For a new principal, picking the school's uniform seemed like a simple decision: The students at Homeland Security Academy in West Baltimore would wear royal blue polos and khaki pants. Then fights started breaking out in the first days of the school year.
Blue is the color associated with the Crips gang. Members of the rival Bloods, who wear red, weren't having it.
"It's all because of this color," 17-year-old Brittany Harris said one day this fall while her school, part of the Walbrook high school complex, was under lockdown. "When they see you with this color, they try to fight you."
The principal quickly offered the option for students to wear yellow shirts instead.
In a year in which violence has been front and center in Baltimore, the city's public schools have been central to the debate.
And the dynamics surrounding school violence in the city are changing, with attacks spurred by the growth of organized gangs - combined with a systemwide reshaping of high schools that's forced rival territorial groups to share buildings. Evolving technology is also a factor: Students now use their cell phone cameras to videotape school fights and post the footage online. Threatening messages that they exchange on teen-oriented Web sites spill over into school conflicts.
As city schools chief Andres Alonso tries to reform a troubled system, ensuring order is a necessary first step. Within the past month, he offered to install metal detectors in any middle or high school that wants them. Forty schools have asked for the devices so far, and Alonso said he expects more requests.
"The premise of a school is it needs to be a safe haven," Alonso said. "There are so many children who start out on the right path and become perpetrators or victims of incidents that make instruction an afterthought."
Teachers and administrators face monumental challenges trying to keep the violence of city streets outside school walls, and trying to educate children who in many cases are traumatized by the violence they've witnessed. In an environment where the color of a uniform can prompt fighting, violence easily spills from neighborhoods into classrooms, and back again.
On Oct. 9, children at James McHenry Elementary were locked in their classrooms after shots were fired in the parking lot. On Nov. 29, a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Garrison Middle was fatally stabbed while out of school on suspension, a victim of street violence. On Dec. 4, nine students were charged with brutally beating a woman on a public bus as they rode home from Robert Poole Middle.
Assault on teachers
Incidents leading to arrests by school police were up 26 percent in the first two months of this academic year compared with the same period last year, from 172 to 216. The majority of violent incidents were in a handful of buildings, among them Walbrook, where a boy from Homeland Security set a girl's hair on fire Oct. 3. On Halloween, a 15-year-old girl stabbed a 17-year-old girl in the chest at Forest Park High after the older girl threw chalk at her.
Sometimes, violent incidents go unreported.
Brad Fields, a math and technology teacher at Dr. Samuel L. Banks High, pressed charges after a student assaulted him in his classroom Sept. 27. He said teachers who are assaulted at his school don't always report the incidents, and he wanted the problem known. "There's a whole lot more of this than what's documented publicly," he said. "Teachers don't even tell their spouses. Our spouses worry about our safety."
According to school system data, there have been three teacher assaults at Banks so far this academic year. But the assault against Fields, in which criminal charges were filed, was not among the incidents listed in the data, and officials could not explain why. Another recent incident in which a student allegedly threw a chair at a teacher also was not included.
In Fields' case, the teacher used his cell phone to take pictures of students roaming the halls during class time, so he could turn them in to the school office. After school that day, he said, a student in the photos came into his classroom and tried to steal his phone.
Fields said the most important thing administrators can do to prevent violence is "having hallways clear of students who are not attending class."
A common disruption is arson. So far this school year, which is halfway over, there have been 55 reported incidents of arson or attempted arson, compared with 170 for all of last year. While projecting a decline in arsons for the school year, officials are investigating fires at the Walbrook complex and Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High where the buildings weren't evacuated.
Students who feel unsafe going to and from school carry weapons for protection. A Homeland Security student who was suspended for carrying a knife, 17-year-old Donald Green, said: "That wasn't even for school. That was for the outside world, neighborhood stuff." A second boy at the school showed a reporter the mouth guard he keeps in his pocket, just in case.
Armed for school
Tashiana Minor, 14, who attends Heritage High in the Lake Clifton complex, worries that students who don't feel safe walking through their neighborhoods unarmed will stop coming to school if there are metal detectors. Classmate Kelly Anthony, 16, added, "We need books and stuff more than metal detectors."
Kelly said she was in a school fight recently where the other girl pulled a knife. She said many fights are caused by petty gossip, as students distraught over dysfunctional home lives look for a way to release their anger.
Conflicts often begin brewing online and continue in school or at school events. That was the case last month when 22 girls were arrested in a melee outside M&T; Bank Stadium after the annual football game between rival high schools Polytechnic Institute and City College. The brawl stemmed from nasty messages exchanged on the social networking site MySpace.
