It was a lunch hour more than 10 years ago when Terri Lozier, now a principal in another district just outside Chicago, was sucked into the violence of aschool fight. Then a teacher, she was supervising the cafeteria when one girl tried to strangle another.
“Two girls got really loud, and all of a sudden one of them had put her purse strap over the other’s head and was choking her,” says Lozier, principal of Streamwood High School in School District U-46, in Elgin, Ill. “I got in the middle of the fight, put my hand between the purse strap and (victim’s) neck, and got punched in the head five or six times.”
In those days, teachers were not trained to respond to fights, Lozier says. “Teachers were diving into fights thinking, ‘I can take these kids down,’ ” she says. “Kids were getting injured and so were the adults.”
