TEACHERS ATTACKED INN. YORK SCHOOLS
(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter) NEW YORK. New York sends 900,000 children to school every day and then waits for the newspapers to report how many of them attacked their teachers with knives, chairs, fists or teeth. Lately the attacks have averaged three a dav.
Teachers say the average would be higher if some headmasters did not quietly overlook some assaults. Day after day, the newspapers tell of attacks by 13 or 14 or 15-year-olds upon no greater provocation than a teacher’s Instructions to his pupils to take off their coats, or take their seats, or stop running in the corridors. A few teachers have been earned away in ambulances their glasses smashed, their clothing ripped, their hands bearing bite marks. Other teachers, well-trained in educational theory but short on courses in the art of selfprotection, are afraid to go to school. Many New Yorkers are alramed. Mr Charles Coben, president of the Teachers’ Union, is so concerned he proposed legislation to in-
crease retirement and death benefits for teachers “who die or are hurt in the line of duty.” Dr. Calvin Gross, the superintendent of schools, supports him. The problem is so big that the school system re-issued a 1962 directive telling which attacks to report and which to ignore. The school boycott of February 3, organised by Negro and Puerto Rican groups, kept 360,000 children out of school to demand faster integration, is blamed by some teachers for provoking the assaults by teaching lawlessness. Double Sessions
The chief villain, blamed by everyone, is a school system which is grossly overcrowded and understaffed, and which has to resort, more and more, to double sessions. The lack of money is the root of this evil, most authorities agree. The children who attack their teachers—nearly all of them Negro or Puerto Rican —invariably come from the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. And a lack of money in the school system frustrates its attempts to pay attention to rowdy children before they become troublemakers. New York has one school psychologist for every 10,000 pupils. “That is not enough,” says Dr. Simon Silverman, head of the Board of Education’s Bureau of Child Guidance. Mr Charles Staloff is the headmaster of Junior High School 149, in a Bronx neighbourhood of three-storey tenements, a school built to accommodate 1200 pupils but with an enrolment of 1700. He blames broken homes. Easily Provoked
“As long as there are homes where the father is not present, or where he has no authority, there will be children who will present problems in a school situation,” he says. The attacks seem to be provoked by the most minor admonitions. In Beichman’s school 13 students have been suspended since September, six of them for assaults. The school’s capacity is 1672 but actually 1990 children attend. Most assailants range in age from 13 to 15. Pupils in that age bracket, a board of education official says, are subject to emotional uncertaines, aggravated by unstable home lives. Older pupils, he said, are more able to handle their tempers. Mr Coben proposes that retired firemen and policemen be engaged to work as school “aids.” Mr Gross has instructed headmasters to suspend pupils who are abusive, repeatedly insubordinate or violent. Last year 2366 pupils were suspended.
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Bibliographic details
Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30454, 30 May 1964, Page 17
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541TEACHERS ATTACKED INN. YORK SCHOOLS Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30454, 30 May 1964, Page 17
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