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Beat Down

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But the next morning, as Hall prepared for another day of breakfast duty, loud pounds suddenly banged against the solid, windowless metal door that led to the outside. They were too hard to be from a hungry student. Hall pushed open the door. She was greeted by a large, obviously angry woman.

"She asked me if I was Mrs. Hall," recalls the teacher. "I said yes. And then I felt my head hit the back of the door."

The woman, a giant compared to Hall, grabbed the tiny, 56-year-old teacher in her hands, Hall says. She slammed her repeatedly against the door, hollering the whole time: "You're the no-good mother-fucking bitch who threw my child against the ceiling!"

Students pleaded with the woman to let their teacher go, but she didn't relent. Hall managed to duck under the woman's arm, and sprinted toward another exit. As help came — security guards, the school's principal, and two police officers restrained the woman — Hall retreated to a fellow teacher's room. She'd escaped with no major injuries, she recalls, but was trembling and weeping.

Later that night, Hall would ask the school custodian to escort her to her car. But first, she says, she finished the day. She recalls trying to explain to her students that sometimes, adults fight. But they knew all about that. She asked them what they did when that happened at home. They crawl under the bed, they said. "But eventually, once the fear goes away, you come out, right?" she asked. They nodded. "Well, Mrs. Hall came back out from under her bed. You're safe. Things are okay."

Hall later learned that the woman who came looking for her that day was the mother and caretaker of the two kids she'd separated the day before. She filled out a report describing the incident, she says. To her knowledge, nothing happened to the mother. But at the principal's request, she says, the children were transferred to a new school.

While Hall fears what might happen at that new school — after all, they took the mother with them — she's happy to have a principal who supported her. In the bureaucratic black hole of large public school districts, an administrator who gets something done — who acts — is a somewhat rare and exotic creature.

Jillian Ahrens can attest to that. On a muggy fall day last September, Ahrens, a kindergarten teacher at an East Side K-8 school, was getting ready to escort her students back from PE class. The air inside the school was thick that day, she remembers. To combat the heat, she wore a lightweight top and sandals that exposed her toes.

As her students flooded out of the gym, she reminded them to form their lines. As usual, one little boy, who happened to be quick to anger, ignored her instructions.

A kindergartner disinterested in order was no surprise to Ahrens. But what happened next was: To prove his dismay, she says, the boy marched up to Ahrens and stomped on her foot, throwing his weight — not a lot, but enough — onto her big toe. It was a direct hit.

Ahrens let out a quick, high-pitched scream. Her toe throbbed. Blood rushed to it in steady pumps. Once she regained herself, she escorted the little boy, along with her class, to the office. Every step sent a sharp pang up her leg as if a glass shard were pressed into her toenail.

Like Lewis and Hall, Ahrens was back in the classroom before long, finishing out the day. After school, with her toe swelling like a popped tendon, she filled out the necessary forms. That the boy was just a kindergartner didn't matter to Ahrens — not by then. In nine years at the school, she says, it was the fifth time a student had attacked her.

The little boy was suspended. But within two days, her principal decided not to rule it an assault, which kept the student from being transferred. Ahrens appealed, sending photos of her toe and a doctor's statement to the district office. But the superintendent sided with the principal, she says.

Along with the incidents reported each year, teachers like Ahrens believe many more go unreported — by teachers who don't want the trouble or administrators who play the incidents down. Mostly, they say, teachers have grown accustomed to the steady wave of abuse. Plus, reporting the incidents is tedious and takes away from what they're really trying to do: teach.

Still, Ahrens believes that schools — lower schools, at least — are safe. It's a fraction of students that create the havoc, and most of the violence toward teachers occurs when they break apart fights — an act built into any teacher's DNA, but which their union is now trying to discourage.

Breaking up a fight is what sent South High's James Cappetto to the hospital. When two students began whaling on each other in January, he tried to stop them. He soon felt the weight of fists beating his head — possibly with brass knuckles. He left school with a fractured skull and three broken vertebrae. Now he sits at home in a neck brace, popping painkillers to make it through the day.

When an account of Cappetto's beating appeared in The Plain Dealer, his injuries made Marylou Prescott shudder. A veteran English teacher at Lincoln-West High School, Prescott recalls facing a dilemma much like Cappetto's.

As she prepared for class one day, shouts roared from outside her door. A pack of students was swarming around two boys. She raced across her classroom and into the hall. But several students blocked her way to keep her from intervening. They also ignored her pleas to get security. Prescott says one student turned to her and said: "No. You go back into the room." The group wanted the fight to go on. They wanted to see it through until the end.

As Prescott recalls that day, she shakes her head and looks toward nowhere, staring hard at the memory. "For some reason," she says, "these students view life as having no purpose. They don't see what a better life education will bring to them. And as a result, their actions are scaring teachers.

"And that," she says, "prevents teachers from providing any education at all."

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