In Texas, GPS helps kids get to school

Posted by Philissa at 7:52 AM

School officials in Dallas have started giving GPS devices to kids who regularly have trouble making it to school — so they can't pass off illegitimate excuses when they're truant. The GPS devices appear to be improving attendance for these students, and one expert notes in the Times article on the subject, “It’s far better than locking a kid up” — not to mention less expensive, despite paying for a full-time case manager to check in on students.

Still, some in Texas have complained about the tracking systems, saying the ankle bracelets used in an earlier iteration of the Dallas experiment, and currently used in a similar program in another Texas city, are reminiscent of slave chains. I, too, am uncomfortable with a program that eases kids to the indignities of being monitored electronically. On the other hand, perhaps if students at Brooklyn's Boys and Girls High School were part of a program like the one in Dallas, they would make it to school in time for the starting bell, after which, according to the Post, students complain they are sometimes barred from admission. (Boys and Girls is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit over illegal pushouts filed in 2005 by Advocates for Children, Insideschools' parent organization.)

Mobile scanning report from the front lines

Posted by Philissa at 11:52 AM

Over at the Insideschools high school forum, user LeonDMatthew describes what happened earlier this week when the mobile scanning unit showed up at his school:

I came into school today and was surprises to see the police presence. I knew what was happening we were being scanned. This time I was determined to keep my belongings but was unsuccessful. I was told that if I did not surrender my cellphone and zune (like and i-pod), I would be handcuffed and they will be forcefully taken. So I surrendered them. While my belongings were being bagged and tagged I voiced my opinions to the school aid. I said "I can understand if they were taken because I was caught using them but the scanning and threatening and all the commotion were unnecessary." All he said was this is what the principle says and I'm doing my job. I also petitioned to him all of the "what ifs" I could think of. For example I mentioned an incident that happened last week when there was a gang shoot-out in front of my school, but still no cigar. I was told my belongings would be returned on Thursday. What do you think? Was I and my fellow students wronged today? Please tell me what are your opinions about the whole no cell phone policy I want to know what parents are thinking. Please give me some adult insight.

So, adults, what can we tell LeonDMatthew? Hope you're not caught without a cell phone next time gang violence flares up in your neighborhood? Shut up and obey the security guards -- it's the only way you'll be able to get to class? There has to be a better way to deal with school safety.

Brooklyn high schools taken over briefly by gun, knife last week

Posted by Philissa at 7:44 AM

Last week was a scary one for two Brooklyn high schools.

On Thursday, John Dewey High School was locked down for three hours after a student dropped his gun in class, then picked it up and fled. Dewey doesn't have permanent metal detectors, although the roving detectors recently made an appearance. An insightful student wrote on the Times' City Room blog, "First they manage to take all of our phones away but when someone brings a gun to school they cant find it." Check out the comments there: students are mixed on whether they would like to see metal detectors installed, but there doesn't appear to be any division on the subject of whether Dewey has grown less safe and why. The reason for the decline, commenters say, is an influx of students from Lafayette High School, which is phasing out due to poor performance.

Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn does have metal detectors, but that didn't stop a student from being stabbed during a fight there on Friday; this weekend, he was in critical condition and his attacker had not been arrested. Officials say the attacker may have used scissors as a weapon, but students say the school has so many doors it's possible to sneak illicit items inside.

Kindergartener handcuffed at Queens elementary school

Posted by Philissa at 10:01 AM

We all know that overzealous security guards can be a problem in schools, but I didn't think the issue extended to kindergartens. Apparently it does. When a 5 year old at PS 81 in Queens had a tantrum — which presumably had something to do with him being 5 years old — a security guard handcuffed him and called an ambulance to take him to a local psych ward, the Daily News reports today. Of course, there may be more to this story than the Daily News is saying, but the school and the DOE aren't disputing what happened, and now a kid feels unwelcome at his neighborhood public school. This story is just one more reminder that the city's schools need personnel who are trained to work with children, not criminals.

