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D.C. school violence

The Heritage Foundation uncovered some alarming statistics about violence in D.C. schools by filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the Metropolitan Police Department that inquired how often officers were dispatched to school zones.

Information provided to the conservative think tank from the police department said D.C. public schools reported 3,500 incidents of crime during the 2007-08 school year, many more than D.C. charter or private schools reported.

Of the calls by public schools, 912 concerned violent incidents, including one homicide and 43 sex offenses. The commonest violent crime was simple assault; there were 648 reports of this and 114 reports of aggravated assault.

“For students heading back to school this week, many of them are going to be experiencing these things or will be around them and everyone should find that unacceptable,” said Heritage Foundation researcher Dan Lips, a co-author of the report.

Dunbar Senior High School in Ward 5 and Anacostia Senior High School in Ward 8 were listed as the two most dangerous D.C. public schools. Police responded to 55 assault calls from Dunbar and 47 from Anacostia.

One of the more shocking assault statistics, however, comes from the elementary schools. The two most dangerous elementary schools had numbers of simple and aggravated assaults higher than the middle schools. Webb Elementary School in Ward 5 reported 35 incidents of aggravated and simple assault. Moten Elementary in Ward 8 had 30. By comparison, Kelly Miller Middle School in Ward 7 had the highest number of assaults for that category with 14.

“Crime and violence appears to be a problem in a handful of schools in the District, and that should give reason for the community look at what’s happening in the less safe schools versus the others to establish some best practices,” Mr. Lips said.

The Heritage Foundation is a vocal supporter of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to let D.C. families choose safer schools.

However, Jennifer Calloway, a spokeswoman for D.C. Public Schools, said the report distorted the data and that “school calls” do not measure actual violence in schools.

“The report uses data that reflects both what is going on in our schools’ buildings, and what is happening on the streets near our schools,” she said in an e-mail.

“Calls for service do not reflect the outcome of the response, nor does it take into consideration the time of day of the incident and whether it had any relation to school safety,” she said. “For example, the report references a homicide at an elementary school. No DCPS student or employee was killed, in reality there was a body found in the woods and the closest building happened to be our school - a very different story.”

She said the school system has experienced an 18 percent drop in serious violence.

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