Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
A wave of senseless violence at community college campuses is raising fears. An 18-year-old student has been charged with wounding two women at a branch campus in a shopping mall near Virginia Tech, the site of mass killings in 2007. Students say the gunmen tried to lure them out of hiding by pretending to be the police, but nobody believed him.
Several community colleges across the nation have been the scene of gun and knife attacks in recent months.
Instead of suspending misbehaving students, schools are trying “restorative justice” programs, reports the New York Times. At Oakland’s Ralph Bunche High School, an alternative school for students who’ve been in trouble, coordinator Eric Butler tries to teach students to defuse conflict, “come up with meaningful reparations for their wrongdoing” and develop empathy with others.
Even before her father’s arrest on a charge of shooting at a car, Mercedes was prone to anger. “When I get angry, I blank out,” she said. She listed some reasons on a white board — the names of friends and classmates who lost their lives to Oakland’s escalating violence. Among them was Kiante Campbell, a senior shot and killed during a downtown arts festival in February. His photocopied image was plastered around Mr. Butler’s room, along with white roses left from a restorative “grief circle.”
. . . “A lot of these young people don’t have adults to cry to,” said Be-Naiah Williams, an after-school coordinator at Bunche whose 21-year-old brother was gunned down two years ago in a nightclub. “So whatever emotion they feel, they go do.”
The U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office is investigating Oakland’s high suspension and expulsion rates. African-American boys make up 17 percent of the district’s enrollment but 42 percent of all suspensions. (It would be more useful to look at their percentage of male enrollment vs. male suspensions.) Many disciplinary actions were for “defiance,” such as cursing at a teacher, rather than violence, notes the Times.
Even advocates of restorative justice admit it doesn’t work for all students. Programs vary across the country. Some schools are reducing suspensions by putting students on “administrative leave,” reports the Times. ”
Restorative justice can mean formal mediation and reparation or more spontaneous discussions.
A recent circle at Bunche for Jeffrey, who was on the verge of expulsion for habitual vandalism, included an Oakland police officer, and the conversation turned to the probability that Jeffrey would wind up incarcerated or on the streets. The student had told Mr. Butler that he was being pressured to join a gang.
“Cat, you got five people right now invested in your well-being,” Mr. Butler told him. “This is a matter of life or death.” Jeffrey agreed to go to Mr. Butler’s classroom every day at third period to do his schoolwork.
Butler’s sister was murdered by her boyfriend, he told Bunche students. When the boyfriend’s mother knocked on his door to ask forgiveness, “The want for revenge in my stomach lifted.”
Sending disruptive, defiant and violent students to an alternative school that focuses on teaching them to get along with others and build self-control sounds like a good idea to me. I’m sure it helps their former teachers and classmates. I hope it helps them.
In New York City, schools are sending students to the emergency room for behavioral outbursts, charges public advocate Bill de Blasio, who’s suing the city for data on 911 calls.
“When I grow up, I want to be a mass murderer,” wrote Brian McGuigan in his second-grade journal. Abandoned by his father, he was an angry child who was “hated” by classmates.
The entry was a story about me as a grown-up, an emerging mass murderer with a Frankenstein combination shotgun and machine gun mounted to my arm. I was probably playing too much “Contra” then. I used the gun to shoot anyone who messed with me, not an indiscriminate killing spree but a revenge fantasy against nameless, faceless bodies, all of whom may or may not have been my father. . . . the police never caught me because a hockey mask concealed my face, like Jason’s.
His teacher called his mother, not the police. After a conference, he began weekly appointments with a therapist.
Ms. Ashley talked animated and slowly like a Teddy Ruxpin doll. We chatted about school, my mom, Nintendo, and since I had trouble sitting still, she let me play with the toys. My favorite were the cars. I could pretend I was driving anywhere. Miss Ashley asked me lots of questions — “What’s your favorite subject in school?”; “Are you a Mets fan or Yankees”?; “Do you like pizza?” but never “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Sometimes my answers were one word, and other times I’d speak at length, spinning stories around her like a tether ball, some of which probably weren’t true at all because I lied often, not out of malice but boredom.
He also started taking Ritalin, which made it possible for him to sit still and focus in class.
As my energy decreased, my motivation did, too. I spent most weekends zoned out playing Zelda for hours, basking in the fuzzed glow of the television. My mother told me to go out and play, but I just wanted to stay inside and play video games, relaxed and focused on the task, and not bounce around the neighborhood causing trouble.
By high school, “a class clown occasionally but no longer by trade,” he was an honor roll student. When he was caught smoking pot, his mother showed him the second-grade journal entry.
