Student crime is mostly in larger urban schools, yesterday's report by the Department of Education concluded. It said 43 percent of public schools surveyed reported zero crimes - serious or minor - in the 1996-97 school year. Only crimes reported to police were tabulated.
President Clinton seized on the statistics to push his education agenda. He urged Congress to pass a 1999 budget that includes additional spending to hire 100,000 teachers, modernize older school buildings and keep schools open for youth activities after hours on the schooldays.
"We do not need to - and we must not ever have to - make a choice between safety and high standards, between crime-free schools and modern classrooms," Clinton told a White House ceremony attended by educators, law enforcement officials and members of Congress.
Clinton said he was troubled that the Education Department survey estimated, based on data from a 1,200-school sample, that public schools nationwide experienced more than 11,000 fights in which weapons were used, 4,000 rapes and other sexual assaults and 7,000 robberies.
White teenagers are still more likely to commit suicide than blacks. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a report released today, says its latest findings suggest that suicide is an "important and growing problem" among young African Americans and may be linked partly to the growth of the black middle class.
In the report, researchers cite no conclusive cause of the rising suicide rate but say that since many more black youths are being reared in upwardly mobile families, more of them also may be experiencing the stresses such an environment can create. "These youths may adopt the coping behaviors of the larger society in which suicide is more commonly used in response to depres
sion and hopelessness," the report states.
Although the number of young blacks who commit suicide is still small - less than five of every 100,000 black teenagers take their own lives - the rate is much more comparable now to the suicide rate of white teenagers nationally, which is also rising.
Salmonella is a leading cause of food poisoning in the nation, responsible each year for about 40,000 cases of stomach pain and diarrhea, some of them fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The treatment, a combination of 29 bacteria, operates under the principle of "competitive exclusion."
03-20-98
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