Attorney Esther Panitch says she can obtain a reliable grid on police activity in any place in metro Atlanta because it is public information.
“But I cannot get an accurate one in schools because there is culture of hiding incidents and failure to report them,” she says.
Panitch says she is running headfirst into this culture in her legal representation of a 16-year-old Westlake High School student beaten so badly last month that he suffered a broken jaw and a broken nose, and underwent surgery.
Five schoolmates face criminal charges, and the Fulton district attorney has filed a motion to potentially prosecute the juveniles charged in this crime as adults.
Many questions remain about the school’s response in this case, including failing to call an ambulance for the bleeding victim and the 40-minute wait after the attack to call his mother.
On leave from work to nurse her son whose jaw remains wired, his mother says the brutal attack has opened her eyes to the constraints placed on teachers to report problems and the efforts to downplay school violence. In visits to the high school, she says she sees as many of 25 students roaming the hallways and acting up while classes are under way, despite surveillance cameras.
“When I asked teachers in the hallways why they weren’t saying anything, they told me there is no point, that the administration can see the kids on cameras. The kids are in total control,” says the mother, who has asked the media not to use her name to protect her son.
Panitch says “schools need to be in contact with the parents much faster and with more sensitivity to what has just happened to their children.
In this case, it took going on the news to get anything from the school and the school board.”
Westlake, a Fulton school in southwest Atlanta, reported 69 fights last year resulting in 27 serious injuries, according to the district.
But can the public trust those numbers or any numbers about school violence?
The federal No Child Left Behind Act says that students attending “persistently dangerous” schools can transfer.
But many states, including Georgia, set the threshold so high for a “dangerous” school that it requires three years of serious violent crimes, or an inordinately high number of drugs or weapon offenses for a school to earn the designation.
State law requires school districts to report offenses that result in serious disciplinary action, including in-school and out-of-school suspension, expulsion and referrals to juvenile or court authorities.
However, the state Department of Education doesn’t validate the submitted data.
“We cannot verify the accuracy,” says DOE spokesman Matt Cardoza.
But Cardoza contends there is some screening.
“The annual discipline reports from school districts that are sent to us are signed off by and authorized by the local school superintendents as being accurate and our Safe and Drug-Free Schools staff members review the annual discipline reports to see if any schools have reported discipline offenses that would put them in the persistently dangerous category, and they look for outliers in the data — 20 firearms in an elementary school — that may call to question the accuracy,” he says.
But many teachers contend schools are concealing what is occurring.
As one teacher said, “When pay and employment is based on the actions of kids and teens, then anything that negatively impacts pay and employment will be diminished. In today’s society, a school full of gun-toting, knife-wielding, fighting teens would be called a failing school, and the teachers and administrators would be blamed.”
“Not surprisingly, some schools became reluctant to report incidents or to downplay the violent aspects of some incidents,” says Tim Callahan, spokesman for the 82,500-member Professional Association of Georgia Educators.
Callahan cites the “blame-and-shame” strategy embedded in No Child Left Behind.
“The analogy that comes to mind is athletic. Rather than improve coaching, the athlete’s training regime or the athlete’s diet, NCLB simply developed more accurate stopwatches and posted the results on the scoreboard with the expectation that improvement would magically occur,” says Callahan.
“The only way it will get better is if we shine a light on it,” says Panitch, “so we can work together on fixing the crime problem rather than hiding it.”
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