Testimony before Phila. panel on school violence

School principals are "between a rock and a hard place," one told the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations on Thursday: getting penalized if they report violence accurately and doing students a disservice if they don't.

Nearly 50 schools nationally are listed as "persistently dangerous." Half are in Philadelphia; most major cities have none on the list.

It's not that schools in other urban areas aren't dangerous, said Linda Carroll, the principal at Northeast High. It's that many other schools don't report accurately.

Northeast landed on the "persistently dangerous" list this year, which initially horrified Carroll. But when she considered that stopping drugs or weapons at a school entrance counts against her, she changed her mind about what the designation means.

"It should be a celebration, because you did the right thing," Carroll said. "If you don't report it, you don't stop it."

Former district teacher Susan Roth told the commission that violence had been vastly underreported in the Philadelphia School District.

"The violence level in all schools . . . is far more dangerous than anyone not there can imagine," Roth said. "If not addressed soon, we are going to see more serious injuries, even death."

She was seriously injured by a student when she taught at Northeast High, Roth said. When she taught at Gratz High in September, a student tried to burn her with a lighter, she said.

Roth suffered a breakdown because of the last incident, she said, and retired in January. District officials were not immediately able to comment on the Gratz incident.

"This system punishes victims, leaves the students who are creating the violence without help, and endangers the entire school," Roth said.

In an interview, John Frangipani, chief of school operations, strongly disagreed.

"Principals are reporting," he said. "I don't believe there's underreporting."

The commission Thursday held the fifth in a series of hearings on intergroup violence in city schools. The meetings were prompted by racial violence at South Philadelphia High.

After the hearings, the commission will present a report to the district. Members have said they were looking not just for trouble spots, but also for best practices.

Administrators, teachers, and students from Washington High testified that their school, where students hail from 67 countries and speak 31 languages, valued diversity and kept the school calm.

"We had our issues back in the '80s," said Bonnie Hughes, a longtime teacher at the school, which has about 2,000 students. Since then, a culture of acceptance, largely fostered by a thriving peer mediation program, has changed things, she said.

Trained student mediators work with every freshman at the school to try to head off trouble. And when there are problems, the mediators react.

Sharrif Floyd, a senior and one of the region's standout high school football players, is a mediator. A few days ago, he testified, he got word that older boys were picking on an immigrant girl.

Floyd is 6-foot-3 and 310 pounds. He sought the girl out and walked her to lunch. The aggressive boys apologized to her, and she hasn't had trouble since, he said.

"We want to make sure it's a safe environment," Floyd said. "You don't have to walk a certain way or act a certain way. You don't have to be scared."

Washington senior Rachel Pagan nodded.

"I think if a lot of schools had peer mediation," she said, "there would be less racial violence."

Imagine 2014, the district's five-year strategic plan, calls for all city middle and high schools to put peer mediation programs in place.