The New Three Rs

Some time after hours one day last week, a band of vandals broke into Manhattan's Junior High School 52 for a lively round of delinquents' sport. They plugged up a sink on the top floor, turned on the faucets and let a flood of water spread throughout the building. They invaded a science classroom, smashed its vials, overturned desks, scattered papers and exhibits over the floor. They sprayed halls and corridors with fire extinguishers, partly burned a school banner, slashed furniture in a teachers' lounge, spattered paint through two classrooms, tore up books in the library. But to veteran Manhattan teachers, all this was not unusual. In the past few years, they have become increasingly accustomed to what the New York Daily News has called the new three Rs--"rowdyism, riot and revolt."

Last week, in a special series, the News told its readers just how far the three Rs have spread. "A teen-age reign of terror." it said, "has transformed New York City's public-school system into a vast incubator of crime in which wayward and delinquent youngsters receive years of 'protection' while developing into toughened and experienced criminals." What is being done about the rising rate of rape, assault, knifings, thefts and dope addiction? Says the News: largely because of a feeling that neither the Board of Education nor Superintendent William Jansen (TIME, Oct. 19) will back them up, many teachers are just doing nothing.

P:"Official eyes are closed or hastily averted from the increasing outbreaks of assaults with deadly weapons . . . While a student riot brimmed over into the streets in front of The Bronx's Walton High . . . a harried school official could think only of keeping the news of it from the press. 'We want to keep this down,' she pleaded. 'We want no publicity.' And this at a girls' school (enrollment: 3,150), where the situation is described by teachers and students as a 'powder keg,' with girls arming themselves with knives--their own, or cutlery stolen from the school cafeteria."

P: "We asked a Bronx shopkeeper whose windows had been broken time after time by children from adjacent P.S. 51 . . . why he didn't take his case to the school principal. 'I should go to him?' he jeered. 'They break all his windows, too.' "

P:"At Frederick Douglass Junior High . . . we asked an instructor why the corridors and classrooms were scrawled with numerous variations of a single obscene theme. The teacher winced, but replied wryly: 'Oh--ah--it's sort of a school motto here.' "

P:"At Manhattan's Haaren High . . . five fires were set in a single classroom in a recent week. Only two were reported by the teacher for fear his disciplinarian slip might be showing."

P:"In some schools, teachers estimate fully half the pupils carry pushbutton switchblades or homemade zipguns. 'Many of these guns,' a teacher said, 'are made in the school machine shops in the presence of teachers who seemingly don't choose to know what is going on, or who are too timid to protest.' "

P: "Many [students] have devised ingenious flame throwers, and others carry plastic water pistols loaded with searing or blinding chemical solutions. One resourceful youngster joined the National Guard, lying about his age, for the sole purpose of stealing a submachine gun . . ."

P: "Kids threaten and have beaten up teachers who wouldn't graduate or promote them ... In Brooklyn, a teacher who reported a group of vandals to the principal was confronted in his office the next day and told he would be thrown out the window ' the next time he 'snitched.' "

P:1n one school, "a teacher recently stopped a fight between two students. Later that day, he found his new car ... scratched and marked up by one of the boys. He reported the matter to the principal, but was told, he said, that since the incident occurred outside the school, it was beyond the school's jurisdiction. Last year a student roughed up a male teacher without being disciplined. Another student struck a woman teacher . . ."

P: "At Jamaica High School in Queens, a teacher challenged three teen-age intruders in the corridors . . . They turned on him savagely and cut him up with their fists . . . Though he suffered severe lacerations, the teacher failed to report the incident to the police."

P: Said one teacher, on being asked why too few delinquents are reported or punished: "The teachers are afraid of the principals. The principals are afraid of their superintendents. The superintendents are afraid of the board [of education], and the board is afraid of the truth. Everybody is afraid but the kids--and they seem to be afraid of nobody."

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