By Steve Barrett

In February 2008, the Times Free Press ran a news article on the silence from the Hamilton County school system regarding serious incidents in local schools, including rioting at Tyner Academy and youths trespassing with a loaded gun at the Howard School of Academics and Technology. It was two weeks before the Tyner riot was publicly disclosed. The gun incident was kept quiet almost a week.

Asked about such delays, Superintendent Jim Scales said, “We’re maybe not doing as good a job as we should.” As reported at the time, “He acknowledged that he and other administrators have been slow to respond to questions about student safety.” But, he vowed, “I came here saying transparency, and we are going to be transparent.”

When?

By now, you may have read about the desk-clearing brawl at Signal Mountain Middle-High School on Monday afternoon. That’s a credit to the resourcefulness of Times Free Press reporter Jacqueline Koch and her editors. But if the school system did not still have its circle-the-wagons mentality, the public might have known about the fight when it happened: three days earlier.

What did the system gain by remaining silent on this violent incident, which apparently involved more than a dozen students from Signal Mountain and from McCallie School; DUI and sundry other charges; and bodily injury? Certainly nothing good. It looks like another episode of hushing up a serious situation.

But think how differently it might have been handled. School officials could have promptly alerted the local media, explaining the facts and dispelling any rumors about what happened, then detailing what they were doing in response. Would the public still have been troubled by the violence? Yes, but forthright communication would have enhanced the system’s credibility and given the public reason to believe the system cares about reality and not just perception.

Instead, once again, we are left to wonder how many serious incidents in local schools never see the light of day.