The Footman case points to serious and common lapses in the Philadelphia School District's handling of special-education students who can become violent and disruptive, tormenting teachers, staff and fellow students.
One student with serious emotional problems can demand almost all of a teacher's class time - even cause havoc throughout a school, as did Footman, now 15.
As a group, special-education students are responsible for an inordinate number of assaults on teachers and other school staff. While just 14 percent of the city's school enrollment, they committed 43 percent of the 7,547 assaults on staff during the last five years, district statistics show - a fact that stuns many of those who work in the schools daily.
Once assaults occur, school officials often discover that they have failed to provide these students the help they have been promised. If those services had been made available, experts say, some of those assaults might not have occurred.
And to compound the district's violence problem, once officials discover their failure to provide services, they often stop any attempts to discipline the students.
"To see a young person with needs that aren't being met by the special-education system end up arrested and in the juvenile-justice system is not at all uncommon," said Rhonda McKitten, director of the Defender Association of Philadelphia's special-education project.
Germantown High paid scant attention to Footman despite a school career riddled with warning signs, from temper tantrums and fights in kindergarten to a death threat against a teacher and an assault on an administrator in middle school.
