By Thomas Tracy
Questions about safety at John Dewey High School were raised last week after a student suffered a broken jaw during a no-holds-barred brawl with a classmate. Cops from the 60th Precinct said that the young student was attacked at the school, located at 50 Avenue X, on Wednesday. After having the broken jaw mended at an area hospital, the teen’s father reported the attack to authorities, who arrested the 15-year-old bruiser responsible on Friday, charging him with assault. Yet some believe that the ferocity of the attack is just systemic of a bigger problem. “Things are pretty bad here [at Dewey]… somebody is going to get killed,” said a United Federation of Teachers (UFT) member assigned to the school, who called this paper Friday. The caller, who refused to give his name, alleged that the student had his jaw broken during a “gang initiation.” “We had that fight on Wednesday and two other fights this week, but nothing was done about it,” said the UFT member, who explained that safety at Dewey is expected to be brought up at a UFT meeting this week. Calls to the UFT to confirm this meeting were not returned as this paper went to press. The Department of Education (DOE) refuted the UFT member’s claims. “The father filed a police report and a student was arrested for the incident,” a DOE spokesperson said Monday. “It is not true that crime has gone up. Whenever an incident occurs, appropriate action is taken.” The spokesperson went on to say that Dewey High School has intervention programs for all students that help to counsel teens on how to behave in school as well as anti-gang and community youth programs in classrooms and in assemblies designed to curb violence. Overall “serious crime” has fallen by 17 percent throughout city schools in the last year, the spokesperson said. Assemblymember Bill Colton, a longtime neighborhood advocate for school and school safety, believes that the jaw-breaking fight at Dewey may be an isolated incident, although he had also heard that police had to break up a group of unruly teens, believed to be from Dewey, at the corner of Harway Avenue and West 16th Street recently. “We are obviously concerned and we are going to be in touch with parents and teachers,” said Colton. “Dewey is very important as a high school in this neighborhood and we want there to be quality education there,” he continued. “For that to happen, there has to be enough security to make sure that everyone feels safe.”
