A School On The Edge

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There’s bullying, and then there’s what’s going on at South Philadelphia High School.

This week, about 50 Asian students at South Philly have opted to stay away from classes. They launched their boycott after a series of fights last week between Asian and black students. The violence was so bad that seven of those involved required medical attention for cuts and bruises. Ten of the students involved in the fights, both blacks and Asians, were suspended or sent to alternative schools.

There is plenty of evidence that the school district and the police have not taken this problem seriously enough. The most obvious sign is that South Philly’s racial tensions are several years old. African Americans make up 70 percent of the school’s 1,200 students, while Asians make up about 18 percent. Asians say that they’ve complained repeatedly about attacks by other students with no results. The state of Pennsylvania has listed the school as “persistently dangerous” for the last three years.

Asian and black community leaders say that there are troublemakers among both groups of students. In fact, the current bout of violence may have been triggered when some Vietnamese students jumped a black student. But there are disturbing reports that blacks retaliated massively by roaming from class to class in search of random victims. If true, South Philadelphia is not a school with a bullying problem. It is a school out of control.

School officials and police have upped security, as you’d expect. Almost everyone seems skeptical that this will have any lasting impact. Chad Dion Lassiter is president of Black Men at Penn, a prominent group of local social workers. He told the Philadelphia Daily News that the school has a lot of heavy lifting to do prevent another blowup.

District officials promised culture-sensitivity workshops as part of a solution, but Lassiter, who mentors black youth in the city, said that may not be enough.

“There needs to be bullying prevention, intervention and anger-reduction workshops built into the curriculum,” he said. “It’s long overdue."