Milwaukee Public School Chaos

Another day, another violent outburst, another lockdown.

From The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

John Burroughs Middle School, 6700 N. 80th St., was locked down shortly after the school opened at 8:45 a.m. because of a number of fights that broke out among students, according to Milwaukee Public Schools spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin.

St. Aubin said there were no injuries reported and no weapons were involved but all students were confined to their classrooms as a precautionary measure. Several groups of students were involved in fights in different locations but it is unclear if they were related.

The school principal was at a meeting at another site at the time of the incident and other administrators decided to initiate the lockdown to cool things down, St. Aubin said.

Two security aides were in the building as normal and additional help was being sent in, St. Aubin said.

There is a second school within the middle school and St. Aubin said she did not know if the groups involved were from the main school or the second school.

The school day at Burroughs begins with several fights.

Administrators call for a lockdown to "cool things down."

It sounds like they feared a riot was brewing, like a prison riot.

Burroughs seems like it should qualify as a dangerous school, but it doesn't.

According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin has NO dangerous schools.

At Todd County High School in South Dakota last school year, 16 calls to police helped earn the school an unsavory distinction in the eyes of the state and federal government: The rural school was slapped with the label "persistently dangerous."

Under the 6-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, each state must define a "persistently dangerous" school and allow parents to transfer their children out of them.

But at Milwaukee's Fritsche Middle School, 187 calls to police over a recent six-month period did not make the school persistently dangerous under Wisconsin's definition.

Neither did 263 calls at Bay View High School, or 299 at Custer.

The fact that Todd County's high school is "dangerous" while many of Milwaukee's high schools do not come close to earning the designation highlights dramatic inconsistencies in the way the federal safety provision is applied, a Journal Sentinel analysis shows.

The analysis also found that the dangerous schools provision does little to foster accountability on school safety issues - and could actually discourage accountability in some schools and states.

Milwaukee does not have a single dangerous school. Neither does Chicago. Nor Boston. Nor Los Angeles.

All told, 40 schools throughout the country were labeled dangerous at the start of this school year - nine of them in Philadelphia.

None is in Wisconsin.

I knew it! It's Bush's fault.

His No Child Left Behind Act is causing the problems.

Federal law now requires all states to have a dangerous-school definition. Many of the states, however, have defined "persistently dangerous" in such a way that schools are unlikely to earn the label unless they have a large number of violent incidents over an extended period, and are thorough in their reporting.

In Wisconsin, to earn the label of persistently dangerous, a large school needs to suspend more than 5% of its students for weapons incidents or expel more than 1% of the students for assault, weapons or dangerous behavior for three straight years.

A school of 1,000 students, for instance, would have to suspend 50 students every year for three straight years for weapons incidents.

Put another way, a large high school could find a gun every day for a week, and it would likely not qualify as persistently dangerous under Wisconsin's definition.

What bugs me is that libs blame the Feds for problems, yet they want more and more federal regulation and they want your money.

If there's a problem with no Wisconsin school being designated dangerous, blame Governor Jim Doyle and the Wisconsin legislature.

Where has the eductaion Gov been anyway?

Has he had anything to say about the meltdown of MPS?

Bottom line: It doesn't matter that there officially are NO dangerous schools in Wisconsin.

What matters is what students and faculty are experiencing on a day to day basis.

Label it however you want -- dangerous, not dangerous.

Loaded guns, brawls, assaults on teachers -- That's not a positive learning environment.

That's not a fair statement.

It's an excellent environment IF the goal is to teach students to be thugs and send them out to apply all that knowledge in the wider community.
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Here's an update.

A student at the John Burroughs Middle School hit a teacher over the head with the receiver of a wall mounted telephone this morning, the most serious of what appears to be three separate incidents that prompted a lockdown of the building.

Roseann St. Aubin, a Milwaukee Public Schools spokeswoman, said the teacher was treated by paramedics at the school but did not require hospitalization.

The student was attempting to make a call from the telephone shortly after classes at the school located at 6700 N. 80th St. began at 8:45 a.m.

The teacher, St. Aubin said, told the student to return to his seat but the student hit the teacher with the receiver.

I can't imagine ever hitting a teacher, or anyone, with a phone.

If one of my children did that to a teacher, I would be horrified. It would be a VERY big deal in our household.

I hope this kid's parents make it a big deal.

What are the odds of that?