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Beat Down

Cleveland teachers swap stories of school violence.

By Bradley Campbell 

Marion-Sterling school, a two-story brick structure on East 30th near Carnegie, sits among a jumbled mass of housing projects. Rusted fences surround its parking lot like a moat. Inside, the floors are concrete, the halls cluttered with dusty boxes of textbooks and poster board.

It's amid this mess that Daniel Lewis teaches. He's a small man, 5 foot 6 and 155 pounds, not much bigger than a large fifth-grader. A former technician in the Navy, he brought to his teaching career an exacting wardrobe: pressed slacks, neatly tucked-in dress shirt, and a taut knot to keep his tie in place through the day. Beneath his sleeve, there's a Pegasus tattoo on his bicep, the physical evidence of his time on the USS Kitty Hawk carrier.

Lewis is 49. A seventh- and eighth-grade language-arts and science teacher, he possesses a soft spot for Irish limericks and Alice in Wonderland. He's been happily leading his students down the rabbit hole for 11 years now.

He's good at what he does.

He used to be better.

On a fall day in 2005, Lewis was lingering in the hallway during his prep period when he heard the sound of crashing chairs, accompanied by a chorus of screams and shouts echoing into the hall. He rushed to the commotion and found a classroom in chaos. Two eighth-graders, at least six feet each, with the builds of budding linebackers, were entangled. They were flailing fists at each other's heads. Both had their shirts off.

Two fellow teachers — women even smaller than Lewis — rushed to pry them apart. Lewis was close behind. There would be no security guards to follow. There weren't any assigned to the school back then.

Lewis wedged his way between the boys. He ordered one into the hall. Grudgingly, the boy obeyed. But as he stepped out of the room, the trash-talking started again.

Lewis shut the room's French doors, hoping to form a barrier between the two. But the doors had large glass half-moon windows. And the boy in the hall was kicking wildly at the glass. With one thunderous blast, his foot went through the window. His toe and shards of glass flew directly into Lewis' groin.

Lewis felt the air exit his stomach, but he held the door tightly. The school's principal and several more teachers arrived and wrestled the boy to the ground, pinning him on his stomach until police came to haul him away.

Battered but somehow uncut, Lewis rested briefly in the office before returning to his class to finish the day.

As he drove home that afternoon, motoring down 90 in his Ford sedan, pulling from cigarette after cigarette, he replayed the fight in his head. It wasn't the flailing arms and shattering glass that stood out to Lewis. It was his tie. The student hadn't grabbed it that morning. But Lewis imagined the leverage a kid could gain by yanking it in a fight. He decided from then on that an open collar would have to do. "I have about a hundred ties just sitting in my closet at home," he says three years later. "I hope that someday I'll feel comfortable enough to wear one again."

Cleveland Municipal School District has reported 212 threats to and assaults on teachers so far this year — a number, says union chief Joanne DeMarco, that's actually down from last year. But it's the severity of the beatings, not the rate, that's thrown violence toward teachers into the news. It even led one Plain Dealer columnist to advocate the return of corporal punishment.

Somehow, parents seem to play minor roles in the storyline.

When Lewis started in 1997, he says, his remedy for misbehavior was simple: a single call to the parent. The student always returned the next day acting angelic. Now, Lewis says, he makes more calls and sees fewer results. Rather than embarrassed, parents are often defensive. The problem isn't them or their child; it's those woeful Cleveland schools and their teachers. Sometimes they cite a syndrome for their child's behavior. Sometimes they don't pick up the phone at all.

And sometimes, as Sheryl Hall learned last year, the parents want to fight too.

Hall is a preschool special-ed teacher at H. Barbara Booker School, a K-8 school near West 67th and Lorain. From the outside, it looks abandoned. Heavy metal doors stay locked from the inside at all times. Sun-stained curtains block views into the school. To get inside, parents push a nickel-size black buzzer near the entrance and wait.

Like Lewis, Hall is small — 5 foot 1 at most. Moving around campus on the tips of her toes, greeting every student who passes, she has the sprightly bounce of a rookie teacher. Her hair is brown and frizzy, and pulled into a ponytail. But gray roots expose her veteran status.

Every morning, Hall drives to school in her red convertible Volkswagen Cabrio — 45 miles from her place in Stow. She makes her way to the school's small cafeteria, which doubles as a gym and an auditorium — the "gymno-café-torium," as the teachers call it. It's crammed with tables and milk crates, portable basketball hoops and volleyball nets.

It was during breakfast last January, Hall says, when she stepped between a girl and boy in the midst of what seemed like a standard-issue grade-school spat: One girl, a first-grader, had tried to swipe the breakfast of her even smaller cousin, a tiny kindergarten boy. As the kids scuffled, Hall moved quickly between them, sentencing them to time-outs on either side of the cafeteria. The event slipped from Hall's memory soon after. That afternoon, she watched the two cousins walk home from school — together.

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