S.J.'S PLIGHT: PROTECT OUR KIDS

Experts offer advice for schools and parents after recent attacks

With three schools labeled "persistently dangerous" by state education
officials, Camden stands apart as South Jersey's most violent district.

Attacks on students on or near campuses in the city and surrounding
communities during the past month have raised questions about what schools,
governments and parents can do to protect children.

On Wednesday, two students were stabbed at Pennsauken High School during an
altercation. A suspect - Hieu Tra, 19, of Pennsauken - surrendered to police
on Thursday. He was charged with two counts of aggravated assault and
weapons offenses.

Authorities say Tra is the person who stabbed the two male victims, one in
the abdomen and the other in the buttocks.

Three others - Van Nguyen, 20, of Willingboro, and two juveniles - were
arrested Wednesday and charged with assault.

The victims, whose names were not released, remained in stable condition
Thursday at Cooper University Hospital, authorities said.

Commenting on the recent spate of violence among students, experts in law
enforcement and academia answered a series of questions posed by the
Courier-Post.

What should families do?

Advocate for effective violence prevention programs, said Jon'a Meyer, a
criminologist at Rutgers-Camden.

"Parents often want increased security, but one of the issues with that is
that it's not enough," Meyer said. "Because what increased security does is
it deters specific acts at specific times. So I look up, I see uniformed
personnel, I say, `OK, I'll beat him up later.'

"So what parents should be interested in is programming brought into schools
that helps prevent violence. Unfortunately, those programs are not quick."
Camden's acting Police Chief Edwin Figueroa said parents must simply do
their jobs.

"The family is the most integral part here because they are the ones that
socialize their children so that they act appropriately," he said. "They
should be in partnership with the schools . . . to make sure that the
education system works well."

What can students do to protect themselves?

"Parents need to teach their children how to defuse (dangerous) situations
and how to, if they find themselves threatened, seek the help of a teacher,
a security guard or a police officer that might be stationed at the school
and try to deal with these situations in a nonviolent way," Figueroa said.

Meyer pointed out that telling adults often runs against the grain.

"If they hear of problems brewing, they need to notify someone," she said.
"The problem is there's a subculture within the schools that you don't want
to be a tattletale. But in all of the major incidents that have happened
across the country, there's been someone who knew about it."

Meyer also cautioned against hysteria.

"Everyone is not guaranteed to be a victim," Meyer said. "Because if kids
are afraid they can't focus on their studies. And they're also going to be
more likely to scoot out of the campus. Truancy is already fairly high."

What is the common theme of these incidents?

Camden County Prosecutor Vincent P. Sarubbi said the circumstances of each
reported crime are different, but "the prevalent theme in some of these
instances is the connection between drugs and violence."

How are schools reacting to the violence?

Last year, the prosecutor's office, the police department, the school
district and several other agencies and organizations convened the Camden
Schools Collaborative on Violence.

Sarubbi said the group had helped start truancy sweeps in Camden by a task
force of law-enforcement officials supporting the district's truancy
officers.

Several high school parents in the district have been cited this year for
the truancy of their children. The parents say they are keeping their
children out of school as a safety precaution.

"If you're going to make it illegal for kids not to go to school . . .
you're going to have to make a safer place," said Meyer, the Rutgers
professor. "I feel for these parents. There's not much they can do. If you
don't keep your kids in school, they threaten to throw you in the hoosegow
or fine you."

Another idea from the group is to introduce in Camden an anti-bullying
program that "focuses on the 80 percent of the children that are not
involved in the bullying conduct," Sarubbi said. "It teaches them to get
involved and make efforts to prevent children from being bullied. In other
words, there's strength in numbers."

Sarubbi also backs using drug-sniffing dogs for locker sweeps and drug
testing in the Camden schools to "identify early on kids that may be using
drugs and . . . get them some help."

Figueroa said the group showed that people care.

"I think what's important here is the fact that we have all these government
agencies that were taking an interest in the schools and the problems that
are occurring there and we want to come together and come up with some ideas
in the hopes of stopping any of the violence . . . in the schools," he said.

The police department assigns 16 uniformed officers and four detectives to
Camden's 33 public schools, Figueroa said. Many police officers are trained
in drug-abuse resistance education and anti-gang education "so that they can
go into the lower grades and hopefully prevent those kids from getting
involved in the drug trade."

"We're also in there to mentor and to get the students to know the police
and exactly what it is that they do," he added. "It's more of . . . a mutual
understanding." What is the trend in youth violence?

Camden reported 1,269 violent incidents in 2001-02, according to the most
recent statistics available. That marked a 26 percent increase over the
previous year. Results for 2002-03 should be available soon.

Based on data from 1999 to 2002, the state Department of Education
classified Camden High School, East Camden Middle School and the Henry L.
Bonsall School as "persistently dangerous" under the provisions of the
federal No Child Left Behind law.

Parent Charlotte Barge said she senses a worsening trend.

"It's getting worse, it's really getting worse," said Barge, a mother of
four.

Barge works for Platform Learning, a New York-based company in charge of the
after-school program at Forrest Hills Elementary, where her two youngest
children go to school. She tutors children who are at risk of failing the
standardized test.

"A lot of them are so aggressive," Barge said. "They have so much anger and
hate, it's hard to teach a child like that. If we keep on going like this,
we're going to be building more jails than schools."

Last year, Barge's 8-year-old son was bullied by a classmate. He attended
the Rafael Cordero Molina school then. Barge wrote letters to the board of
education asking for help, but the bullying continued. It stopped this year
only because her son now attends the Forrest Hills school, she said.

"I can't change the system, all I can do is talk to my child," Barge said.

After a long decline in crime, nationally rates are rising again, Meyer
said.

"Right now there are increases in violence in general, and of course, we
would expect that to extend into the schools," she said. "It's been fairly
recent. Some people have attributed that to the changes in the economy and
the stresses associated with that."