WHAT IT'S COME TO. We're not looking at reserve passenger screening capacity at an overstretched airport. Those metal detectors are set up on the numbers I used to line up along for roll call in gym class at Milwaukee Hamilton. The photo illustrates a school-wide weapons scan in progress. I understand that each high school has at least one such search each academic year.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photo by Rick Wood.

The weapons scans appear to be a necessary evil in a school system dealing with increasingly violent students and parents.

"It's not just in high schools," said Dorothy Johnson, a teacher at Wisconsin Avenue Elementary School. "If our kids don't feel safe in elementary school, how are they going to feel safe in middle or high school?"

Last school year, police arrived at Keefe Avenue Elementary School after hearing that a mother, Andreya Jones, had stormed a classroom in search of a teacher's assistant. She was reportedly angry that her son's teachers kept calling her.

The assistant tried to back up as Jones approached. But Jones drew closer and started punching. When a school official arrived, he saw the teachers assistant flying across the room toward a wall, literally airborne. Jones later pleaded no
contest to battery and was convicted.

The attack exemplified what some teachers and staff describe as a new brazenness. A student sexually assaulted a teacher in front of a full classroom at Madison High School, touching her indecently on top of her desk. Two young women fought outside Bradley Tech High School with babies in their arms. Two sisters, both middle school students, even attacked a police officer.

The author of the article offers an editorial comment that appears to rule some approaches to misbehavior in school out of bounds.

The case of middle school sisters who attacked a police officer last year shows that there are no simple solutions.

One of the sisters was suspended at least eight times at the school prior to the assault, according to court records. In the 2 1/2 years before the incident, she had attended four different schools.

This fall, she enrolled at another MPS school. In November, she was arrested for shoplifting a second time. A witness to the incident said the girl seemed to have "no regard to penalties."

At the time of that arrest, the girl, then 15, was about three months pregnant.

The father, in his 20s, left Milwaukee for Chicago to avoid charges of statutory rape, according to court documents.

Last month, the young girl was due to became a mother.

At one time, the Milwaukee Public Schools attempted to inculcate the habits of the middle class in students. Whether students were on collegiate or vocational tracks (yes, those things existed) all understood that responsible Milwaukeeans would have the discipline to be up at six in order to catch a bus to be able to punch in by seven if that's when the shift started, as well as the discipline to study after school. That inculcation started well before junior high (the middle schools are a relatively recent change.) The habits of the middle class are particularly valuable to people currently living in straitened circumstances. The way I heard it from my parents years ago, it went "there's no shame in being poor, but be ashamed to be messy." Perhaps that lesson ought come even before reading or figuring or self-esteem.