For Teshada Herring, the action was unmistakable: The girls smearing Vaseline on their faces and fitting scarves to their heads were preparing for a fight.
The ritual - well-known in Philadelphia schools - is intended to keep skin from scarring and hair from getting ripped out.
As Teshada passed the group on her way to class at Audenried High that morning, the events of the previous week flashed through her mind - a fight she had witnessed, Facebook posts warning that someone from her neighborhood would be attacked, a text blast to her phone that all but named her as the intended victim.
She wondered: Would they come for her?
Minutes later, while taking an algebra test, Teshada was unable to stop thinking about the pack of girls. She glanced up from the test, looking at the classroom door.
The girls in scarves passed by.
Teshada was terrified; now she was sure they were coming for her.
Suddenly, a band of more than a dozen girls and boys - captured on video roaming the halls and looking into classrooms - barged through the door.
The group converged on Teshada and began to beat her.
In less then a minute, they vanished.
"It was like a tornado," her teacher would later say."They went one way, then they went the other way."
In Philadelphia, schools are no sanctuary.
The Jan. 22, 2010, assault on Teshada, which left her bleeding and dazed, was the 2,095th violent incident the School District recorded in the 2009-10 year.
Within a few minutes, a video at the three-story school recorded violent incident No. 2,096, another attack in a hallway in a largely unused part of the building that teachers had complained about for months. Students rushed past a security guard as the fight erupted. Then, he waded into the fray, reaching down to help a girl who had been knocked to the ground and kicked and punched by her assailants.
By June, the district's total of violent incidents had grown to 4,541. That means on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes.
That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.
And those are just the incidents that are reported; teachers, students, and administrators interviewed by The Inquirer during a yearlong investigation say many are not. During the 2009-10 school year alone, 183 cases came to the district's attention only after the city police made arrests.
Violence in Philadelphia schools is more than the sheer numbers. The specter of violence traumatizes students and teachers, and stifles learning.
Audenried, housed in a gleaming, new $60 million building in Grays Ferry, is equipped with a sophisticated camera-surveillance system. But that was no deterrent to the band of youngsters bent on attack who roamed the corridors.
In the attack's aftermath, Teshada - then a 15-year-old freshman - had to confront the elemental question of whether she could stay in her neighborhood school and learn.
And her teacher, Brynn Keller, after witnessing the assault, grappled with her total inability to protect a student in her classroom.
Incidents of violence like this raise the question of whether Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman, in the midst of her third year, is fulfilling her pledge to make Philadelphia schools safe places to learn.
Ackerman contends that on her watch the district has taken strong steps to curb school violence - such as enforcing a zero-tolerance policy on discipline and expelling students. She cites a drop in reported incidents as proof the efforts are working.
Moreover, she said, school violence is a national "public health problem" that will require an entire community to resolve: "We're going to have to fix it as a collective effort and not expect the school to take on the responsibility for trying to do everything."
Ackerman conceded that the School District must do a better job developing responses to violence, but that getting hundreds of "schools to implement these programs with fidelity is where we still have a long way to go."
And she placed much of the responsibility on teachers and principals.
"When young people rush into a classroom, when they roam the halls, that's an adult problem - of the educators in that school," Ackerman said, referring to Teshada's assault at Audenried. "Having been a teacher, having been a principal, I never had that happen in my classroom, and I sure didn't have it happen in my school, because we were clear about what we would tolerate, what was acceptable and what wasn't."
Good discipline occurs in classrooms with good teaching, she said.
But many teachers and other school staff have said that even good teaching can fail in the face of violence, and that the district has done little to help. They, as well as students and parents interviewed by The Inquirer, are openly skeptical of the district's antiviolence efforts and its assertion that it enforces zero tolerance for violence.
"Really? Because you can pretty much punch a teacher and still go to school," said teacher Hope Moffett, who was in an adjacent classroom when Teshada was attacked. In a January interview, she compared the assault to "a prison riot."
Since then, Moffett has become openly critical about violence and Ackerman's plan to turn Audenried into a charter school run by a nonprofit company. Despite receiving positive evaluations, Moffett faced firing for giving students bus tokens to travel to a demonstration opposing Audenried's conversion and then talking to the press about being disciplined. The district backed off after the union sued.
The Inquirer's investigation
The Inquirer spent a year looking into violence in Philadelphia public schools, interviewing hundreds of teachers, parents, students, and education experts about the district's problems.
It also commissioned an extensive, independently administered survey by Temple University that sampled the opinions of more than 750 teachers and aides - 6 percent of the 13,000 the district employs.
More than two-thirds of those who responded to the survey reported that the violence and disruption in their building hindered their students' ability to learn. And more than half said violence had worsened during the last three years.
Educators in schools throughout the district spoke out about high levels of violence and disruption in their schools.
"There are far more disruptive and violent students than our system can handle," said one middle school teacher, who spoke of students who "hop from classroom to classroom . . . causing chaos."
The Inquirer also obtained thousands of internal School District police reports of violent incidents dating back to 2007. They show that during the last four years serious crimes occurred dozens of times a day, in every corner of the city, at every level of school.
