Ever meet a kid like Mike? 8 out of 10 on the Rant scale.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1651002,00.html?cnn=yes

I have taught several kids who needed therapy and medication. They would mentally snap from time to time, trying to get beat up or suspended, pushing to hurt people physically and emotionally as much as they could. Bringing them to administrators would do less than nothing.

A few times I asked why we just let mentally ill students off the hook. In the suburbs, I heard we just didn't have the money to get a kid help. In one case, I had to beg the parents to hire a lawyer to advocate for their kid. The school couldn't wait to expel their kid, and they never knew they weren't going to get a fair shake. One thing graduate teaching school does for you is tell you how many rights the families have. We managed to get this particular student into an intensive treatment program that lasted for a year. I saw him on the street last month, and he was back to being the kid that broke into houses for drug money.

If he didn't self-medicate, he might have killed himself (I've seen that happen as well). I got myself into a lot of hot water standing up for this kid. As soon as I left town, he was expelled.

Another kid in the same town was undiagnosed, but exhibited severe bipolar behavior. He tried to get himself thrown out of school once a month by picking out a teacher and swearing and threatening until he could upset an entire cafeteria. Two days later, he would sincerely apologize. He was going to talk a speeding ticket into major jail time someday. As far as I know, he never got the help he needed. Not enough money in the budget, not even in the suburbs. Teachers were instructed to avoid this student because there was nothing else we could do without funds. I guess we could have given up textbooks and paper. I hope you never meet him on a bad day, because he could get dangerous.

In the city, these stories are legion. One student would pick fights once a week and would get his face smashed every other onth. That would get him suspended for week, when he would come back in and start the process all over. He didn't need punishment and didn't respond to punishment, but the school had no other way of dealing with him and seats in therapeutic environments are hard to come by.

Mental illness tends to run in families, and in the city, you can go without help for generations. I could pick out a few people I thought might grow into petty violent criminals, and the principal always did the best he could. Without more resources, there was nothing he could do but try to isolate the problems and try to educate the rest of the students as much as possible.

One day, one of these kids is going to grow up and do something bad. Society will punish the hell out of this kid, and we'll all feel better that the criminal is off the streets. Someone's mother or daughter will say, "Justice was served today." I wonder how much people will be patting each other on the backs when they lock the perpetrator up. I know that a few people will say, "We should have seen it coming."

In each of these kid's files, I have carefully documented the issues. I would have to say the City of Medford hired the best people to deal with this and coordinate with the teachers and parents for the best plan of action. They may have done this at the expense of hiring another guidance counselor to help the students get into the best colleges. And the best counselor had the most disturbed students eat lunch with her everyday. Boston and Arlington are just totally overmatched.

In America, people think the money they have in their paycheck is the money they earn, and they shouldn't have to pay so much in taxes. That's a valid philosophy, but just realize that if you accepted a few hundred dollars less each year or gave an hour or two each week to work with kids who needed you, you honestly wouldn't have to worry so much.

I know that my generation can't make this happen. I've spent enough time volunteering with old hippies to know that people my age just aren't into the slow fix. The only other solution is to prepare the next generation to be ready to sacrifice their personal time and money. That's where I am right now.

There have been a couple of stories recently about people who tried to volunteer that have been mutilated or killed. My generation is arriving at the problem a bit late, and very few of the Yuppie generation have seen fit to pitch in. I would expect things to get a bit worse before they get better. The book "Freakonomics" seems to have a different take on inner city crime statistics. It's a good read if you get the chance. I still think the only way to do something about violent crime in the city is to stop it a generation before it happens.