In Wednesday’s gray morning cold outside Forest Park High School in Northwest Baltimore, there was the expected gathering: A couple of city police cars, a couple of TV news people, and a couple of kids who should have been inside the school but were not.
One was a young lady, perhaps 16, who stood by the school’s big front doors, beneath a sign reading “Great Schools — Great Kids,” and hollered into a cell phone. Every third word was a curse. There were noun curses and pronoun curses, and curses employed as adjectives and adverbs, too. This is some beautiful grammar they’re teaching in the schools these days.
The cops, oblivious to the language, were there a little late. The day before, five students who imagined themselves real tough guys beat up a couple of teachers. The TV news crew was there as part of the modern ritual dance.
“Just the violence of the day,” said a reporter from WMAR-TV.
Well, some of the violence, anyway. The same day as the trouble at Forest Park, there was a little outbreak at Maritime Industries Academy on North Avenue, where five girls got into a fight that sent two of them to Mercy Hospital. A few days earlier, a parent at Matthew Henson Elementary attacked a teacher who had a problem with her son, as a classroom full of students looked on. Nice lesson for all the kids, Mom.
That was the same day a 15-year-old kid was found outside William H. Lemmel Middle School, stabbed to death by a 14-year-old classmate.
“Just the violence of the day,” the TV reporter said. He said this to a guy wandering past who used to live near Forest Park.
“This was a hell of a school,” the guy said.
“Was it?” the TV reporter said. “Good academics? Good sports teams?”
“Good academics, yeah. Good sports teams, nah. The school was always heavily girls, back when girls didn’t play sports very much.”
But it was more than academics. Spiro Agnew went here, and Mama Cass, and Kenny Waisman and Maxine Fox, who produced “Grease,” and judges and political figures and leaders of the business community.
And now there are five guys who imagine themselves pretty tough because they beat up a couple of teachers.
Take a bow, guys. Take a bow, because you’ve given an entire community a brand new image of your school. Take a bow, because you’ve unleashed every critic who’s been lying in wait, looking to say: You see? You can’t help these people. It’s a waste of time to throw money at the schools and think we can change these kids’ lives.
Take a bow for putting a chill into the General Assembly this winter, when they consider money for public schools and somebody says: What about places like Forest Park? Why are we wasting money when this is the result we get?
According to school officials, one of the Forest Park teachers was robbed by two students — real geniuses, who imagined the teacher wouldn’t report the incident, or wouldn’t be able to identify them. But he did, and police came to the school to arrest the students.
Later that morning, the brother of one of the robbery suspects attacked the teacher. Other students piled on. Another teacher tried to break up the fight, and he was beaten up. And so more police were called in, and the students have now been charged with assault and disorderly conduct.
Pitiful.
Pitiful that this kind of barbarism happens, and pitiful that we reduce it to such tame and timid legalisms. And pitiful, because we know why it happens and why it continues.
Nobody at home is giving these kids lessons in civil behavior, and nobody in the school system, or the legal system, is meting out sufficient punishment when they act out.
And it’s pitiful, too, because you’ve got a school where the overwhelming percentage of kids arrive every day, and they want to make something of their lives. They live in this neighborhood of stately old homes and hard-working families up against it in a bruising economy, and they do the best they can — and along come these five kids who now put a label on an entire population.
So let’s get this straight: Attacks of any kind are intolerable. If the city teachers union has any heart at all, it should demand strict punishment of these kids. But the parents of these kids need to be called in, as well. The kids’ behavior didn’t come from nothing. It came from absent and indifferent parents. If the kids are to be held accountable, so should the parents. They should be humiliated.
And if they aren’t, then here we behold the beginning of all the troubles.
