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January 10, 2007

School chief: Adults need to learn nonviolence

The Woonsocket schools superintendent said today she plans to take an aggressive stance against the feud between two 13-year-old girls that led to the arrest of the girls, their mothers and two other female students.

At tonight’s School Committee meeting, Supt. Maureen B. Macera plans to ask parents in the school district to speak with their community leaders – at local churches, housing corporations and health centers – to explore how everyone can work together “to help educate the adults on nonviolent behavior.”

“I want everyone at the table,” she said.

The school has nonviolence programs – for its students – but it’s not enough, Macera said.

Although the district had involved a social worker, counselor and school administrators to mediate between the two girls who fought on Monday, Macera said it hadn’t worked.

If students are going home and the nonviolent message isn’t enforced – “and very much the opposite is enforced” – more must be done, she said. “Home and community pressures or parental pressures” were too strong, in this case, for the school intervention to work, Macera said.

-- projo.com staff writer Kate Bramson

“Now this is an isolated incident,” Macera said of the Monday afternoon fight that broke out when one mother drove her already suspended daughter to the school to fight another girl. “But I’m going to take a much more aggressive stance with it because I don’t want even the slightest opportunity for this to occur again.”

Macera said the two mothers will attend a hearing sometime this week before a disciplinary officer for the Woonsocket School District before the case goes before the School Committee. The superintendent doesn’t typically attend such hearings, but Macera said she’s making an exception in this case and plans to be there.

Tonight’s School Committee meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Woonsocket Area Career and Technical Center, 400 Aylesworth Ave., in Room 303. The superintendent typically offers her report at the end of the meetings, but she said she’ll ask the committee chairman if she can address the community before the meeting starts.

Macera said she doesn’t know what prompted the fight.

Posted by Kate Bramson at 12:22 PM | Permalink

January 10, 2007

School chief: Adults need to learn nonviolence

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