Fighting down in schools, but dating-related violence up for NYC teens

Posted by Philissa at 3:08 PM

The Times reported this week that fighting in city schools dropped by 20 percent between 2003 and 2005. But dating-related violence is on the rise among NYC teens, with 10 percent of girls and 5 percent of boys reporting being raped or forced into sex by a partner.

The report underscores the reality that while the school system may make kids feel like criminals, New York City teens face real dangers. Last week, a teenager was stabbed to death in a botched robbery across the street from Murrow High School in Brooklyn, although it's still not clear whether the teenagers involved had an affiliation with the school. And as part of the Post's article on dating violence, one Washington Irving High School 9th grader reported that she carries a box cutter to school to avoid problems.

I wonder whether schools' focus on policing prevents them from teaching students how to make healthy choices for themselves and their partners. If so, a short term drop in fighting might belie longer-term dangers for the city's young women and men.

Incident in Red Hook feeds fears about multi-age buildings

Posted by Philissa at 11:47 AM

I don't usually like to post about incidents at individual schools that only involve one kid. The Post and the Daily News get a lot of mileage out of stories where affronted parents and kids tell their tale, but you can never be sure whether their stories point out real flaws in their school, although undoubtedly they sometimes do. But today the Daily News is reporting that a 1st grader at Agnes Humphrey School for Leadership in Red Hook was bound with tape by two older students, who threatened to throw him down the stairs, and I think the situation deserves a little attention.

Adults intervened quickly, the child wasn't hurt, and one 9th grader was suspended for bullying and intimidation. The school has only recently expanded to include high school grades, and the mother says in the article, "Teenagers are going to be teenagers and they are going to be doing things that aren't appropriate for younger kids," reflecting the argument made by angry parents at other elementary schools where the DOE has tried to place middle and high schools. At most schools I've visited, kids in different school levels keep to themselves, but at Agnes Humphrey, these fears appear to have been borne out.

Also mentioned in the article: another older student was arrested "after becoming belligerent with authorities." Another downside of housing middle and high schools in the same building as elementary schools? Younger kids may be exposed to tensions between school safety agents and students.

Even after bad press, Jamaica HS still trying to thwart 911 calls

Posted by Philissa at 11:13 AM

Some people never learn. Just a month after taking heat for administrators' failure to call 911 quickly when a student suffered a stroke, troubled Jamaica High School is in the news again -- this time because of a new directive aimed at preventing 911 calls from the school. The memo, written by someone new because the author of the last one was removed from the school, outlines four steps school personnel must take before calling 911. The goal is likely to cut down on incident reports and improve the school's numbers, but in a real emergency, as a teacher told the Daily News, "by step four, the kid's already dead." Just another reason for kids not to feel safe in school.

At City Council hearing on safety, kids describe schools' least pleasant lessons

Posted by Philissa at 2:14 PM

I've been meaning to share notes from last week's City Council hearing on school safety for days. The press did a pretty good job sharing the central issue of the hearing: it's unclear whether DOE employees or NYPD employees have the final say on school safety and discipline decisions, and the lack of clarity creates flammable conditions in schools that give rise to incidents like the one at East Side Community High School last week.

But the issue is more than one of confusion. Community leaders and students took to the stand in the late afternoon to describe the ways that aggressive policing detracts from a learning environment. Kids described being arrested and hauled out of school by safety agents after breaking minor rules, such as by writing on a desk or cutting class. They also described harassment by school safety agents that didn't result in arrest. Every student mentioned missing class time as one outcome of his or her interaction with police in school.

Kids described psychic losses as well. Jonathan Clark, a senior at Aviation High School, where he is president of the honor society, described the day last spring when radnom scanners came to his school. The scene was one of confusion and screaming, Clark said, with agents unclear about what to confiscate; they took some students' school equipment and birthday cupcakes, while allowing others to choose whether their cell phone or iPod was taken. Students missed hours of class waiting in line, and the day was ruined. Clark said, "Every other day there is such morale and happiness, and on that day it was the exact opposite." Another student echoed Clark's concern when he saw random scanning at Bryant High School: "I thought that something had happened and I was scared."

