GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

When the city proposed changes to its discipline rules, its new policy towards “cyber-bullying” and “sexting” caught the public eye.

But the central changes have nothing to do with text messages. They represent a win by civil rights groups who have been calling on the city to make sure that schools use more counseling and less punishment and suspension to resolve problems.

At a hearing on the proposed changes Wednesday, one middle school principal described a program that she piloted and is now part of the new code. In some schools the program, which is known as PBIS and is designed to encourage good behavior in all students at a school, can include a reward system in which students collect points toward a prize for demonstrating things like good study skills.

Denise Jamison, principal of Williamsburg’s M.S. 50, said that the program has helped improve the behavior of even some of her most struggling students. The “hottest ticket” for rewards, she said, is a “No Uniform Today” pass, or “NUT card.” One day, she recalled, she pulled over a student well-known by school staff for his temper and asked why he wasn’t in uniform.

“He pulls out [his NUT card], and we all started congratulating him,” she said. “Because we knew how much he would have had to improved in order to earn that.” (more…)

Stepping up its campaign against excessive policing in city schools, the New York Civil Liberties Union today sued the city on behalf of students who say they’ve been victims of overaggressive school safety officers.

The abuses alleged in the 56-page complaint filed in federal court today “shock the conscience,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman at a press conference this morning. The NYCLU charges that school safety officers threatened, intimidated, handcuffed, and assaulted students whose only offenses included writing on a desk or being late for class.

The NYCLU has sued the city before about single cases of abuse by school safety agents, who are overseen by the police department rather than the Department of Education. In November, the city agreed to pay $55,000 to a student who said he was assaulted by a safety agent at Robert F. Kennedy High School in Queens. Today’s suit is different because it seeks to represent all city students and because it aims to establish that the city’s official school discipline policies violate students’ civil rights. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s school leadership has been characterized by secrecy, defiance of the law, and a heavy hand in school discipline, the New York Civil Liberties Union declared today in a report titled “The Price of Power.”

The report details NYCLU’s experiences with the Bloomberg-controlled Department of Education stalling on responding to Freedom of Information Law requests, refusing to comply with student safety-related laws passed by the City Council, and refusing to provide basic data about military recruitment that the organization said the U.S. Armed Forces provided freely.

The report deliberately avoids some of the major questions of the debate about mayoral control of the city’s schools, including whether the mayor should appoint the chancellor and whether the mayor should control the number of seats on the citywide school board. But it does offer recommendations on the law, which is set to sunset June 30 if it’s not renewed or revised.

The recommendations include making the public school system a city, rather than state, agency, which would bring it under a slate of good governance regulations about public notification of policy changes; opening the school system to audits by the city comptroller and public advocate; and requiring that schools contracts get publicly vetted.

Transforming the Department of Education into a city agency would also allow the City Council to make laws about the public schools that the DOE would be accountable for implementing. Like others recommending changes to mayoral control, NYCLU is saying that the city’s Independent Budget Office should get the right to receive and review DOE data, but the group adds the idea that the department needs an “inspector general” who would investigate systemic wrongdoing. (more…)

At a LYFE center at Urban Academy. Picture by Los Dragonnes via Flickr.

A report out today by the New York Civil Liberties Union says the Department of Education should bolster its daycare program for students with young children of their own. But because of budget cuts, the DOE could actually move in the opposite direction, cutting off young parents’ access to free DOE-run daycare centers currently housed in 40 public schools across the city.

The programs, called LYFE centers, have existed since 1982. Last year, after the city eliminated special schools just for pregnant and parenting teens, saying that the schools were academically weak, the LYFE centers became the centerpiece of the DOE’s services for young parents.

Now the centers could also be on the chopping block, a possibility that has one editor of the report worried.

Without the LYFE centers, “the DOE would lack any real meaningful services for this very high-risk population,” Galen Sherwin, director of NYCLU’s Reproductive Rights Program, told me. “The outcome would be devastating.”

