First, Lawrence Eric Chapman stole a car. Four months later, he brought a .45 to school. They gave him probation on both counts. While on probation, he was charged with stealing 12 more cars, convicted of stealing nine of them, and spent a few months in prison on two of the charges.
Meanwhile, Tyrice Terrell Givens was building a name for himself as the leader of the Crips gang at Independence High School, The Charlotte Observer later reported. In September of last year, Givens was arrested at school for disorderly conduct. He came right back, and less then two months later, according to the Observer, Givens beat another student so badly in a fight outside the cafeteria that the student had to be hospitalized.
In January, Givens and Chapman collided in a hail of bullets on Burkland Drive in the Wendover Road area. Chapman, 20, shot and killed Givens, 17, during an attempted robbery.
When kids get caught with guns in school, school board members like to lecture parents about keeping their guns locked up, as if these kids innocently stumbled across them in dad’s junk drawer.
The reality is that these “students” are hardened street thugs. Our community crime problem and our school crime problem are one and the same. The kids stealing a dozen cars, the kids sticking .45s in convenience store clerks’ faces and the kids committing assaults with a deadly weapon resulting in serious injury outside school grounds are the same ones who are bringing weapons to school and committing violent crimes there.
The schools know exactly who they are. So do the courts. And no one chooses to do anything about it.
A while back, I started pulling the records of every person charged with murder in this county. I’d say, conservatively, that at least a quarter of them have a charge of bringing a gun or weapon to school on their records. Lately, as I’ve started tracking several dozen young men who commit about one armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon a month — only to be churned back on the street — I’ve noticed a trend. Many were charged at least once with bringing a gun or weapon to school, some of them recently. Or they committed a violent crime at school. In fact, I have no doubt some of them are still in school.
To deal with this, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Peter Gorman is opening a series of additional “discipline schools,” including doubling from three to six the number of suspension centers where teachers will work with kids suspended for less than 10 days.
Kids who commit “more serious offenses,” like fighting, would spend up to 30 days at another new suspension center. And kids who commit the “most serious” crimes, like assaulting staff, will go to Derita Alternative School for the remainder of the school year.
But it’s what’s left unsaid in Gorman’s plan that really sticks out. What will happen to the 22 kids caught during the first semester of school this year with guns in school? Or how about the kids who committed the seven sexual assaults, 15 sexual offenses, 25 assaults on school personnel, five assaults with a weapon, four assaults resulting in serious injury, 157 incidents of possession of a weapon or the two robberies with a dangerous weapon? (Again, all of that was just in the first semester of this year.)
When you consider that last year, facing similar statistics, CMS expelled just six students out of 125,000, the answer is clear.
After a 30-day siesta or at worst a year at Derita, the majority of these kids will be right back in the classroom. And CMS can’t be trusted to hit kids with long-term suspensions, either. Last year, the Wake County Schools doled out 1,009 long-term suspensions. CMS handed out just 34.
There is a simple reason for all of this. Gorman simply doesn’t have the votes on the school board to expel more of these kids. He knows that actually kicking significant numbers of violent kids out of school would be an explosive issue for this school board during a time when he needs its unity to back a half-billion-dollar plan for new schools.
School board member and former school resource officer George Dunlap once wrote a column in The Charlotte Post acknowledging that there were rapists in our schools — and that “troubled” kids shouldn’t be denied an education. Let anyone suggest that we should consider pulling kids who are on their second or third armed robbery from mainstream schools, and board member Vilma Leake gets huffy and whines about educating “all our children.”
And that’s the root of the problem. This community needs to forget about taking guns away from students and take the students with the guns away from the school board.
In our court system, most kids get probation or suspended sentences for bringing guns to school — even if they were already felons, had violent criminal histories and could have faced serious prison time. A no-tolerance policy on the part of the district attorney’s office — that means no plea deals — for these kids, and particularly for felons who bring guns to school, would wipe out the worst of this problem.
Unfortunately, it will probably take a couple of bullet wounds on campus before someone figures this out.
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2007.
How nice to know that the calm, peaceful school that my children attended a little over 15 years ago now local branches of violent gangs. The CMS board has done SUCH a good job over these past few years. It just makes me all warm inside.
Bottom line: sending your children to CMS schools today should be prima facie evidence of child abuse.
How about we let Vilma take responsibility for her beliefs? She can home school the violent offenders and any kid that brings a gun to school.
Yes, every student needs an education, even the convicted felons and felons in training.
