Public-school Pollyannas will dismiss the Mifflin High School horror story as an isolated case. Open your eyes. Smell the stench. It's in your neighborhood.
The New York Post reported recently that assaulted or sexually abused students and staff members collected $6.9 million in negligence claims against the New York City school system in fiscal 2004, an 18 percent increase in payouts over the previous fiscal year. The largest settlement, $1 million, was awarded to a Bronx high school student whose classmates stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver. The school had refused his mother's request for a safety transfer before the assault.
In my home county, Montgomery County, Md., a local government report revealed that nearly 12,000 children ages 12 to 17 are bullied, abused or robbed by peers and others. Of that number, more than 1,000 are victims of sexual assaults. The school system, which is not required to inform police of these crimes, has been bombarded with complaints by parents that school officials ignored the victims or downplayed sexual assaults, including a number of incidents involving young girls attacked on local school buses.
These are heart-stopping nightmares every parent fears. You send your children to school to learn, not to be assaulted by classmates and abused by the negligent overseers of Public School Classrooms Gone Wild. If these assaults occurred in private schools, the institutions would be shut down. Instead, the government dance of the lemons continues, as abominable administrators skip away with "sensitivity training," "reassignment," and eternal protection from accountability.