The LYFE centers have already taken a hit from the faltering economy. (more…)

The New York Civil Liberties Union has spent the last few years arguing that police officers are too aggressive in public schools. Today, it is spotlighting a Queens high school where a 16-year-old says police beat him so forcefully that he had to have surgery. Other students at the school also say they have been assaulted by safety agents.

Yesterday, NYCLU sent a letter to Chancellor Klein and police commissioner Ray Kelly calling on them to investigate the allegations of abuse. At a press conference this afternoon, at Hillcrest High School in Queens, they will make this demand publicly, and will also call on the City Council to pass the Student Safety Act, which would increase oversight of the more than 5,000 safety agents in city schools.

NYCLU’s letter, obtained by GothamSchools, says the school’s administration has not responded to complaints about alleged abuse:

It is our understanding that several students and at least one community organization have approached the school’s administration about these reports in hopes of remedying the situation. These attempts have been fruitless, according to the organization, as the administration has turned a deaf ear to these concerns.

Just a few weeks ago, a student at Robert F. Kennedy High School in Queens filed a lawsuit alleging that a school safety agent there kicked open a restroom stall door, injuring him. NYCLU has filed a complaint with the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau on his behalf.

A Department of Education spokesperson said she cannot comment on pending litigation.

With time running out in this legislative cycle, students and advocates are increasing pressure on the City Council to hold hearings and vote on the Student Safety Act. The bill, which has been waiting in the City Council for months, and has 26 councilmembers signed on as co-sponsors, would increase transparency and accountability for School Safety Agents. If no action is taken by January, it will have to be reintroduced to the City Council.

The Student Safety Coalition, made up of community organizations from around the city, is organizing a rally at City Hall on Sunday to call for hearings and a vote. Organizers told me that city youth feel betrayed that for months council members have claimed to be too busy to hold hearings on the Student Safety Act, but were able to act to extend term limits in a matter of days.

In addition to organizing the rally, activists have set up a web page allowing the public to send a letter to the City Council in support of the act.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and local youth organizations regularly condemn metal detectors and policing of schools, saying they make students feel like criminals. So I was surprised when I was in the Bronx last week and heard students saying something different.

I was at a workshop at a conference on youth violence prevention, and participants were asked to cross the room if they agreed with statements by the facilitator, move to the middle if they weren’t sure or partly agreed, and stay on the other side if they disagreed.

Nearly all the students crossed the room, indicating they agreed, in response to two questions related to NYCLU’s campaign: Should the city have a curfew for teenagers, and should the city schools have metal detectors?

Although students in the workshop crossed the room in favor of them, other students I spoke to later expressed concerns about whether metal detectors really keep schools safe. Their views are after the jump. (more…)

In 1971, with the United States fighting in Vietnam, the New York State Senate voted to allow high school ROTC military training programs during school hours, over opposition from those who felt the military had no place in the schools.

“The soldier who obeys his superior officer without question except in the most extreme circumstances is essentially different from the citizen who prizes his freedom to think dangerous thoughts and to challenge even legally sanctioned authority,” wrote Irwin Stark of the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1979 New York Times column, arguing for the continued separation of the military from the public schools.

Junior ROTC programs are now a fairly common but still controversial program in schools across the country. More controversial right now is military recruitment in public schools — and the NY Civil Liberties Union, students, and lawmakers object to a new DOE policy of providing military recruiters access to students’ contact information on a centralized, rather than school-by-school, basis.

Here’s the New York Civil Liberties Union’s (NYCLU) analysis of over 300 arrests that it charges took place illegally in city schools between 2005-07. Minor infractions, such as those listed in the table, should be handled by educators within schools, NYCLU and other advocates argue, but instead, students are treated arrested, stigmatizing them as criminals. NYCLU believes that this is part of a larger pattern of pushing out rather than supporting and educating students with chronic behavior problems.

As reported in the Daily News and Times today, NYCLU sent a letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, urging him to “immediately issue a directive informing all NYPD personnel in public schools of the prohibitions set forth in Section 305.2 of the Family Court Act, and that you take steps to ensure enforcement of this provision.”

NYCLU supports the Student Safety Act, which would require more transparency in reporting school safety incidents and would provide a grievance process for students who believe they were treated inappropriately by school safety agents.