As the Legal Aid Society's Nancy Ginsberg noted, "You could probably find probable cause for arrest every 20 minutes" in schools. That doesn't mean that having police in schools — and there are nearly 5,000 school safety agents in New York City's schools — is necessary or wise. Representatives of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which released a report earlier this year decrying "aggressive" policing in the schools, spoke about alternative discipline strategies, such as Positive Behavior Intervention System, that have been successful elsewhere. Those strategies are more flexible and less punitive than giving control to school safety agents, and they are administered by those charged with carrying out schools' educational missions.

Kids from the Urban Youth Collaborative, who said they didn't want to identify their schools out of fear of retaliation, repeatedly said that incidents in their schools "can be solved" if school safety agents were simply more respectful toward them. The student from Bryant said, "I don't think the NYPD knows how to deal with young people." Keeping kids out of class and teaching them that the police are their enemies? With such terrible teachers on staff, NYPD really shouldn't get involved in schools.

One final note: Council members were interested in what happened to a 1998 Memorandum of Understanding between the DOE and NYPD effectively transferring authority over school safety to the NYPD. That memorandum was supposed to be revisited in 2002, but by that time Mayor Bloomberg had been elected and given control of the schools, and no joint committee met to extend the arrangement. Kathleen Grimm, deputy chancellor for finance and operations, argued that mayoral control made such memorandums unnecessary because the mayor oversees both NYPD and the DOE. So we can attribute some of the reason behind the lack of explicit guidelines for making school safety decisions to mayoral control, touted (at least by mayors) as a panacea for educational problems.

Thanks to Leah Gogel, Insideschools' Zankel Fellow from Columbia University's Teachers College, for her help covering the hearing.

NYTimes covering today's hearing on school safety

Posted by Philissa at 5:58 PM

Today I don't have to liveblog the City Council hearing because the New York Times is doing it. Check out Jenny Medina's coverage of the hearing on school safety, which has been going off and on since 10 this morning and may last all night, judging from the number of students who are lined up to testify. We'll have a summary tomorrow, but for now you can read along at home.

TODAY: City Council hearing on school safety

Posted by Philissa at 6:38 AM

Just a reminder that the City Council is holding a major hearing tomorrow about school safety. The hearing is a joint endeavor of the council's committees on education, public safety, and juvenile justice and is being held in two sessions, one from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m. and the second from 3 p.m. until the end of the day. Map

We'll be reporting on what happens, but if you are concerned about safety issues at your kids' schools, you might want to consider testifying. To get on the docket, speak to the sergeant-at-arms at the beginning of the hearing. If you can, bring copies of what you plan to say. Given the persistent issues surrounding school safety and the interaction between safety agents and students — just yesterday, the principal and an honors student at East Side Community High School were arrested in a confrontation with safety agents — it's important that the council hear from students and parents.

Stuy kids riled up by new restrictions

Posted by Philissa at 12:58 PM

An article in the Sun today takes a look at tension between students and the administration at Stuyvesant High School, which has been percolating for years and has reached a new high this fall. Kids are upset that they must now swipe their ID cards when they enter the school and leave for lunch and that the school is now assigning lockers and locks to students, instead of allowing them to select their own. Students have started StuyWatch.com to protest these policies and monitor students' rights at the school; one user complained of “a general air of mistrust from the administration with regards to students,” the Stuyvesant Spectator reported. The site, which doesn't appear to be public right now, has hundreds of registered users, the Sun reports, but Principal Stanley Teitel isn't taking it too seriously; he says the new policies are necessary for safety reasons.

The situation at Stuyvesant is like those that Seth and the other members of the NYC Student Union are working on citywide. Across the city, kids must contend with policies that include random scanning and a cell phone ban. I'm guessing that even reasonable changes in this climate feel disrespectful to students.