However, the problem students must be removed from school and educated at alternative facilities. Teachers can’t teach and students can’t learn under the threat of violence and general mayhem.
People like Vilma Leake need to wake up and smell reality. There are serious problems with violent students in the schools. The fact that many of these kids are black is unfortunate but this fact can’t be used as an excuse to not remove the problem student from the school.
It’s time for Ms. Leake and others to worry more about the overwhelming majority of black students that want to learn and stop coddling the small, troublemaking minority that prevent them from doing so.
My daughter is 5, and my son is 3. She’s just wrapped up kindergarten, and he will start preschool shortly. She’s in an excellent little magnet school, tucked away in a criminally active cesspool, but surrounded by good fences and in possession of a tight lockdown plan. He will go to a church preschool even though we do not attend services. This will go on for maybe two more years…
…At which point we are leaving this place. Where are we going? Who the hell cares – I’ve lived in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Rochester (not far from Buffalo – Ms. Leake’s home town), and would rather live in any of those places than suffer through this asinine hyperbolic political imbecility in this rinky-dink little burg. Seeking Southern Hospitality? Dive on in – the blood’s fine, and McCrory’s peers uptown will make damn sure there as much blood as possible so we can ALL enjoy it.
My house will be on the market in 2-3 years. I’ll give the damn thing away before I’ll let my kids endure Ms. Leake’s plan: educate “all our children” my ass – you’re not touching mine you brain-addled dimwit. I’ll send them to ANY school that isn’t CMS.
And what’s the deal with George Dunlap – he was a cop, wasn’t he? And he “acknowledged” there are rapists in CMS schools? Well isn’t THAT just Sherlock Holmes quality deduction for you.
I moved here to take advantage of the available workplace in the financial marketplace and low costs – but the low housing prices? Well, no kidding. Look how little you get for the money. What was I thinking?
I really don’t know what to think of Doctor Pete: he gave himself low marks on his first year of service, and I admire his candor. Then again, he got low marks his first year nonetheless, and he’s devastating the magnet school program, the last bastion of potentially useful and seemingly safe education in town.
Posit: A group of twenty late-teenaged students who are all friends, minor troublemakers (teenagers are predominantly minor troublemakers, at the very least), relatively smart (“relative” being the point here), dress like slobs and get a little snippety with teachers occasionally have a chance of growing up to be “useful members of society”, whatever that is. Kids are kids, right? They get in trouble – it’s their job. But these kids are just “kids.” They’re not thugs.
Now add a twenty-first member on his second or third drug charge, or assault charge, or auto theft or whatever. Give him a gun – whether it’s from daddy’s sock drawer or a corner dealer. In other words, let’s add Lawrence Eric Chapman to that group.
Those twenty kids’ odd of growing up to be “useful members of society” just dwindled, didn’t they? There’s got to be a percentage posted somewhere, some statistic that Ms. Leake would decry as insensitive to the natures of the vicious thugs she’s keen to educate. Thing is, she’s forgetting that her beloved thugs are educating kids too, and that’s where my children will stop attending classes under the auspice of her idiotic idealism.
Geez, Tara. Got me all riled up!
And Fredo: “Bottom line: sending your children to CMS schools today should be prima facie evidence of child abuse.”
I couldn’t agree more.
sounds like things worked themselves out nicely..the two bad boys got together and the outcome was at least one less bad boy.and another now in jail..shame they didn’t manage to shoot each other simultaneously.. I know..it’s all the school systems’s fault that they ever got to this point…well, at least the School’s version of Darwin’s natural order of selection is proving out..these boys will never pro-create…
They might not procreate, but obviously a few from the bottom of the gene pool are, and this is why we are where we are at.
I’ve lived here 23 years now and put 2 through the system but pulled the last two out when I thought things were getting bad. Now they are worse. Why is it that nobody in this city can figure out that you lock up the criminals. You don’t put them back on the street and you most certainly don’t put them back in schools. Sure – give them the education – in prison where they belong. That’s the ultimate suspension center. CMS suspension centers are a joke. It’s like punishing the delinquent by sending him to his room where he must play his video games, watch television, and get on the phone. There’s tough love for you! This just gives these thugs a better chance to make new aquaintances and not have to do the schoolwork they had no intention of doing while waiting to hit dropout age.
All that’s bs coming from someone who took a gun to school who is now a successful sbo guns are for protection I kept one Cuz white kids are knownot to shoot schools now they have to be protected from police