So remember in February when that Pakistani kid got the stuffing beat out of him by kids at his school? Jeremayah Daniels, that kid my parents knew whose nose was broken by his classmates? This week (right in time for school), Philadelphia Weekly is running a story called “Asian Students Under Assault,” which profiles Daniel among other Asian immigrants targeted by their classmates.
Here’s what they say about Daniel.
He was in the stairwell, exiting Fels at the end of the school day. Other students who walked by never offered to help. With blood pouring down his face and splattered all over his clothes, Daniel left the building, stopped only by a safety officer who asked if he wanted to see the nurse. No one called 911. No reports were taken by the school that day. No one from the school called afterward to learn about his condition. And no arrests were immediately made.
Grrr. How ridiculous. Thankfully Daniel was able to get to a new school, George Washington High School (whose safety is also questionable at times). ( And I still say his parents should’ve sued. At least he’d have gotten a proper nose job.) But how many other kids are left behind to live in fear? A lot. The article says about 5.9% of the students in the Philadelphia School District are Asian. Which is why the school has established something called the “International Welcome Squad.” The squad hooks up students who are new to the country with someone else who speaks the same language as them. And this kid supposedly takes them all around school and helps them get acquainted with American teenagerhood.
Okay, um. Excuse me. This buddy system is old business, School District experts. I call it a gang. In my hood (Olney), here’s how the Asian kids did it. What you did was, you got together (mostly the Laotians and the Vietnamese, i.e. the remaining Asians in the neighborhood) and you found the biggest/toughest black or Hispanic kid in your class and you beat the crap out of him the first day of school. You probably got in trouble. Maybe you even got suspended. But at least nobody messed with you for the rest of the year. It worked.
Now me and my brother, we wouldn’t have lasted a day at Olney High School. Our parents sent us to Christian private schools which taught us unhelpful things like (*gasp) “turning the other cheek.” And our Korean neighbors, well, their parents did whatever they could to get them to a suburban school. As a result, by the time we got to high school, the Asian kids who’d played together as kids had pretty much drifted apart. The kids in magnet schools were headed to college. The Asian kids in neighborhood schools were dealing drugs , dropping out of school and continuing to get in trouble.
It makes sense that Asian families without money stress education so highly. As this Citypaper article said, the magnet school can be a family’s only way out:
Students can apply to a maximum of five district high schools, and as many charters as they like. If a student chooses not to apply — or if she’s rejected by her top five schools — she can still attend her neighborhood high school.
The additional choices have been a welcome change for many families. But the process of choosing and applying to high schools has become both complex and high pressure — especially when you throw in the fact that many don’t see the district’s 31 neighborhood high schools as viable options.
For some FACTS students, “Their neighborhood school is unfortunately just not a very good option, safety-wise or academically,” says Young.
So what’s a poor Asian kid to do? Study really hard and hope that despite a limited number of slots, you’ll get into a “safe” school. And if not, end up at a local school where you’re constantly fighting to stay alive? Scary. Very scary.
(On a side note, as the article correctly pointed out, non-Asian immigrants often get the same treatment. African immigrants have a heck’ve a time in Philadelphia’s public schools.)
Words fail me.
I will not soil your blog with the profanity I wish to speak.
Back when my mother was teaching in a recently desegregated school system in rural Virginia (and by “recently desegregated,” I mean she returned to teaching in 1964, so she was teaching as the system went from “token desegregation”–one, then eleven black kids in the white high school–to “full integration”–meaning the black high school became the junior high and the white high school became the senior high, and everyone went to the same schools, except for those who opted to go to the newly formed “seg academy”), she witnessed nothing like this.
The school was more likely to face problems among the parents (like the time a rumor of a race riot in the school spread–it was never tracked down–and parents started showing up during the school day, while the students looked out the classroom windows and wondered, “Why are all these cars here?”) than among the students. Nobody got beat up.
I am appalled.
Then, again, they didn’t need metal detectors either.