Backs Thompson's Finding: Union: Schools Hide Extent of Violence

By RICHARD STEIER

The union leader representing School Safety Agents said Sept. 20 that an audit by City Comptroller William C. Thompson accurately reflected underreporting of violent incidents in public high schools by education officials.

GREGORY FLOYD: Don't deny the problem.

"We did not think the Department of Education was being honest and forthcoming about the extent of serious violence in the public schools," said Teamsters Local 237 President Gregory Floyd, countering DOE claims that Mr. Thompson's report relied on stale data and definitions of violence that did not conform to those used by the NYPD and the State Education Department.

'Serious Gang Problem'

"There is a serious gang problem in this city," Mr. Floyd continued in a phone interview, "and I think our elected officials should admit it, because it's not going to go away by ignoring it."

A day earlier, Mr. Thompson had asserted that DOE's "vague" instructions on reporting violent incidents in schools had given Principals too much latitude in how they classified disturbances, allowing them to conceal or minimize problems with violence in their schools.

ERNEST LOGAN: Principals using discretion.

As a result, the Comptroller contended, "No one really knows for sure" whether crime is down in the school system, as Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have contended.

A DOE spokeswoman, Dina Paul Parks, fired back in a statement that Mr. Thompson had relied on data that was more than two years old from the school system's own On-line Occurrence Reporting System. (Mr. Thompson retorted that this was the most recent data made available by DOE.)

She also noted that Mr. Thompson used a criteria to define serious incidents that was inconsistent with the definitions used by both the NYPD and the state.

'Cherry-Picks Targets'

"Third," Ms. Parks stated, "the report cherry-picks 10 schools and then tries to use those schools as representative of the whole system."

A top aide to the Comptroller said during his press conference that in an attempt to produce a representative sample, the report focused on two high schools in each borough, one of which experienced violence at a level below the median for high schools citywide, the other at a level above that median.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow STATISTICS LIE: City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. asserts that more than 20 percent of the unusual incidents that occurred in schools were not reported, and as a result 'no one really knows for sure' whether violence has dropped in the system, as the Mayor and Schools Chancellor contend.

As a whole, Mr. Thompson said, 21 percent of the incidents that occurred in the schools were not reported, with underreporting ranging from 5 percent to 75 percent. Among 1,247 incidents at the 10 high schools during the 2004-2005 school year that his auditors deemed "serious," 14 percent were not reported to the state.

"At Murry Bergtraum," Mr. Thompson told reporters outside that school, "students have been the victims of theft, harassment and assault, yet many of these incidents have not been reported." At Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, he added, school officials did not report one case in which a girl was raped.

Floyd Faults Principals

Mr. Floyd said he believed individual Principals who were fearful they would be punished for high levels of violence, rather than top school officials, were responsible for the underreporting, explaining that otherwise there wouldn't be such a wide discrepancy in the extent to which incidents were omitted or downgraded.

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten shared the Local 237 president's view and contended that Mr. Thompson's report confirmed concerns expressed in DOE's recently released Learning Environment Survey. She noted that the survey found that "62 percent of students worry about crime and violence in their schools some, most or all of the time, and 36 percent of Teachers polled feel that order and discipline are not maintained at their schools."

The UFT leader said in a statement, "While we know the Mayor and the Chancellor want schools to be safe, this audit confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents. 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, putting everyone inside at risk."

Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernie Logan, whose members were among the targets of Mr. Thompson's criticism, had a more-measured view of the report, saying the union disagreed "with the methodology and the interpretation of the data that led to the findings in this audit.

"The Comptroller is right when he says guidelines and instructions can be vague and open-ended," the CSA leader said in a statement. "The guidelines need to be cleaned up, and more supervision by the DOE is appropriate. However, professional judgment is also important. There are different levels of incidents and different methods of dealing with each incident."

Mr. Thompson said in response to a question that there was no indication that the greatest degree of underreporting was occurring in schools that either had already been classified as dangerous or would have received that designation if all the violent incidents were accurately recorded and reported to the state.

Omissions 'Intentional'

In some instances, he said, the "generalized and vague instructions the DOE has given to Principals" were a contributing factor. "In some schools," he added, "I think there is an intentional underreporting."

The Comptroller said he did not believe the problem was systemic.

The report noted that DOE had acknowledged that two of the schools studied, Boys and Girls and Alfred E. Smith High School in The Bronx, had failed to satisfactorily report incidents during the 2004-2005 school year, but claimed that the problems had since been addressed. DOE also contended that "many fighting incidents included in the sample are reasonably classified [by the schools themselves] as 'minor altercations' not involving weapons and not resulting in injury."