Clinton to Hold Forum on School Safety

NEW ORLEANS —  Targeting behavior that runs the gamut from disruptive classroom wisecracks to deadly schoolyard shootings, President Clinton announced an offensive Monday aimed at restoring discipline to America’s troubled schools.

The president said that he will convene a special White House conference on school safety in October so that educators, law enforcement officials, students and victims can hash out the problem.

“Learning cannot occur unless our schools are safe and orderly places where teachers can teach and children can learn,” Clinton said in a speech to the American Federation of Teachers’ national convention. “Whenever there is chaos where there should be calm, wherever there is disorder where there should be discipline . . , it is a threat to the strength and vitality of America.”

The focus on school violence comes amid a rash of schoolhouse shootings by young pupils that began last fall in Pearl, Miss., and has left 14 teachers and students dead and three dozen injured in states across the country. But Clinton said that the problem extends much beyond those acts.

“In most schools, it’s not the sensational acts of violence but small acts of aggression--threats, scuffles, constant back talk--that take a terrible toll on the atmosphere of learning, on the morale of teachers, on the attitudes of other students,” Clinton said.

Clinton noted statistics showing that three of four students say they have trouble with disruptive classmates and that 81% of teachers say undisciplined students take up the majority of their time.

The president repeated his calls for wider use of school uniforms, tough curfews and anti-gun policies “to restore discipline to our schools and order to our children’s lives.”

Although Clinton repeatedly said that school safety should not be a partisan issue, the safety conference Oct. 15 will come just weeks before the midterm congressional elections, allowing Democrats to press an issue that they see as a vote-winner.

Clinton’s speech, sandwiched between fund-raisers and golf outings, also knocked congressional Republicans for blocking his wider education agenda, which includes initiatives to reduce class sizes, build new schools and connect classrooms to the Internet.

As an alternative, GOP lawmakers have pressed for education vouchers to give students the choice to avoid failing schools altogether. Clinton is expected to veto a voucher pilot project that Congress approved for the District of Columbia.

With the federal government’s influence in education limited, Clinton touted local initiatives from Milwaukee to Long Beach, Calif., that he said are making a difference. He praised a Milwaukee policy that allows police to stop youths on the streets during school hours and cited recent data from Long Beach showing that school uniforms have helped boost attendance and reduce campus crime.

“Students have told me . . . when one student is no longer obsessed by another student’s sneakers or designer jackets and where students are focused not on appearances but learning, crime and violence go down, attendance and learning go up,” he said.

Clinton’s focus on the atmosphere inside the classroom was well received by members of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union with nearly 1 million members. But teachers said that answers will not come easy.

“The greatest obstruction to education is the lack of discipline,” agreed Jerry Marcus, the dean of students at a Philadelphia middle school. “There are kids who don’t want to learn whose presence interferes with the education of others.”

Barbara Prideaux, a special education teacher in Staten Island, N.Y., said that the real answers will have to come from the home, not the school.

“We’re getting undisciplined, disrespectful people,” she said. “They curse in the halls. Even the girls curse like truck drivers. These are kids who come from violent and undisciplined homes. That is their reality.”

In a radio address in May, just after a deadly shooting in Springfield, Ore., Clinton attributed the violence to “a changing culture” of violent movies and video games that teach gunplay to the young.