there were messages on facebook about the pending attack. and even with three days notice, the school wasn t able to stop it. and susan, i also know that you were able to research what s going on even in the earliest of classrooms in kindergarten, finding that there are episodes of violence happening there. so when you look at an age group like that, you have to think, well, maybe this is being learned at home, and responsibility of what s going on in the city needs to be cracking down on a lot of these parents. absolutely. and that s something you will hear some of the experts that we quote say, that more needs to be done at home, and that parents have to start taking more of the responsibility. our police commissioner has said that, and others in the city, as well. all right, susan, great work. and we encourage everybody to check out the reporting that you re doing there for the philadelphia inquirer. thanks again, susan. thank you. i want to point out to everybody, because
welcome back, everybody. for many of us, growing up in schools, they were safe places, where education was the priority, and also had a purpose. nowadays, sadly, that is not always the case. according to a year-long investigation by the philadelphia inquirer, violence in the city s school district is so widespread, so unbearable, that educators are at a loss for how to stop it. we re talking about students being hazed and beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, in attacks so commonplace, that they re actually happening in both the hallways and the classroom. teachers can t predict the kids, and the kids can t protect themselves. so how can this be happening, and how much worse can it get before it gets better? susan snyder is one of the reporters who researched and co wrote the latest installment of which is now on newsstands. she joins me to talk about it. susan, nice to have you with us. first of all, the study is
incredible. the scope, mind-blowing, as we read this. so explain to all of us what initially sparked the investigation. certainly. last school year, we had incidents at south philadelphia high school, a series of attacks on asian students. and the school district really was slow to respond to that. and so we decided we really need to take a look at what was going on in the schools. so we had had a team of five reporters who spent the last year really looking at every facet of violence in the schools, and what we found was alarmin alarming. ran an elite case is about a student at one of the high school, and she was in her class, taking an algebra test. and she wasn t safe there. a group of students who had walked the halls for several minutes burst into her classroom and attacked her right there before her teacher and her classmates. susan, in all of your research, did you ever get an idea of how things actually got to this point? i mean, you know, all of us, parents, educators, you
owe. people had been armed to the teeth, and they were attacking these convoys of rebels going through their towns, 360 degrees. so much so that the rebels then pulled back. first they pulled back to a town about 60 or 70 miles east of sirte. now we understand, information is that they re back on the edge of raslanoof, the oil and gas station, took that two days ago, back 50 or 6 0 miles from where they hit that wall of fire yesterday. obviously, thomas, they want to take sirte. sirte for a lot of symbolic and strategic reasons. but what s happened, what s changed is that the first couple of days of that push, where they made, you know they were going probably two or three hundred miles in about two days, they met no resistance at all, because nato war planes had taken out gadhafi s troops, tanks and artillery. and it was a cake walk for them. now they are in gadhafi territory. even 50, 60, 70 miles to the east of sirte, that is all controlled by gadhafi. the overwhelming m