspensions during the next school year. He pointed out he has said he will refuse to sign off on any long-term suspension until he had heard the facts of the case.
"I don't think schools can move an instructional program if students and staff don't feel safe," he said. "I am going to pay a lot of attention to this."
Alonso acknowledged that schools can play with the statistics to avoid the designation. "There are opportunities for gaming here," he said. In a year, he told the board, he hopes the panel will be celebrating that there are no persistently dangerous schools in the state.
Chuck Buckler, the state's director of student services and alternative programs, said some schools on the list have made progress. He said he had hoped that Calverton Middle would make it off the list. "They got a principal who is fantastic and she is changing things, but she can't do it overnight," he said.
Maryland has one of the strictest regulations about what constitutes a dangerous school. Some states decided that a school would have to have a certain number of firearm violations in a year, but do not include fighting among students or sexual assault, according to a report by Education Sector, a think tank.
Last year, only 46 of 95,000 schools in the nation were designated as persistently dangerous - six of them Maryland, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Only New York and Pennsylvania had more schools on the list.
"It has been so inconsistently implemented, with some school districts taking it seriously and some not, that there isn't good data," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, an education policy group that tracks how states are implementing No Child Left Behind.
liz.bowie@baltsun.com