It’s so predictable. Once again, students at the county’s highest poverty, highest minority schools said they don’t feel safe at school in an annual student survey. And once again, the problem is the starkest at the system’s Equity II Plus schools, which have the highest poverty and minority student rates in the county.
At four of the district’s six equity high schools, only a third or fewer of the students say they feel safe. Ditto for half the equity middle schools. At present, we don’t have an equity high school or middle school in the system at which more than 47 percent of the kids say they even feel safe. That’s beyond pathetic. This is the very group of kids who most need a stable school environment.
The prevailing attitude on the school board right now about this issue is one of dismissal. My jaw almost hit the floor a few months ago when school board chairman Joe White explained to me that, “If you asked the same thing about neighborhoods and parts of town, you’d find that those kids who come from those conditions would say they feel the least safe.”
In other words, if you come from the right parts of the suburbs, you have the right to feel safe in school, like the kids at Providence High School, where 81 percent feel safe. If you’re poor, you aren’t entitled to feel safe at school.
Unfortunately, there’s an uncanny correlation between where kids say they feel safe and where the most experienced teachers in the system are deciding to teach. There’s also an uncanny correlation between test scores and where the most experienced teachers are teaching.
The cold, hard truth is that the most experienced teachers don’t want to teach at Garinger High School, where only 28 percent of the kids feel safe. They’d rather teach at Butler, where 79 percent do. That’s why nearly 40 percent of the teachers at Garinger had less than four years experience this year while only 10 percent of teachers at Butler did. Young teachers dumped into these schools eventually flee to the suburbs despite the fact that the system is willing to pay them more to teach at equity schools.
This means that these kids are not only suffering the consequences of going to school with peers who are out of control, they suffer a double whammy in that they don’t have equal access to the most experienced teachers in the system. Ask the teachers who’ve worked in these schools and they’ll tell you the same thing. Sure, more kids in their school have serious discipline problems. Most put the number at two to five kids in each of their classes who completely disrupt their ability to teach. But every one of them will also tell you that the rest of their students are good kids they could focus on if they weren’t battling the others.
If there’s one thing this system’s administrators absolutely will not do, it’s admit that this situation exists, even if the results of the problem are beginning to make the news on a weekly basis. They’ve spent money building kids at equity schools shiny new buildings, providing them with the best student/computer ratios in the system, and filling their school libraries with new books. But they refuse to do the one thing that would help their struggling teachers: do whatever it takes to apply the student code.
If you have any doubts about this, consider the following. During the 2002-2003 school year, there were 11 sexual assaults, 18 sexual offenses, 82 assaults on school personnel, 11 assaults resulting in serious injury, 218 incidents of possession of a weapon, four assaults involving use of a weapon, nine robberies, and 12 incidents of possession of a firearm. All of the above were, according to the student code, grounds for dismissal.
Yet only nine students were expelled. Nine. Only 47 students were given long-term suspensions, or suspensions that lasted longer than 10 days. And keep in mind, the system doesn’t even track assaults against students unless the attack was sexual in nature, their attacker used a weapon, or the attack resulted in serious injury.
Yet in the midst of all of this, School board member George Dunlap, a school DARE officer, had the nerve to tell the Charlotte Observer that the “negative image” created by media coverage is the district’s biggest safety problem.
“More than anything else, it’s the perception,” he told the paper. “There’s a perception among the public that our schools are not safe.” Uh-huh. And the kids who filled out this survey were part of some vast media conspiracy to make you look bad — right, George?
School safety is every bit as much an equity issue as school building conditions and teacher quality.
Trouble is, this is no longer just confined to equity schools. Vance and East high schools both reported a double-digit plunge in the number kids who say they feel safe. If the numbers hold, look for the predictable exodus of teachers. The math is so simple, even school system officials could do it if they chose to.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2004.
