Ronnie Polaneczky: Why we need a Safe School Advocate. Fast.

SIX YEARS ago, when my kid was a third-grader, I enrolled her in a weekend PSSA-test prep class sponsored by the Philadelphia School District.

I thought she'd learn how to stay focused on testing day.

Instead, she learned how to talk trash to an unhinged adult male stranger.

And I learned firsthand why the district needs an Office of the Safe School Advocate.

As my colleague Dafney Tales reports today, state Reps. John Taylor and Bill Keller want to reinstate the office, which was closed two years ago in violation of the law that created it in 2002.

The office gave desperate parents an independent way to address school-safety issues that weren't being taken seriously by school administrators. Those issues often involved dangerously misbehaving kids - or, in my kid's case, a seriously wacko instructor.

The day of my child's class, the teacher - let's call her Miss B - arrived late and told the class that it was because "a man had sold her a bad car."

During the three-hour session, Miss B's cellphone rang incessantly as the children were trying to finish their test booklets.

She explained that the calls were from the man who'd sold her the bad car, and that she didn't want to talk with him. So she repeatedly opened her phone when it rang, then shut it, hanging up on the guy.

After this happened a dozen times, Miss B had the female students speak with the man for her.

She ordered them to say, "Stop calling her or she'll call the police," and, "She doesn't want to talk with you, so shut up," and, "Go away, stupid."

Although the man cursed more angrily at the girls with each hang-up, they found this exercise to be great fun, since a teacher had given them "permission to talk mean," as my daughter giddily told me when I retrieved her after the class.

Needless to say, I was appalled.

By then Miss B had left the building. So I tracked down the site administrator, whom I'll call Miss T, who happens to be a school-district principal.

I stupidly assumed that Miss T would agree that the situation warranted looking into. After all, we didn't know the identity of the crazed man on the phone, his precise relationship to Miss B and whether he was waiting outside to retaliate against the kids who'd taunted him.

Without elaborating, let me say that Miss T's sneering disinterest was more shocking to me than Miss B's stunning lack of judgment. She first dismissed my complaint, then lied about the inquiry process that should have kicked into gear the moment I reported the incident.

Only after I later contacted then-Safe Schools advocate Harvey Rice, who steered me toward the appropriate local district supervisor, did the incident get any attention. Even then, I suspect it was addressed only because the supervisor recognized my name from the Daily News (although I never said I was calling on behalf of the paper) and was too freaked out not to respond.

Still, I never learned what, if any, consequences were meted out to Miss B for her actions in the classroom, or to Miss T for her inaction afterward.

I was told that it was "a confidential personnel matter."

No one seemed to understand that it ceased to be confidential the moment Miss B involved children in her sordid drama - and the moment afterward, when Miss T shrugged it off.

As I write this, the Inquirer is in the midst of publishing a must-read series on violence in the city's public schools. It meticulously documents the twin outrages that occur with depressing frequency in the district:

Violent incidents against students and staff. And the willful coverup afterward by administrators, who lie about it.

Do we have to wait for someone to almost die before violence is taken seriously in the district?

Oh, wait - someone almost did die. That would be Matt Gremo, the George Washington High School student who in 2001 needed brain surgery following a brutal attack in a school hallway. In the wake of his assault, which was despicably downplayed by school officials, the Office of the Safe Schools Advocate was created to make sure that such underreporting never happened again.

We know how that turned out.

I'm beginning to think that the only way to get school administrators to report violent incidents is to threaten them with criminal charges if they don't.

The way that the district attorney has brought child-endangerment charges against Monsignor William Lynn, accused of harming kids by shuffling credibly accused child molesters around the Philadelphia Archdiocese as if it were a game board.

How are district officials any less accountable to protect the children in their care?

Email polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

www.philly.com/Ronnie. Read Ronnie's blog at www.philly.com/RonnieBlog.