When violence or other inappropriate behavior occurs in school, students record and post it on the video-sharing site YouTube. The site contains footage of boys fighting in the bathroom at Thurgood Marshall High and students at Mergenthaler trying to throw a girl out of a window.
Labels and reports
As a result of the provision in the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to label violent schools as "persistently dangerous," teachers and administrators nationwide report being discouraged from reporting violent incidents. The phenomenon is particularly acute in Maryland because the law leaves it to states to define what a persistently dangerous school is, and it's easier to be labeled such a school here than in most other states. All of Maryland's persistently dangerous schools are in Baltimore.
Alonso said dishonest reporting won't be tolerated: "If I have any kind of evidence that a violent incident is not reported, a principal will lose his or her job. The integrity of the system is at stake. Every decision has to be based on what is good for children. It cannot be based on what is good for the reputation of a school or the reputation of an adult."
The system's efforts in recent years to break up large high schools and close schools with extra space have led to many arrangements where multiple schools operate under the same roof. As students from different neighborhoods interact, gang and territorial disputes intensify.
A culture clash between New Era and Southside academies in Cherry Hill led to a false bomb threat earlier this month that emptied the building so students could fight each other on the football field. Eleven were arrested.
At New Era, one of six independently run "innovation" high schools in the city, D'Andre Martin, 16, was torn between academics and peer pressure. The adults at the school made him want to do well. "They used to call us scholars," he recalled.
But outside class, D'Andre said, students were taunted by their peers at Southside, a neighborhood high school. Southside thought New Era was "uppity," so D'Andre and his friends stuck together. One day in October, that loyalty cost him.
D'Andre said his friend, in the midst of getting suspended for fighting, asked him to get his things out of his locker. D'Andre obliged - and got caught in possession of the gun his friend was storing there.
"A lot of us, we ain't bad," said D'Andre, now enrolled in a class at Baltimore City Community College for students on long-term suspension. "Where we from, if you try to be too good, too nice, you get picked on."
The desire to fit in is a major reason that students join gangs and get into trouble. "You either in a gang or you a nerd," said Donald Green, who's in the same class as D'Andre at BCCC.
A woman trying to help D'Andre, Donald and dozens of others to escape the culture of violence is Nzinga Oneferua-El, 55. She became involved in anti-violence advocacy after her fiance's murder in 1992. Last year, her best friend was killed in connection with her grandson's drug activity.
'Alive and free'
At the BCCC class for suspended students and at Lake Clifton, Oneferua-El runs a violence-prevention program called Street Soldiers. Based in San Francisco, Street Soldiers has a mission to keep youth "alive and free" - that is, alive and not incarcerated. It says violence is a disease that can be cured by replacing rules of the street with "rules of living." The first rule of the street: "Thou shalt not snitch." The first rule of living: "There is nothing more valuable than an individual's life. (You can never kill an enemy.)"
At Lake Clifton, students from both Heritage and Doris M. Johnson High pack a weekly after-school session of Street Soldiers. And 51 students are enrolled in an elective class at Heritage, where they read passages from books like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Strength To Love and watch clips from movies like Boyz n the Hood. They also vent a lot.
On a recent Tuesday, Oneferua-El asked the 35 students present how many of them had lost someone close to them to murder. Nearly every hand went up.
She asked for another show of hands: How many had lost a family member? And another: How many had lost a friend? Several students raised their hands twice.
"I've been through so much," said one of them, Jo Juan Edwards, 15. Acting out of grief, she said, "I got in so much trouble, got in so many fights, it's ridiculous." Until she was pressured into joining Street Soldiers last year, she said, she carried "mad weapons" with her to school: a razor and multiple knives.
She's come a long way since then. Three of her cousins who attend Southside were in the big fight against New Era a few weeks ago. Afterward, Jo Juan gave them copies of a card listing the Street Soldiers rules for living, hoping they might come around, too.
sara.neufeld@baltsun.com
Comment on this story on The Sun education blog, www.baltimoresun.com/InsideEd.
Violence in Baltimore's schools
Forty schools have requested walkthrough metal detectors so far.
Incidents leading to arrests by school police were up 26 percent in the first two months of this academic year compared with the same period in 2006, from 172 to 216.
The most common incident types in the first two months of the school year were: student assault (120 cases), theft under $500 (80 cases), destruction of property (59 cases), breaking and entering (52 cases), and possession of a deadly weapon (52 cases).
[Source: Baltimore public schools]