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City Councilman Charles Barron criticized Chancellor Cathie Black for failing to condemn a video posted by Stuyvesant High School students that used racial slurs. To Barron's right is Veronica Celestin, the mother of a Stuyvesant student.

Parents and politicians gathered today outside of prestigious Stuyvesant High School to condemn what they describe as a pattern of racial exclusion and insensitivity at the school.

The group was responding to an amateur rap video that shows four young white men — reportedly Stuyvesant students — using racial slurs. The video emerged after a former student at the school posted it to YouTube.

Recently critics have said that the city’s selective public schools don’t admit enough black and Hispanic students, and that the Department of Education hasn’t fully implemented its own anti-bullying program.

At today’s event outside of the ten-story school building in Lower Manhattan, several parents of students of color talked about their children’s experiences. Veronica Celestin, whose daughter Breanna found the video posted to Facebook, said they were disturbed by the “racist video.”

“This has been a very difficult and traumatic time for Breanna and our family,” said Celestin, reading softly from a typed statement.

Another Stuyvesant parent, Ruth Sowell, said that her child sometimes felt unwelcome at the school. Her son, Michael Bucaoto, is a Stuyvesant football player who is bi-racial.

“They didn’t treat him as an equal,” Sowell said. “He felt he had nowhere to go.” (more…)

Chancellor Cathie Black with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at the Brooklyn International School today.

At the end of a week in which students across New York City were supposed to highlight ways they can celebrate each other’s differences and fight against bullying and harassment, city officials announced an expansion of their anti-harassment initiative.

School safety teams will now be required to include a staff member trained in diversity awareness and in efforts to battle bullying and harassment, officials announced today. The city is also collecting some of principals’ most successful responses to bullying, and plans to formally recognize schools with strong anti-bullying programs.

City officials, led by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, have been expanding their anti-bullying efforts — known as the “Respect for All” initiative — since 2009. Since then, elementary school teachers and counselors have joined middle and high school teachers at anti-bullying training, and annual school surveys and quality reviews have begun to rate school on how accepting the environment is. (more…)

New York City is full of parents unafraid to say exactly what they think of their childrens’ schools, but the Department of Education is finding that all too often, that passion is getting out of control.

The DOE currently mediates parent-on-parent disputes two to three times a week, according to Chief Family Engagement Officer Martine Guerrier. She revealed the statistic at a Tuesday meeting of the citywide school board, which approved a regulation giving the department the right to boot parents from parent associations if they verbally abuse or physically threaten other members.

Guerrier said the regulation is needed because the department has little recourse against bullying that has caused intimidated and frightened parents to quit the parent associations at their schools.

But members of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, which represents parent associations across the city, said the regulation’s language is so vague that it could be used to curb parents’ speech.

“This vague and extremely broad language easily lends itself to abuse and inappropriately patronizes hard-working PA officers by treating them like squabbling kindergartners,” CPAC members wrote in an e-mail to Chancellor Joel Klein. ”To the extent there are actual threats to the safety of others, they can be dealt with under existing law.” Reiterating their arguments yesterday, CPAC members asked the panel to delay its vote. (more…)

One surprising item on Mayor Bloomberg’s list of fulfilled campaign promises was his commitment to lobby the state to pass an anti-bullying law that he has declined to enforce at the city level.

The City Council passed the Dignity for All Students Act in 2004, saying that the city needed to do more to protect students, especially gay students and members of certain religious groups, from harassment. Bloomberg immediately vetoed the act, and then after the council overturned his veto he refused to implement the law.

At the same time, the city says, Bloomberg was lobbying the State Senate and Assembly to pass essentially the same law. “The City continues to support this legislation and submitted a memo in support of both the Assembly and Senate versions of the bill,” the campaign scorecard says. It gave the lobbying plans an asterisked “done,” meaning that the promise is close to accomplished. (DASA came close to passing this year, but so far it hasn’t.)

The discrepancy is rooted in the city Department of Education’s nebulous legal position as neither a city nor a state agency, a position that got attention but no resolution in the school governance debate this year. (more…)

Updating the shoebox-with-a hole-in-the-top outside the principal’s office, SchoolTipline lets children and parents report bullying to school administrators anonymously. If the school doesn’t read the tip, it even sends a reminder email a few days later.

Administrators using the service are willing to take the risk that they might get a few bad tips in with the good ones, the site’s founder told Teacher Magazine, because it makes children feel comfortable sharing things who might otherwise stay silent. Schools can require that students set up a log-in before sending a tip, which SchoolTipline says will help deter false tips.

Following up on an anonymous tip seems tricky, but at least it brings to the adults’ attention situations that can be hard to spot; principals can alert teachers to keep an eye out for certain kinds of behavior, increasing the likelihood of catching a bully in the act.

A handful of New York City schools are listed on the site, but none appear to be actively using it. Interested schools can sign up for a free pilot, and anyone can send an automatic email to a school suggesting they sign up.

Meanwhile, a study published in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry found that early childhood behavior patterns can help predict which children will be bullied, perhaps making intervention possible:

The study found that children who were aggressive at 17 months of age were more likely to become victims in preschool than their less aggressive peers. Children exposed to harsh parenting were more likely to be chronic victims, as were those from poorer families.

“These results suggest that early preventive interventions should target both child- and parent-level risks, and focus on alternatives to harsh and aggressive interactions,” the author wrote.

How does your school, or your child’s, handle bullying?