The attack on a St. Paul teacher by a student in December has spurred action in a district that has struggled with issues of student discipline and misbehavior.
But Ramsey County Attorney John Choi has made it clear: St. Paul is not alone.
When the county's top prosecutor stood before reporters at a Dec. 8 news conference announcing plans to form a task force to map out strategies to combat school violence, he spoke of assaults on school officials rising at an alarming rate across the county. Of the 28 fourth-degree assault cases charged by his office in 2015, nearly one-half occurred in the suburbs.
But interviews with law enforcement officials in suburban communities that trail St. Paul in a city-by-city breakdown of such cases reveal no significant concerns about assaultive behavior in traditional school settings.
In Little Canada, where eight cases of student-on-staff violence made their way into the juvenile court system the past two years, the violence occurred in programs tailored to students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD), said Sgt. Mike Hankee of the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office.
Hankee oversees seven school resource officers who serve at 10 schools in the county, including Mounds View High School, Roseville Area Middle School and Valentine Hills, Island Lake and Turtle Lake elementary schools — the latter three part of the Mounds View school system.
"With the mainstream schools, I can't remember reading one assault report this year," Hankee said last week.
In White Bear Lake, police Capt. Dale Hager said he also does not see school violence as a major issue at the schools for which his department deploys school resource officers. According to the county attorney's office, White Bear Lake was the site of five student-on-staff assault cases prosecuted this year. Hager, however, knew of only two.