Classroom Disarmament

For some public school systems, arms control is an everyday concern. In Boston, for instance, hundreds of knives and other weapons are confiscated from city pupils each year. At one time those caught red-handed were automatically expelled. But for the past year hundreds have been sent instead to a yellow brick school building in the working-class Roslindale section. At the Barron Assessment and Counseling Center, as the place is called, they go through a five-to-ten-day program designed to get them to put down their knives and pick up their books.

"We've done things with these kids that no one else could do," boasts Director Franklin Tucker, a former high school assistant principal. His center opened last February after Boston schools suffered a spate of highly publicized violent crimes and a chilling upsurge in weapons -- more than 90 confiscated in one month. Roughly 300 students, ranging in age from eight to 21, have participated so far.

At any one time about 15 to 20 students, almost a third of them girls, are in the program. Upon a student's arrival, counselors gather a personal history, which often reveals that a pattern of academic decline began with some crisis: the death of a parent, an episode of sexual abuse. During their daily 5 1/2 hours, students do regular schoolwork and take part in a much praised program developed by Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, the state's public health commissioner, that tries to teach them how to discharge anger without resorting to violence. The school also uses scare-tactic "field trips." At Boston's Charles Street jail, for instance, students talk to inmates about prison life and learn that offenders as young as 14 can be tried as adults in Massachusetts. Explains Tucker: "It's a way of letting these kids know that the customary smack on the hand is going to stop."

The program, costing $360,000 annually, appears to be having some success, at least in the disarmament area. In almost a year only six program graduates have been caught again with weapons. (A second offense means expulsion.) Tucker is now devising a plan for a full-time alternative school for students who don't seem able to make it in regular schools. "The alternative school will be the education of the future," he says. "We have to take our schools back. We have to."