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e academic year.

The existence of discipline problems in school may contribute to an environment that facilitates school violence and crime. On a daily or weekly occurrence, problems such as student racial tensions, bullying, sexual harassment of other students, verbal abuse of teachers, widespread classroom disorder, and acts of disrespect for teachers in public schools. The occurrence of undesirable gang and cult activities, and due to the severe nature of these incidents, presents all reports of gang and cult activities during the school year.

Secondary school principals across the United States revealed that most administrators felt more rigorous due process procedures should follow in discipline cases than those required by federal regulations and school policies. The principals also tended to believe that corporal punishment should be permitted under certain circumstances and that both inadequate teacher training concerning discipline and a lack of adequate alternative programs for students were the major factors limiting schools' abilities to maintain order.

However, today principals lack the tools they used to have for dealing even with the unruliest kids. Formerly, they could expel such kids permanently or send them to special schools for the hard-to-discipline. The special schools have largely vanished, and state education laws usually do not allow for permanent expulsion. So at best, a school might manage to transfer a student felon elsewhere in the same district.

Educators today also find their hands tied when dealing with another disruptive and much larger group of students, those covered by the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law, which mandates that schools provide a 'free and appropriate education' for children regardless of disability and provide it, moreover, within regular classrooms whenever humanly possible effectively strips educators of the authority to transfer or to suspend for long periods any student classified as needing special education.

This would not matter if special education included mainly the wheelchair-bound or deaf students whom we ordinarily think of as disabled. However, it does not. Over the past several decades, the number of children classified under the vaguely defined disability categories of 'learning disability' and 'emotional disturbance' has exploded. Many of these kids are those once just called 'unmanageable' or 'antisocial': part of the legal definition of emotional disturbance is 'an inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers, ' in other words, to be part of an orderly community. Prosecutors indicates that disproportionate numbers of the juvenile criminals they now see are special education students.

With IDEA restrictions hampering them, school officials cannot respond forcefully when these kids get into fights, curse teachers, or even put students and staff at serious risk, as too often happens. One example captures the law's absurdity. School officials in Connecticut caught one student passing a gun to another on school premises. One, a regular student, received a yearlong suspension, as federal law requires. The other, disabled (he stuttered), received just a 45-day suspension and special, individualized services, as IDEA requires. Most times, though, schools cannot get even a 45-day respite from the chaos the