Tamika McNeill, who had just turned 12, contemplated killing herself last April after classmates at Cleveland Elementary School grabbed her in the cafeteria, wedged their hands under her shirt and tried to fondle her breasts.
"It made me feel like: End it all right there," said Tamika, then a sixth-grader, who had been teased and taunted for months before the attack. "But I knew that it would make my family feel worse."
Neither the principal at the elementary school in Tioga nor his assistant took the incident as seriously. They failed to report the assault to the district's central office, a violation of district policy, until 2 1/2 months later and permitted her attackers to stay in school.
A yearlong Inquirer investigation of violence in Philadelphia schools uncovered dozens of cases like Tamika's - 183 alone during the 2009-10 school year: Cases of students assaulting each other, punching teachers, kicking school police officers and threatening to harm staff.
The incidents only came to light - weeks or months later - when city police issued arrest reports on the incidents, prompting district officials to ask principals about them.
Teachers and union officials, meanwhile, spoke of constant pressure from senior administrators at the district and school level - sometimes subtle and unspoken, sometimes blatant - to hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.
"My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported."
And when crimes aren't reported, the public doesn't get a true picture of school violence.
Lodise said the 183 cases came to light only when city police made arrests.
Tamika's mother said Cleveland administrators told her they had a good reason for suppressing notification of the assault on her daughter: They didn't want to disrupt students during state testing.
Christopher Byrd, the principal, did not return calls for comment, but Ackerman said she was dismayed to hear the details.
"Where were the teachers? Where were the principals? If this had been dealt with at the school level - and I'm not trying to point fingers," she said, then paused. "Getting to central office two months later puts her in harm's way for a very long time."
Principals get wide latitude
It wasn't until June 22 that school police finally wrote a report about the Cleveland incident that stated: "School did not report this incident. . . . Spoke with AP [assistant principal] Renee Waring. Ms. Waring was aware of the incident and thought it had been called into the ICU [incident control unit]."
School district policy says principals or their designees must report all serious incidents to the district's central police office, where overall crime statistics are tabulated.
Yet district officials concede that not every incident has been properly recorded, and that Tamika's case is an example. At the same time, they deny any pressure from district headquarters to underreport.
Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison said that principals have long had broad latitude in running their schools. So, depending on the principal, schools vary widely on how they report and handle violence and whether they call city police.
"There is a tension because some principals want to say, 'I understand, and I think we can help' without involving the formal system," said Gillison, who oversees city police. "What we're saying is ... it's not necessarily going to hurt if that report is made."
Ackerman also has said publicly that she doesn't want a school-to-prison pipeline.
In the last year, Lodise said, there has been a noticeable change in whether incidents are reported to the city police: The district has increasingly left it to assault victims to press charges.
His 635-member force of full- and part-time officers is unarmed and generally does not make arrests, though it does detain suspects.
Last month, in response to questions from The Inquirer, district spokeswoman Shana Kemp said: "Individuals who are assaulted, parents, students, teachers and staff must file individual criminal charges. Not the school."
One area that appears to be handled differently is aggravated assault. Under state law, assaults on teachers and other school personnel are automatically classified as aggravated assaults and are supposed to be reported to city police as a matter of course.
Last year, 690 cases of teacher assaults were documented. Yet the district directly notified police only half the time, according to district records.In some cases, teachers didn't want to press charges, district officials said.
James B. Golden, the district's former chief safety executive who was removed last summer after five years, said when he was in charge, he followed a simple rule:
