Gerson Garcia had been fighting. It happened during second-grade recess, and had to do with a ball on the playground. He was too angry to talk about it.
One of his friends had seen him getting upset and alerted a teacher, who whisked him down the hallway at Enrico Fermi School 17, the skinny 8-year-old squirming in protest all the way. He ended up in the office of school sentry Miguel Rivera and — still not speaking — made a beeline for the trampoline.
When Rivera started working in the district as a sentry, or security officer, in 2008, he didn't have a trampoline in his office, much less a blue-and-white striped teepee or a pop-a-shot basketball set-up with two hoops. He was there to enforce the rules, not to run a carnival.
"It used to be so stressful, I'd go home and have to sit in the driveway and decompress before I could deal with my own kids," he said. "We used to restrain kids and stuff. It didn't work."'
[For more of this story, written by Justin Murphy, go to http://www.democratandchronicl...pervision/420535001/]
Comments (0)