Effort Aims to Quell Surge in Bad Behavior
By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
When the last bell rings, thousands of District schoolchildren make their way to the nearest Metro train -- their school bus on rails -- where many let loose a day's worth of bottled-up angst, energy and emotion. All that the tens of thousands of other riders want, in most instances, is a quiet trip home.
The tension between the groups has been a long-standing concern for Metro, and efforts to do something about teenagers' rowdy behavior have grown more urgent as problems have escalated. In the past four years, juvenile arrests have nearly doubled, and warnings have increased more than 40 percent.
Today, police and school officials are launching a campaign that they hope will bring more harmony on the rails. The effort, the result of focus groups with students, is called "Respect: Give it. Get it." Instructional cards will be given to students, and posters and radio spots will point out banned behavior in Metro stations and on trains and buses, including eating, drinking, smoking, fighting and running around.
"We want to use this as an opportunity to tell everyone that our customers don't appreciate when kids are sitting on the train talking loudly and using profanity or horseplaying," said Polly Hanson, chief of Metro Transit Police.
Lakeisha Staley, a regular Red Line commuter, said she sees bad behavior all the time. On Monday, two teenage boys on her car were throwing water at each other -- and spraying other passengers -- from bottles. Staley, 29, went up to them, yelled at them to stop and informed the train operator through the emergency intercom.
"They are disrespectful and nasty," she said, getting off at Metro Center to transfer to an Orange Line train to New Carrollton and a bus to her home in Annapolis. "I have a long commute, and I have to deal with this every day."
She grew up in Washington and, as a public school student, rode trains and buses. "But I never acted like this," she said.
There are 34 public and private schools near the 10 Metro stations with the highest student ridership, school officials said. For the past two years, transit police have designated a special unit to focus on inappropriate juvenile behavior, assigning officers to specific schools. Transit police have spoken regularly to students at assemblies at those schools, and each school has a designated liaison with Metro, officials said.
Since the beginning of this school year, District police have hosted a daily 1 p.m. conference call with Metro and school officials. That way, "when we get intelligence from the school that there will be a spillover [at a Metro station], we will deploy more officers in anticipation," said Lt. Kevin Gaddis, a Metro police officer.
School officials say better communication has helped.
"If a student knows that Mr. Jones, his assistant principal, knows Sgt. Jones at Metro, and if that Sgt. Jones calls the school and says he has a disruptive student who has on this color jacket" and requests that the school have a talk with the student, the message will be driven home, said Diane Powell, a senior D.C. schools official.
Most students behave appropriately, even though adults might not agree, Powell said. When they are calling each other names, for instance, "it's not name-calling, the kind that causes a kid to fight," she said. "This is what they do. We all did it. But if you're a person who sees 23 kids from a school, and they're all doing this, it becomes magnified, and adults have a more anxious response."
Adults complain about students talking loudly, swearing, eating and drinking, taking up more than one seat, clustering on platforms and blocking escalators and train doors.
Some students say they think adults unfairly lump them together.
"It's one thing to be loud and another thing to be rowdy," said Alicia Wade, 15, a ninth-grader at the School Without Walls who gets on a train with her girlfriends each day at Foggy Bottom. Alicia said that the "Respect" campaign is "a waste of time" and that students should already know to be considerate of other people.
"Adults make those faces at us like they don't want to be near us," said classmate Rakiya Moore, 15. Tiara Marshall, another ninth-grader at the school, said that the best way to crack down on misbehaving teenagers is to make their parents pay fines.
Roughly 20,000 students younger than 19 who attend school in the District can buy discounted monthly Metro passes for $22 for unlimited trips on trains and buses in the city. There are also discounts for bus tokens and student farecards.
The average monthly student ridership on Metrorail in 2006 was 239,000; the average monthly student ridership on Metrobus was 418,000, said a spokesman for the District Transportation Department, which administers the school program. The program cost the District $4.6 million last year.
Transportation officials are looking into the possibility of revoking students' discounted fare for unruly behavior, the guidelines of which are being worked out with Metro and school officials, said Erik Linden, spokesman for the Department of Transportation. For the 2008-09 school year, the District plans to issue travel cards that operate much like the SmarTrip cards that commuters use, which will allow Metro and transportation officials to better track student usage.
Arrests of juveniles in the Metro system have nearly doubled in recent years, from 156 in 2002 to 295 in 2006, according to Transit Police statistics. Nearly half of juvenile arrests in 2006 took place at Metro stations with high student ridership, including transfer stations such as Gallery Place and L'Enfant Plaza, and stations close to schools, such as Anacostia, Minnesota Avenue and Fort Totten.
Transit Police warnings, the mildest category of offense, have increased more than 40 percent, from 1,694 in 2002, to 2,433 in 2006.
Will Elsbury, 40, who works at the Library of Congress, saw students shredding newspapers and throwing them at each other on his Orange Line commute from Capitol South to Ballston on Friday. The group of about 10 boys and girls, who got off at L'Enfant Plaza, were "just messing around," he said. But by the time it was over, the train car "looked like a giant recycling dump."
Sometimes, the hassle of dealing with schoolkids is too much. Krista Sakallaris, 22, who commutes from Franconia-Springfield to Union Station for a job as a contract photographer, started leaving her office at 4:40 p.m. instead of 3:30 to avoid run-ins with juveniles. Last week, an incident with a group of students at Gallery Place -- they wouldn't move on the escalator, and she pushed them aside -- ended up with them following her to the platform, with one threatening to cut her. She ignored them and got on her train, she said, frustrated again.
Some riders don't like the behavior but say it should be tolerated so that children aren't prevented from getting to school.
And others who haven't had trouble with youths say it should be tolerated because of who they are. "Sure, some of us would prefer that they tone it down so we can sleep after a hard day at work," said Robert Johnston, 53, who commutes from Glenmont to Judiciary Square. "But give me a break -- they are kids."
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