Incidents of students being violent toward teachers at public schools increased more than 11 percent to about 5,000 cases nationwide in the 1999 school year, according to an Education Ministry report released Friday.
The report says that a record 36,600 cases of violence by elementary, junior high and high school students were recorded in the 1999 school year, which ended in March 2000, up 3.8 percent from the previous year.
It was the first time violent incidents by public school students exceeded 30,000 since the 1997 school year, when violence in elementary schools and outside school grounds were included for the first time in the ministry's survey, expanding the scope of what is considered on-campus violence.