Joe Clark, the overarching disciplinary director of a troubled New Jersey high school in the 1980s, who gained fame for restoring order while roaming the halls with a megaphone and sometimes a baseball bat, died on Tuesday in your home in Gainesville, Florida. He was 82
His family announced his death, but did not specify a cause.
When Mr. Clark, a former Army sergeant, arrived at Eastside High School in Paterson in 1982, he declared it a “melting pot of violence”. He expelled 300 students for disciplinary problems in his first week.
When he threw it away – “purged”, as he said – about 60 students a further five years later, he called them “leeches, scoundrels and bandits”. (This second round of suspensions prompted Paterson’s school board to draft charges of insubordination, which were later dropped.)
Mr. Clark was able to restore order, inspiring pride in many students and improving some test results. He received praise from President Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s secretary of education, William J. Bennett. With Morgan Freeman portraying him, he was immortalized in the 1989 film “Lean on Me”. And his tough love policies put him on the cover of Time magazine in 1988, holding his baton. “Is the answer getting difficult?” the headline read. “School principal Joe Clark says yes – and the critics are up in arms.”
Mr. Clark, who oversaw a poor student body, mostly black and Hispanic, denounced the policies of affirmative action and welfare and “liberal hypocrites”. When “60 Minutes” profiled him in 1988, he told correspondent Harry Reasoner: “Because we were slaves, it doesn’t mean you have to be a thug and thug and hit people over the head and steal and rape people. No, I cannot accept this. And I don’t give alibis to blacks anymore. I simply say work hard for what you want. “
To gain control of a crime-ridden school, Mr. Clark instituted automatic suspensions for assault, drug possession, fights, vandalism and the use of profanity against teachers. He assigned students to perform school tasks for minor crimes, such as class delays and interruptions. The offenders’ names were announced in the public address system.
And in 1986, to prevent bandits from entering the school, he ordered the entrance doors to be padlocked during school hours. Firefighters responded by removing the locks, citing the safety of students and teachers. A year later, the city cited him for contempt for continuing to lock the doors.
“Instead of receiving applause and purple hearts for the resurgence of a school,” said Mr. Clark after a court hearing, “you find yourself defamed by some weak-minded scoundrels.
Although the locking episode put him in conflict with Paterson’s school board, his practical style led him to an interview for a job at the White House in early 1988. Before refusing, he insisted that if he accepted the job, he would not it would be because of any pressure from the council.
“I refuse to allow a band of rebellious and obstinate members to expel me from this city where I worked so assiduously for 27 years,” he told The Washington Post in 1988. A Post headline called him “The Wyts Earp of Eastside High. “
Joe Louis Clark was born on May 8, 1938, in Rochelle, Georgia, and moved with his family to Newark when he was 6 years old. He graduated from current William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, and obtained his master’s degree from Seton Hall.
After serving as an exercise instructor in the Army Reserve, he began his educational career as an elementary school teacher and principal in New Jersey and then as director of camps and playgrounds for Essex County, NJ. Then he was appointed to turn at Eastside High.
“A school is going where the principal is going,” William Pascrell, the president of Paterson’s school council, told The Record newspaper in North Jersey. “Eastside is a school ready to take off. Joe Clark is the guy who can do this. “
In 1989, his last year at Eastside, Mr. Clark spent time away from school promoting “Lean on Me” and was on the road when a group of guys threw their thong during a school assembly. Mr. Clark was suspended for a week for not supervising the meeting.
He resigned from Eastside in July 1989, two months after heart surgery.
After six years on the lecture circuit, often demanding rigorous academic standards, Mr. Clark reappeared as director of the Essex County Youth Detention Center in Newark. Once again, his tactics drew fire. Both the New Jersey Youth Justice Commission and the state’s Youth and Family Services Division have criticized him on different occasions for the excessive use of physical restrictions, including handcuffing and handcuffing some detainees for two days.
Clark stepped down as director in early 2002, after the juvenile justice commission accused him of tolerating putting teenagers in isolation for long periods.
Their survivors include their daughters, Joetta Clark Diggs and Hazel Clark, who were both middle distance Olympic runners; a son, JJ, the athletics director at Stanford University; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Clark’s image had a dramatic reimagination at the climax of “Lean on Me”. Like Mr. Clark, Mr. Freeman is sent to prison for violating fire safety codes, only to persuade students who are fighting for his release to disperse. (He is released by the mayor in the film.)
Mr. Clark never went to prison, and the film’s director, John Avildsen, admitted that the scene was fictional.
“Now, if he hadn’t actually taken the chains off the doors,” Avildsen told The Times in 1989, talking about Mr. Clark, “and if he had gone to jail, what happened in the movie could very well have happened. “