America's teachers in a war zone
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Your support makes all the difference.Surveillance cameras, two-way radios, hand-held metal detectors, X-ray machines of the type used in airports, magnetic door locks with secret codes: these are some of the paraphernalia deemed essential these days for crime-control in America's inner-city schools.
The New York Board of Education employs 3,000 full-time security guards, between 10 and 20 of whom are deployed at any given moment in each of the city's high schools. They patrol the schools armed with handcuffs and radios and the legal authority to make arrests.
The job of school security officer has become a career, with promotion possible to bureaucratic positions at New York's School Safety Division. The preferred requirements for an applicant include a degree, military experience and knowledge of a foreign language. Training takes three months.
Throughout the United States an entire industry has evolved around the imperative to try to make the schools less unsafe. Increasingly, the job of school principal resembles that of a prison superintendent.
The FBI reported recently that while crime generally is declining in the US, among teenagers it is increasing at an alarming rate. And schools are one of the main battlegrounds.
Some of the school incidents reported in the last two months are typical: in Florida, a boy of 14 pulled a semi-automatic gun and shot dead a 13- year-old classmate whom he claimed had been bullying him; in Denver, a boy of 16 was shot dead with one blast from a sawn-off shotgun; in New York, a girl of 14 was slashed in the face by a group of five girls using box- cutting knives - the victim required 108 stitches. This last incident prompted the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, to ban the sale to minors of box-cutters, razor- sharp tools encased in plastic which can evade metal detectors.
Guns, however, remain the greatest threat. Police in Baltimore reported 122 incidents of gun crime in the city's schools in 1994.
However, there has been some encouraging news. The introduction of metal detectors and security patrols has reduced the incidence of gun- related crime in a number of city schools.
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