BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The teenage girl cranks up the radio, and hip-hop blasts from 92Q.

Her art teacher, trying to show students how to paint Japanese characters on umbrellas, asks the girl to turn down the music.

Instead, the girl stands up and gets inches from Jolita Berry’s face.

“You’re in my personal space,” Berry tells the 16-year-old. “You need to back up. If you hit me, I’m gonna defend myself.”

The girl’s friends egg her on, shouting “Hit her, yo!”

Her heart pounding faster, Berry glances at the students as they call out for blood at Reginald F. Lewis High School in Northeast Baltimore.

The girl sucker punches Berry on the left side of her face, bursting a blood vessel below her eye. Then the girl knocks her to the floor, straddles her and punches her again and again. Students jump from their seats, cheering, and several open their cell phones to record the beating.

“Get off me!” Berry yells. “Have you lost your mind?”

Finally, one girl runs into the hallway to call for help from other teachers.

Footage of the beating surfaces online, prompting Berry to speak out against the violence that besets so many classrooms, against the physical and emotional abuse hundreds of teachers in Baltimore — and thousands elsewhere — suffer at the hands of their students.

Students ‘running wild’

The April 4 attack grabbed national attention. Berry, who has taught in city schools for two years, appeared on “The Today Show,” CNN, Geraldo Rivera’s “Geraldo at Large” and “Inside Edition.”

But four weeks after the brutal attack, Berry insists few would have taken notice but for the video. The Examiner reported several similar incidents last year, drawing little response.

“It’s not all about me,” says Berry, 30. “It’s about everybody who is a teacher and wants to educate our youth. And they are running wild.”

It’s become a familiar lament among teachers in Baltimore, where more than 100 students have been expelled this school year. Last year, city schools suspended students 515 times for attacking teachers.

Most attacks go unreported because teachers say they fear retribution from students or their principals.

Too often, teachers say, chaos reigns in classrooms, where students fight, set fires, throw desks, break windows, toss books, settle gang beefs and threaten teachers daily.

But teachers complain that principals look the other way, discourage reporting violence and even threaten retribution because they fear losing their jobs.

For their part, most principals, including those contacted for this article, refuse to comment about violence in classrooms.

‘Principals could care less’

After 20 years of teaching in city schools, Cindy Bush-Johnson, 47, a teacher at Moravia Park Elementary, says she’s so fed up with the violence in schools, she wants to retire.

She’s had preschoolers throw chairs and punch her in the stomach, but her administrators don’t help, she says.

Her last principal, she says, didn’t even report fires students had set.

She recalls a teacher who had her eye injured when a student used a rubber band to flick a paper clip into the teacher’s face, but the principal did nothing, she says.

“There’s chaos in classrooms, and principals could care less,” she says.

One day, at the beginning of this school year, Kim Sadberry, another teacher at Lewis High, told her ninth-grade English students to replace their books on the shelves and push their chairs under their desks when the bell rang.

Sadberry stood in the doorway, waiting for her kids to put everything back in order. But one boy didn’t want to wait, she says.

He pushed her.

“Don’t put your hands on me!” Sadberry recalls saying. 

“F--- this. I’m not listening to this,” he replied.

Principal Jean Ragin yelled at Sadberry in front of the boy and his grandparents, Sadberry says.

Ragin declined comment. But Sadberry says Ragin blamed her by saying she had instigated the attack by standing in the doorway.

The boy was back in class the next day. He never did the one-page report administrators gave him as punishment.

Sadberry, a teacher in the system since 2004, didn’t file a report with school police, she says, because when a colleague filed one after a student pulled a knife on her last year, nothing happened.

Berry says Ragin also told her she had triggered the attack by telling the girl she would defend herself.

Teachers ‘silenced’

Time and again, teachers, even ones who’ve suffered broken noses and broken arms during scuffles with students, defend most of their students as well-behaved, saying a few bullies make it miserable for everyone.

Shelye Knotts taught English at W.E.B. DuBois High School, which was formed, along with Lewis, when the violence-ridden Northern High School was broken up in 2002.

But DuBois, she says, isn’t any safer. She recalled several melees, one involving more than 100 students and drawing city police in riot gear.

After a girl assaulted a librarian in 2006, Knotts tried to take the attacker to the office.

The girl said, “Bitch, I don’t know who you think you are” and struck her in the head and back with an umbrella. Knotts later learned the girl had assaulted eight staff members over the years but was always returned to school.

When she filed a class-action grievance with the Baltimore Teachers Union against her principals and the system for failing to provide a safe environment, Knotts was fired. Fearing she wouldn’t win, Knotts took a settlement.

“Teachers are being silenced,” she says. “I’ve seen so many of my well-behaved students terrified of aggressive, bullying students who are allowed to do whatever they want. Even the best students become defiant and start to act bad so nobody bullies them.

“There’s no amount of conflict-resolution training that’s going to help when the administration empowers students to act out.”

Lydia Ebosele, a senior, can’t wait to graduate this month from Lewis High, where she has developed a resigned acceptance of the violence that breaks out routinely in classrooms and in the hallways.

The attack on Berry “makes the school look bad,” she says, walking home one recent afternoon.

“But we are known for fights. And the newly installed metal detectors won’t help.”

Berry, who still suffers nightmares and crying spells, doesn’t know whether she can ever return to teaching without fearing for her life.

“I just feel like no one’s going to be satisfied,” she says, “until somebody gets killed.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com