Making Safety a Piece of the Pie

Teacher Voices:

In Philadelphia last week a teacher named Frank Burd, wound up in the hospital after two students assaulted him, apparently because he had confiscated an iPod during class. After class, according to a report on NBC news, the two students were waiting for Burd. One punched him and the other pushed him. As of Friday night (February 23), he was still in intensive care with two broken bones in his neck.

Mr. Burd’s experience may seem like an aberration, but actually, it is only a slightly more extreme example of the kind of violence, crime, and general incivility that teachers and students confront in schools all over the nation. Here in NY, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s Preliminary Management Report showed a 21-percent increase in felony crimes committed in the city's schools between July and October 2006 compared with the same period the previous year. And according a February 23 article in The Chief, “Major crimes rose from 287 to 348, other criminal reports increased from 820 to 983, and additional safety incidents climbed from 1,614 to 1,926, according to the Mayor's report.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 27, 2007 7:36 AM
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