Rashaan Carr should have been in class at Martin Luther King High School.
Instead, he ended up wading into a crowd of fourth and fifth graders in a bustling elementary school playground, swinging a silver-and-white Louisville Slugger aluminum baseball bat, witnesses said.
Eleven younger boys were hurt.
"This was no nightmare. This was real," one victim said later that day.
The attack last spring was held up as a senseless example of runaway school violence - "Psycho Attack," read one headline.
But behind the melee is a more complicated, subtle, and elusive story, a yearlong Inquirer investigation has found.
It is the story of how a school district in one of the poorest and most violent American cities struggles to help troubled students, and how the district's intervention efforts too often fail.
Since Arlene C. Ackerman took over as Philadelphia school superintendent in 2008, she has made a program called CSAP - Comprehensive Student Assistance Process - the centerpiece of her effort to stave off students' deteriorating grades and behavior. The program is designed to apply a host of resources such as intensive tutoring and counseling, as well as identifying learning disabilities or behavioral disorders.
Use of the program skyrocketed from 16,534 referrals in 2008 to 51,166, including Carr, by the end of the 2009-10 school year. That means that nearly a third of the School District's 155,000 students are enrolled - and the district plans to expand the program even more.
"If used correctly, it's a major intervention that can work," Ackerman said. "I know that because I've seen it work in my own experiences."
But many teachers and administrators say the program is a bust - an exercise in paper-shuffling that is more about documenting students' failures. Judge Kevin Dougherty, the administrative judge of Family Court, said that from what he's seen, CSAP is a "fiction."
On Monday, Dougherty found Carr and two King classmates charged in the attack, Ralph Moore and Diquan Allen, delinquent in a juvenile hearing. He will sentence them next week.
They told Dougherty they were breaking up a fight on the playground, not starting one. As for the bat, they say they had cut school and armed themselves after tussling with a gang at King earlier in the day. Police said the real story was that they were settling scores as part of an obscure neighborhood feud. The judge rejected the boys' story.
The playground assault on April 30, 2010, marked the first time they'd ever been arrested.
But all three had long been in trouble in school. Carr had been suspended 17 times, starting when he was 7, for offenses ranging from fighting to indecent exposure.
All three were enrolled in CSAP at King. The School District declined to discuss their cases, citing privacy concerns, but their court files are open because they were originally charged as adults.
At a hearing this month, Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner pointed out that until the boys landed in court, only teachers and administrators were privy to their misbehavior. He wondered aloud, as he reviewed Carr's "stunningly bad" school record, how the district had let Carr's misconduct escalate from the time he was a young elementary school student.
"It's difficult for me to understand," he said, why Carr's violent misbehavior was "not addressed earlier with something other than just multiple, repeated suspensions."
Later, Lerner said, "It's clear to me that these kids and the community would benefit if the schools took a more proactive role in addressing these kids' needs before they become defendants in serious criminal cases."
Almost a third enrolled
Enrollment in CSAP is no great distinction at King, where 900 of the school's 1,100 students are enrolled in the program.
Kristina Diviny - King's principal until January - said her experience with the program had shown it to be a failure, because so many students are enrolled that it can't possibly help everyone.
"Did 900 kids get the resources?" said Diviny, who left in January to become principal of the high school in Christiana, Del. "There's not 900 kids' worth of resources."
She said the documentation sometimes is "CYA."
"It's almost impossible to really do it the way it needs to be done," she said. "I would say 10 percent . . . is real effective CSAP, because the rest is just a blanket."
She is hardly alone in her assessment. Teachers, students, parents, judges, and other experts agreed.
The Inquirer investigation found that the program is deeply flawed in significant ways:
It sweeps in far too many students for its resources. Students suffering from severe behavioral problems are lumped in with classmates encountering minor academic setbacks - even a grade dropping from an "A" to a "B" can be enough to qualify, said the district's head of counseling, Deborah James Vance. Fifteen years ago, there were only 4,600 students in the program.
It rewards schools for enrolling and providing services to as many students as possible who are eligible for CSAP. For example, in the 2009-10 school year - the last full year Diviny was principal - King exceeded its performance goals for CSAP by serving 93.8 percent of its eligible students. That put it in the top quarter of all high schools.
It does not deliver all the services it recommends for individual students, according to state reports and interviews with teachers and administrators.
It permits youngsters to languish without progress for months on end, as the case of the King students illustrates. The result: CSAP data analyzed by The Inquirer show that one-third of all students are in the program for multiple years.
Ackerman acknowledged in an interview that program guidelines are not always followed when placing students.
"What I have found happens is that educators want to jump to put them in CSAP, or go around CSAP and get them some social and emotional services right away," she said. "Some of these issues are directly related to the lack of academic skills or the lack of the appropriate academic strategies and . . . classroom management strategies."
She said the district has the resources to provide services to children.
"You're speaking to somebody who knows this with my eyes closed," Ackerman said. "Now, can I guarantee that everybody is going to do it exactly the way I did it as a principal? All I can do is continue to try to give the support to principals and teachers so that it's implemented with fidelity."
Her chief accountability officer, David Weiner, said he is satisfied that in most cases, children are getting at least some of the recommended services.
"In some environments [CSAP] works extremely well," he said. "It works well at identifying the kids, providing supports for the kids, helping the children improve in academic, behavioral, social, and emotional issues."
Few dispute that under the right circumstances, CSAP can be effective.
District spokeswoman Shana Kemp pointed to the Anne Frank School, a K-5 elementary school in Bustleton near Northeast Philadelphia Airport, as an example of a school where CSAP works and students receive an ample array of services.
Frank's enrollment numbers are similar to King's - about 1,000 students to King's 1,100. But otherwise the two schools have little in common.
For starters, Frank has fewer than 100 children in CSAP, and they are fifth graders or below.
About half of the Frank students are classified as economically disadvantaged, while 75 percent of King students are. And just 6 percent of Frank students are in special education, vs. 27 percent at King.
In statewide tests, King scores well below the city average for reading and math, while Anne Frank scores well above.
A broken program
Experts who see CSAP's failures - the Rashaans, the Ralphs, and the Diquans - have complained for years that the program is broken.
These students regularly turn up before judges in the courts, or find their way to mental-health advocacy groups or legal-aid clinics and disciplinary schools. This has left critics increasingly dismayed.
At Monday's hearing, Dougherty decried that the district had done so little for the three King boys.
A total of 1,917 students were arrested during the 2009-10 school year, according to the district's figures.
In cases of in-school arrests, Dougherty routinely asks the district what help it has given a student headed for disaster. He said his inquiries are almost always met with a shrug.
The former director of the district's network of disciplinary schools described CSAP as "imaginary."
