BALTIMORE (Map, News) - A metal plate holds together Frank Principato’s face. A student threw a chair at his head and shattered his cheekbone in three places.

The teacher’s spine is swollen and his right eye pushed back into his skull.

And he can’t move his right arm up or back without feeling intense pain from a sprained rotator cuff.

He’s had plastic surgery on his face and will need more.

“I could have died,” he said. “I could have been blinded.”

Principato, 60, a soft-spoken man from Gwynn Oak, started teaching at William C. March Middle School in February. Two seventh-graders attacked him March 11, and he now collects worker’s compensation as he recuperates.

A girl punched him 20 times in the face and neck. A boy threw a 25-pound metal desk, which flew over another teacher’s head before striking Principato in the head, breaking his nose and fracturing his cheekbone and eye socket. Blood gushed down his face, covering his shirt.

The school nurse called Principato’s wife, asking her to take him to the hospital, saying the school didn’t want to call an ambulance, he said.

His wife pleaded with the nurse to call an ambulance. Principato spent the next four days at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he still goes for doctor appointments. He pressed assault charges against the two students, who go on trial this month.

“I have now been out of work for longer than my teaching career,” he said. But the students were allowed to return to school to take the state exams.

Before teaching, Principato ran two Baltimore drug-treatment and mental-health programs for homeless people. In decades of working with potentially dangerous clients, he was never assaulted, he said.

He noticed many of the addicts he treated were young and had little education. He thought maybe he could help them earlier in their lives by teaching.

“It would be difficult to find a middle school teacher who has not been assaulted or is close to a teacher who was assaulted,” said Principato, who also had a student threaten to shoot him. “Teachers are so undervalued.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com