I wondered where I would be if not for my mother, Mrs. McKierney and Miss Ashley, if I would have ended up like Jason, minus the succession of campy sequels.
It sounds like the Ritalin helped too.
McGuigan lives in Seattle where he is the program director at Richard Hugo House, a community writing center.
In Los Angeles, mental health workers work with schools and law enforcement to help troubled students who might turn to violence, reports the New York Times.
Each day, several dozen calls come in to the program’s dispatch center from principals, counselors, school security officers or parents worried about students who have talked about suicide, exhibited bizarre behavior or made outright threats.
Mental health workers try to convince principals not to expel students who’ve made threats. “Doing so only pushes the problem onto another school or leaves a child at home with free time to surf the Internet and nurse a grudge against the school.”
Worried about post-Newtown censorship, the video game lobby will run ads aimed at parents that encourage them to use existing parental controls, reports Roll Call.
Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has introduced a bill calling for a study to examine whether violent video games lead to real-world violence.
The industry and its lobby, the Entertainment Software Association, maintain its products do not cause shooting sprees or other violent crimes. But it’s been on the defensive since the National Rifle Association, in opposing proposed gun safety measures, pegged violent video games as a culprit in such mass murders.
Video games have carried ratings since 1994. An “M” rating “denotes content generally suitable for ages 17 and up that may contain intense violence, blood, gore, sexual content and/or strong language.”
Three football players who took a loaded gun from an angry teammate on a high school bus were suspended for three days, reports WFTX-TV in Fort Myers, Florida.
After a quarrel, a 15-year-old pulled out a revolver, aimed at another boy on the activities bus and said he’d shoot him, witnesses told police. Three boys tackled the gunmen and wrestled away the gun, which police say was loaded. The heroes were given an “emergency suspension” for being part of an “incident” where a weapon was present.
One of the suspended students described wrestling away the .22 caliber RG-14 Revolver.
“I think he was really going to shoot him right then and there,” the student said. “Not taking no pity.”
. . . “It’s dumb,” he said. “How they going to suspend me for doing the right thing?”
This 16-year-old knows the right thing — take action to save lives — and the dumb thing — punish the kids who prevented a shooting. Why don’t Cypress Hill High School administrators know the difference between right and dumb?
The 15-year-old gunman was arrested and charged with possession of a firearm on school property and assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill. So they’re going easy on the kid who pulled the gun and hard on the kids who stopped him.
President Obama condemned the wave of violence in Chicago in a speech at Hyde Park Career Academy. He said “the solution is not only more gun laws, but community intervention and economic opportunity in impoverished neighborhoods.” A few hours later, the sister of a student sitting behind Obama on the stage, was shot and killed in a North Chicago alley. Janay Mcfarlane, 18, had attended Hyde Park.
Last school year, 29 current and recent students at Chicago’s Harper High were shot; eight died. This American Life looks at the violence that surrounds the high school. More than 15 gangs operate in Harper’s attendance area, reports Linda Lutton. “Boys are nearly always assigned a gang affiliation, whether they want it or not, based on where they live,” says Lutton. Many gangs don’t sell drugs. They shoot each other over “girls, ‘he said-she said’ stuff, money owed, a fistfight.”
In one story, staff and students learn at a Homecoming pep rally that a recent student was just shot a few blocks away. Principal Leonetta Sanders struggles to decide if she’s going to hold two events – the football game and the dance – while everyone’s worried about retaliation.
When a boy is tall enough — he has “hard legs” — he’s a target says a gang member in the second episode.
Harper High’s “After Action Review” team — the principal, social workers, the football coach and others — tries to contain the damage after each incident, reports Slate. Chicago school officials picked up the AAR idea on a visit to Fort Leavenworth to study military training.
New York City students visited a simulated shooting game facility on a school day, reports NBC. Bronx High School of Visual Arts students, led by a teacher, had a chance to see a new shooting game for children called iCombat at Indoor Extreme Sports.
iCombat outfits children like SWAT officers and lets them pretend to have shootouts in an indoor fake village . . . The level of the realism in the game has sparked concerns in the law enforcement community and among child psychologists.
Students were members of a school club, said district officials. “A mistake was clearly made,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott told NBC.
A Detroit high school coach shot two teens who attacked him as he was walking two female basketball players to their cars after dark, reports WXYZ. He killed one and wounded the other.
One attacker pulled a gun and grabbed the 70-year-old man by his chain necklace, the coach told police. He pulled his gun and shot both. A reserve police officer, the coach has a concealed pistol license.
Both attackers had attended the high school; one had been expelled recently, reports WXYZ.
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