Tabitha Allen blames herself for her 10-year-old son's violent behavior.
Growing up and living in a drug-infested, hooker-inhabited neighborhood, the 33-year-old mother of five is angry about life.
"My anger reflects off my children," Allen explained one morning in the North Philadelphia rowhouse she inherited from her grandmother. Her son - a thin, almost gaunt, boy with long eyelashes - punched a teacher last June at Kenderton Elementary School, a K-8 in Tioga. He knocked the glasses off her face and blackened her eye with a blow that packed unexpected power.
As a 10-year-old, he had reached the minimum age to be arrested, and ended up with a simple assault charge in Family Court, where he was put on probation. He was removed from Kenderton and transferred to a classroom for disruptive elementary school students in Logan.
Only last week, Allen said that her son was disciplined for having a BB gun at his new school. She said it was a misunderstanding and that the gun belonged to another student.
Allen's son typifies a disturbing side of violence in Philadelphia schools.
A yearlong Inquirer investigation found that young children - from kindergartners to 10-year-olds - have been assaulting and threatening classmates and staff members with increasing ferocity and sophistication.
A number of the attacks had sexual elements - there were 187 morals offenses during the last five years in schools with grades no higher than fifth, and 1,118 in all elementary schools, including K-8 buildings. About 60 percent were classified as indecent assault.
Children 10 and under account for nearly 18 percent - more than one in six - of all students committing offenses reported in the entire district, according to 2009-10 data submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Education and obtained by The Inquirer.
The Inquirer looked at violence in that age group because, by law, children under 10 are not arrested.
A sampling of incident reports filed by school police during the last five years, coupled with interviews, offers chilling accounts:
In October 2010 at Dobson Elementary, a K-8 in Manayunk, a classroom assistant was spat on, punched and kicked - all by a kindergartner. The aide suffered torn ligaments and tendons in a hand.
At Southwark Elementary, a K-8 school in South Philadelphia in October 2010, a 10-year-old boy "body slammed" into his teacher with such force that she suffered a concussion as she fell to the ground.
In June 2009, a Douglass Elementary student issued a startling warning to a second grader at the K-8 school in North Philadelphia whom she was choking: "I know where you live, and I will burn your house down."
In April 2008, in a third-grade classroom at Taylor Elementary, a K-5 school in Hunting Park, one child held a knife against a classmate's throat and threatened to cut off his head if he snitched.
At the K-8 Morris Elementary in North Philadelphia in February 2008, an angry 9-year-old punched his pregnant teacher in the stomach.
In December 2007, on the playground at Richmond Elementary, a K-5 school in Port Richmond, a 10-year-old girl's classmate forced her head down to his groin.
During the 2009-10 school year, an Inquirer analysis shows, eight of the top 10 highest rates for morals crimes in the district were recorded in elementary schools.
More than half of the 177 elementary schools - including K-8 buildings and other early learning schools - reported a morals crime in 2009-10. Ninety percent have dealt with at least one sex crime in the last five years.
Overall violence rates rose in nearly half the elementary schools, according to a five-year Inquirer analysis of the district's raw data through June 2010.
Likewise, of the elementary schools that include at least one grade above fifth, about half reported increases in violent crime rates over the previous year.
Eleven of the district's 41 schools with no grade above fifth saw their violent crime rate increase in the last year.
Three of those schools - Smedley, a K-5 school in Frankford that became a charter in September; Cayuga, a K-5 school in Hunting Park; and McClure, a K-4 school also in Hunting Park - had a violent crime rate for 2010 that was higher than the district's overall average, including high schools.
Concerns have arisen even at some of the district's most highly regarded elementary schools.
Pollock, a K-6 school in the Northeast, was recognized as a national Blue Ribbon school by the U.S. Department of Education in 2007 for its consistent increase in test scores.
But last spring, a group of staff members and parents wrote to Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman about violent acts occurring there among young students.
"The fights and bullying that go on here every day and the lack of discipline being taken by [the principal] is horrible," they wrote. "We have had students swing at us, curse us out, threaten us that they will get our kids during school when we are breaking up fights in the morning and after school."
District spokeswoman Shana Kemp said conditions at the school had improved, thanks to principal Marilyn Carr.
"Principal Carr has done a great job of engaging the community as a part of her efforts to improve the climate at the school," Kemp said, "and we hope that that continued community-building will lead to even greater improvements in the climate at the school."
Facing young violence
The school system is also overwhelmed with young students living amid poverty, violence, and disorder, some of them largely unparented.
Often, the district has failed to heed the warning signs of violence in its youngsters and figure out a systemic plan to address the problem, with dire consequences.
"By the time they get to middle school and high school, [violence] metastasizes like cancer," said Charles A. Williams 3d, director of the Center for Prevention of School-Aged Violence at Drexel University.
During the last several years, district officials began a handful of programs they say make for a good start, including a bullying and violence prevention curriculum in K-12, said Benjamin Wright, assistant superintendent of alternative education, who oversees discipline in the 155,000-student district.
More than five years ago - when Paul Vallas was still running it - the School District also created alternative classrooms for violent and extremely disruptive third and fourth graders within regular elementary schools scattered around the city. It hired Abraxas, a Houston company, to oversee these special classrooms.
Children in kindergarten through second grade who commit violent offenses remain in their schools - sometimes in the same classroom - and get help. Or they can be transferred to another elementary school.
Transfers at that age rarely happen, Wright said. The district, he said, doesn't keep records in its central archive, but he maintained that no more than five cases occurred in the last school year.
He opposes sending children that young to alternative schools or classrooms. They are in school to learn good behavior, and it's not right to banish them to a disciplinary setting, he said.
"In kindergarten, you're supposed to teach kids how to act when they're going through school," he said.
Wright says the problem is due in part to poor responses by staff, who inflame rather than defuse bad behavior.
Take the case of a young student who refuses his teacher's directive to take his seat. "Does that mean that child's being disobedient? No, that means the child is bored.
"So you might want to say 'OK, I'll give you five minutes to move around and then I'm going to ask you to take your seat.' "
If the child still won't sit, let him stand but say, "You must keep working," he suggested.
Wright also blamed the staff's unequal treatment of boys and Hispanic and black students.
"A boy can't do what a girl does in some schools. A black or Latino kid can't do what a nonblack or Latino kid does," he said.
He also said that adequate counseling and resources were available and that the staff received ample training to deal with problem students.
But teachers say their schools lack enough training, psychological services, and coordination with other agencies to address the problem.
In a recent survey of more than 750 teachers and aides, conducted in a partnership by The Inquirer and Temple University, nearly equal numbers of educators in elementary, middle, and high schools said the problems of violence and disruptive student behavior are getting worse.
Violence worsened during the last three years, said 53 percent of the respondents who work at elementary schools. In middle schools, 57 percent said it was worse, and in high schools, 59 percent.
Those working in the elementary schools, the survey showed, are as likely as those in middle and high schools to see bullying, fighting, and physical attacks on students every day.