State audit: schools underreport violence

Posted by Philissa at 6:29 PM

Via the New York Times' City Room blog comes a report released today by the state comptroller showing that schools often fail to report major violence. The report, based on analysis of 10 large schools data from the 2004-2005 school year, found that an average of 21 percent of violent incidents went unreported at some schools. At Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, officials even sat on information about a rape that happened on campus rather than bring down the school's numbers!

UFT head Randi Weingarten's response was perfectly on point: "With data driving all education decision-making, this audit couldn’t have come at a more important time. We have to ensure that schools are safe the old-fashioned way, namely because they are and not because incidents are going unreported. Making schools seem safer than they really are does a disservice to parents, students and educators because those schools don’t get the attention and resources they need to be made safer."

For its part, the DOE isn't concerned about reporting issues, because the tracking system the city now uses is "incredibly sophisticated," the Times reports. Of course, we all know that better data doesn't mean safer schools, but I guess now that the DOE's got data management under control, it can turn its attention keeping its students and teachers safe.

City schools: safe or not?

Posted by Philissa at 10:41 AM

As Seth noted in his post yesterday on solving the security issue in high schools, the state has added 16 city schools to its list of "persistently dangerous" schools. Schools earn this classification if they report a high number of violent incidents compared to the size of their student population. (Schools that under report incidents are less likely to end on the list, and it seems that very small schools could be more likely to make the list. It's also worth noting that New York appears to label schools as dangerous more aggressively than other states.)

Four of the new additions are special education schools in District 75. Some of the other schools newly added to the list are known to have problems, such as Jamaica High School, which is currently on the city's list of Impact Schools as well. But we're perplexed about the inclusion of others, such as PS 47 American Sign Language School, that don't have a reputation as being particularly dangerous.

For being so obsessed with data, the state and the DOE don't seem particularly able to figure out whether or not schools in the city are safe. Both the content and scope of the state's list are at odds with the DOE's own accounting of school violence -- most of the city's Impact Schools did not make the state's list -- and the state's announcement came just one day after DOE officials announced a "dramatic decrease" in violent crime last year, while the Post today has a graphic showing a large increase in major crimes in schools in the 2005-2006 school year.

Student Thought: How do we solve the security problem?

Posted by Seth Pearce at 4:31 PM

For anyone who thought our schools were on a constant (albeit slow) path to excellence, here is some disturbing news. Today, Fox reported that the number of "persistently dangerous" schools in New York under the No Child Left Behind Act has raised from 18 to 27 this year. Twenty-five of these schools are in New York City.

The question now is how to deal with this? It is a serious problem. It seems from that dramatic increase in the number of schools on the list, our current strategies are not working. Students from Urban Youth Collaborative, a coalition of 10 activist organizations, present an interesting argument against our current security measures. From their website:

When we walk into school the first thing we see is a metal detector cops and x-ray machines that the city believes will help the kids and the school...We believe what the city does in our schools actually makes kids want to be more violent. It doesn't give us any privacy at all, and it just scares us. Having so many cops in one building intimidates and agitates student and increases tension rather than decreasing it.

The NYC Student Union, a citywide student run education advocacy group, has also been lobbying government officials including Governor Spitzer's policy director about the issue.

Students from all ends of the city feel this tension. Even at specialized high schools, students complain about being "herded" away from the school after dismissal.

However, we need something more creative then just a lessening of current security; that would also create fear. Students, school safety agents, city officials and all of the other groups that have a stake in our schools need to work together to craft policies that foster better relationships between safety agents and students. This means revising policies that alienate students and examining alternative security methods for safety agents. Most of all, this means giving these two groups a chance to talk openly about the problem and have a say in the policies that so heavily influence their relationship.

As of now, we don't have any answers to this security crisis. What we have tried has not worked. We do know, however, that creating an atmosphere of trust is the first step. What do you think?

Lots of spin at PEP meeting

Posted by Philissa at 8:48 PM

Despite the rain and cool weather, a healthy crowd gathered outside Tweed for the rally in support of Khalil Gibran International Academy, apparently split pretty evenly between the school's supporters and journalists.

