SCHOOL OFFICIALS TAKE STEPS TO CURB POTENTIAL VIOLENCE

Charlene Peyton says teachers in the Cape Girardeau public schools don't worry much about being assaulted by their students.

Incidents like the one in St. Louis Oct. 10, when a substitute teacher collapsed and died after struggling with a 9-year-old boy, can make teachers a little nervous, said Peyton, a music teacher at Clippard School and president of the Cape Girardeau Community Teachers Association. But, she says, violence in schools isn't mostly against teachers. It's children against children.

Peyton, who has taught 20 years in the district, said she's not aware of any student attacks on staff members. She also thinks staff, students and parents feel the schools are pretty safe.

"I don't think they're completely safe," she said, adding that with open campuses, it's impossible to control everyone coming and going at the schools.

"There's always violence," she said, whether students are getting in fights in school or out of school or hearing about it happening elsewhere. "It's just that it has not come to the point where we're always nervous and scared about coming to school."

Peyton and school officials from other districts add they worry more about children being abducted by non-custodial parents than enraged students attacking a teacher.

School officials around the area say they're concerned about the potential for violence in their schools, but they're taking steps to prevent it.

"We've done a number of things to address the issue of safety on campus in order to prevent that kind of thing from ever happening," said Cape Girardeau School Superintendent Dr. Neyland Clark.

It's not easy. Clark said, "You don't want to get so restrictive that people can't move and people can't come in to the schools." Educators have to "walk a real fine line" between making the community feel welcome and keeping troublemakers out.

"There's a lot of things that we have done," he said. "I don't know that we can ever do enough."

Some measures the district has taken include imposing a dress policy that forbids wearing gang-related apparel and training teachers to look for gang-related behavior.

In addition, Clark said, administrators on the secondary campuses use two-way radios to communicate and can report problems quickly and efficiently.

The district has also established a crisis prevention and intervention committee to draw up response plans in the event of everything from a hostage situation to counseling students about peer suicide to earthquakes.

"They're dealing with a lot of issues," Clark said.

In the Caruthersville and Cairo, Ill., public schools, metal detectors are used to ensure safe schools. Clark said local school officials have "talked a little bit" about using such devices, although they're not needed.

"If we felt that it was necessary to sustain the safety of our campuses, we'd go into that topic pretty quickly and seriously," he said. "We're not currently talking about metal detectors."

This summer, the school district began working "very closely" with Cape Girardeau police on youth programs, said Central High School Principal Dan Tallent, adding: "That's kind of paid off. The kids seem a lot less stressed this year about those issues."

In the Caruthersville schools, officials have adopted a "zero tolerance" policy toward violence, said superintendent Olin Parks.

"It has to do with your attitude toward school violence," Parks said. "This district's just not going to tolerate it. It doesn't have a place in education. If anything, we want to teach people how to get along. We don't condone violence."

The school district has used portable metal detectors for "a couple of years," he said, adding: "We haven't had any incidents since we bought them."

Cairo Superintendent Elaine Bonifield and Jackson Superintendent Howard Jones said it's unrealistic to think that a violent society won't spill over into public schools.

"While it is appalling, look what happens in the post offices," Bonifield said. "I think there's a good deal of violence around us all the time, on television and in the media. But the kind of problem that you see in public schools today is very rarely directed toward staff."

"It can't be overstated, the societal influence," Jones said. "If a student comes from a culture that uses violence to deal with problems, it's obvious that it's going to show up at school."

Parents need to be aware, he said, that telling their children that it's OK to hit back if they don't hit first can start a lot of fights.

"There's a fine line between me putting up my hands to defend myself and me goading the other kid into throwing the first punch and then I have license to beat him to a pulp," he said.

He added, though, "It should be rare for a child to have to defend himself by fighting."

Hand-held metal detectors have been used in the Cairo schools for a number of years, Bonifield said, and this year the district installed "walk-through" detectors at the high school.

"Those are preventive in nature," she said. "We feel that our instances of violence are much less than they used to be." Since the district started using the detectors, enrollment has increased, a phenomenon she says "verifies that the public agrees that our schools are much better than they used to be."

Violence in the Cairo schools hasn't increased, she said, but publicized incidents of violence in other districts points up the need for pre-emptive steps.

Southeast University education professor Charles Ireland said the university doesn't offer a course that specifically addresses the issue of violence in schools as part of its teacher-training program.

What typically happens, Ireland said, is teachers get their instructions from a school's administrators.

"There's not one class that's devoted to that topic, yet it's a very, very real concern," he said, and "we frequently have informal discussions in class in response to incidents that we might hear about or read about."