Gene J. Mann, a forty year veteran of New York City public schools, will never forget the image of students watching through a classroom window as a security officer collapsed in their doorway.
Both the security officer and Gene were trying to break up a melee in the hallway of Eastern District High School, a violence-prone school in Brooklyn that was eventually shut down. The security officer had a heart attack and slumped into the doorway as the students inside looked on in “absolute terror,” says Gene.
Though the security officer succumbed to a physical weakness, and didn’t die as a result of the violence he was trying to combat, it still stands out among a string of dangerous incidents Gene encountered at that Brooklyn school.
“I was always one of those people advocating for security,” says Gene. “We really needed it and I’d like to stress that really needing it wasn’t just a matter of protecting adults. It was needed to protect the children.”
Gene says he believes every student in the school was related to a death by gunshot wound.
“Kids carried weapons not so much to bring to school, but for the trip to school,” he says. “The security there made the school the safest place in the neighborhood.”
As I talk to Gene, I begin to reconsider what used to be entertaining images of high school violence. I’ve often bragged about leaving my AP calculus class at my public high school and encountering a group of students running to the cafeteria to see a “Fight!” I have used that anecdote to illustrate the reason why I’m glad I went to public school—good academics punctuated by the sight of a shirt-ripping girl fight in seventh grade, or a cafeteria brawl in 12th grade.
But my public school experience in Gainesville, Florida was a far cry from the realities of violence in some bigger city schools. Gene, who said he would still teach at Eastern District High School if it hadn’t been closed, knows the real toll of school violence.