Inside, a much smaller group of people assembled for the August meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy. Marcia Lyles, deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, gave an overview of the new middle school reform initiative. In selecting which remedies to put in place for struggling middle schools, Lyles said the task force and the DOE "looked at what the schools that were performing well had and what the schools that were not performing well didn't have" — and came up with Regents-level courses and good professional development. Lyles continued the pattern established last week of the DOE taking credit for the City Council's work; Lyles called it "my first initiative" as deputy chancellor, even though work on the task force was underway long before she moved into the position, and began her presentation by detailing how the DOE's Children First program has supported middle schools.

PEP member Patrick Sullivan asked why the DOE didn't adopt the task force's recommendation to lower class size in middle schools. Lyles didn't rule out more aggressive class size reduction for the future but said that principals "recognize that that is not the sole ingredient" in getting kids to achieve.

Julia Levy from the press office showed off the new version of the DOE's website, due to launch "hopefully later this week." Many of the improvements in navigation, search, and content reflect the priorities behind Insideschools' own redesign, which we're working on now. But I don't think the DOE is going to put us out of business — Levy said the redesign will not replace all of the old, outdated content on the DOE's site, just "sit on top" of the existing site.

Finally, Elayna Konstan, the CEO of the Office of School and Youth Development, reviewed changes to the discipline code and announced that preliminary data shows a "dramatic decrease" in violent and major crime in schools last year. She said at least a couple of the nine schools currently designated as Impact Schools will likely come off the list soon. But schools will continue to discipline kids who bring cell phones to school — in response to Sullivan's question about whether the City Council's recent cell phone bill conflicts with the discipline code, Konstan said, "We have to wait for the litigation," signaling that the cell phone ban is headed to court.

Second hearing on discipline code Aug. 13

Posted by Philissa at 3:18 PM

A second public hearing on the proposed changes to the discipline code will be held from 6-8 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 13, at the Department of Education. Map. Check out our earlier post on the proposed changes, which include a proposal to make "sexually suggestive" behavior punishable with a year-long suspension.

The first (and, originally, only) hearing was held yesterday, but attendance may have been affected by the day's travel woes. The deadline to submit comments on the proposed changes by email has been extended as well, to Aug. 14.

Comment now on discipline code changes

Posted by Philissa at 6:51 PM

The DOE has announced its proposed revisions to the discipline code, which it now is subtitling "Bill of Students' Rights and Responsibilities, K-12." You can view the code online; proposed changes are highlighted in red. You can comment on the changes until August 8, when the DOE will hold a public hearing on them.

Most of the proposed changes reflect the changing titles of DOE personnel who are responsible for discipline. But there are a couple of substantive changes you might want to pay attention to:

• The code now contains an updated link to the full set of Chancellor's Regulations online.
• Horseplay is now explicitly excluded from "Level 4" infractions for younger students.
• "Sexually suggestive" speech and behaviors have been bumped up a level of severity for older kids; they can now result in a year-long superintendent's suspension.
• And several lines strongly suggesting counseling for kids who commit certain offenses seem to have been removed.

Let us know if you see other changes. You can submit comments by email until Aug. 8.

'Overly aggressive' police in classroom

Posted by Unknown at 11:55 AM

In a New York Times column (subscription required) today, Bob Herbert writes about a case of police harassment in the classroom-- one incident on a long list compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union in its report "Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools."

According to Herbert's column, Principal Michael Soguero of Bronx Guild High School was suspended in 2005 after being arrested in front of a classroom full of students by Officer Juan Gonzalez. His crime? Defending a 16-year-old girl who had cursed within earshot of a police officer on her way to class. When the officer attempted to arrest the student, Principal Soguero intervened. Charges were later dropped, and Soguero has since moved to Colorado. Although Police Department and the district attorney initially supported Officer Gonzalez, Herbert writes that he has since learned Gonzalez is "indeed a problem officer," and that his gun and badge have since been confiscated.