EDITORIAL: Discipline Problems Must Be Addressed

By Reading Eagle, Pa.

Apr. 4–Thanks to the president of the teachers union at the Reading School District and one brave high school senior, the school board has been put on notice that major trouble has been brewing.

Daniel B. Grim, backed by about 75 of his fellow teachers, presented the school board with nearly 20 examples of students roaming the halls when classes are in session, threatening other students and attempting to intimidate faculty and staff.

Ironically Grim’s warning came after a week after teacher Craig A. Miller suffered minor injuries trying to breakup a fight between two 15-year-old boys at Northeast Middle School.

Grim, the teachers union president, said he has asked Dr. Thomas R. Chapman Jr., district superintendent, and high school administrators to crack down on the disruptive students without result.

“In my 35 years of teaching, I never thought I would see problems to this extent within the Reading School District,” said Grim.

His description of conditions at Reading’s only public high school were echoed by Matthew W. Hayes, a senior who said he twice was a target of attacks by fellow students last year.

When Hayes tried to complain to a district administrator, whom the student did not identify, he was told to get out of the administrator’s office.

“I truly believe if we don’t get more security guards, we will see a shootout before the end of the year,” Hayes said in a sobering evaluation of the situation.

Later at the same meeting, the school board agreed to hire two additional security guards, but judging from the complaints lodged by Grim and Hayes, two more guards are not about to quell the problems in the high school.

Before anything else is done, district officials must investigate Hayes’ claim that he verbally was tossed out of an administrator’s office while trying report an incident in which he was attacked by other students.

Anyone — administrator, faculty, staff, director — who turns his back on a student at such a time should not be involved in public education. If Hayes’ accusation is accurate, that administrator should be fired and replaced by someone who is willing to work with the students and faculty to develop a safe environment that encourages learning.

Yes, Reading High School was not designed to house 4,500 students, as the superintendent pointed out. And there are plans in the works to alleviate that overcrowding.

But the number of students alone does not create an environment such as the one described by Grim and Hayes. Such an environment grows when minor discipline problems are allowed to escalate.

No one wants to see a school run as if it were a prison, with armed guards patrolling every hallway. That isn’t any more conducive to a learning environment than one in which discipline is nonexistent.

But neither does anyone want to see Reading High School deteriorate into Germantown High School in Philadelphia, where earlier this year two students attacked a teacher and broke his neck after he had taken an iPod from one of them.

There is no doubt that the vast majority of students in Reading High School are good kids who want to get educated so they can graduate and become contributing members of society.

We owe it to those students to do whatever is necessary to protect them from the disruptive influences before Hayes’ grim prediction becomes reality.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Reading Eagle, Pa.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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