You might think the savage murder of a student in a Bronx classroom would shake City Hall from its stubborn, election-season insistence — despite lots of evidence to the contrary — that violence is on the decline in city schools. Alas, you would be wrong.
Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña spent 90 minutes Monday in a town hall-style meeting talking about teacher training programs, the psychology of bullying, the need to communicate better with parents and the benefits of calling the city’s mental health hotline.
Fariña detailed initiatives to fight discrimination, bullying and rivalries between co-located schools. Just last week, she noted, 400 school officials across the city received diversity training on approaching curriculums from different perspectives.
In short, last week’s brutal killing of 15-year-old Matthew McCree and the wounding of Ariane Laboy, 16 — children entrusted to the care of the city Education Department — were treated like something to be handled with a few tweaks to the curriculum, or a few parent conferences.
That’s an abdication of responsibility by school leaders who had ample warning about the problem of school violence in general and at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation in particular.
In 2015, an audit by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli — covering reports for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, before de Blasio and Fariña took over — found that more than 400 violent incidents were not reported by the Education Department to state authorities. These included 126 cases of serious matters such as “assaults with physical injury; weapons possession; sexual offenses, and reckless endangerment,” the state audit said.
Other cases were downgraded, the audit found, including a student at one school who suffered head trauma after being put in a headlock and thrown against a wall.
The de Blasio administration pooh-poohed the report, claiming it uses a different standard for disruption than the state.
This year brought the eye-popping accusation, from the pro-charter school advocacy nonprofit Families for Excellent Schools, of 10,000 unreported acts of school violence. The group compared a state database of incident reports to numbers tracked by the city, and found that by the state’s standard, violence in the schools went up in each of the last three years and is up by 30% since de Blasio took office.
(De Blasio claims that the city’s numbers, which track serious crimes, are more reliable than the state’s database, which he says includes many trivial incidents that don’t amount to violence.)
That didn’t shake the mayor’s happy-talk narrative, which prominently features a decline in arrests and suspensions as a valuable metric of how safe the schools have become. Studiously ignored by the mayor are any data that contradict his claims of success.
The numbers don’t lie. Four years ago, 94% of teachers and 80% of students at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation said, in a survey administered by the city, that they considered the school safe — but by last year, the numbers had plunged to only 19% of teachers and 55% of students calling the school safe.
That number alone should have triggered a response from officials. According to The New York Times, parents were so worried about safety in the school, they had taken to patrolling the hallways themselves.
Nowhere did these numbers get discussed in Monday’s antiseptic meeting about school violence. And no one has apologized for the fact that metal detectors weren’t installed at the school until after Abel Cedeno allegedly used a 3-inch switchblade to stab his classmates.
Nor did anybody mention that last April almost a dozen New York City parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the city over the “staggering” violence that they argued targeted minority students and prevented them from learning.
“The violence knows few boundaries, except that, on average, white and Asian students encounter far fewer incidents of school violence than black and Hispanic students,” the lawsuit charged. Young students, those who are gay, lesbian or transsexual and the disabled are often the biggest targets for abuse.
Meanwhile, the mayor has been boasting about removing metal detectors and replacing tough sanctions — suspension, expulsion or arrest — with softer solutions like having violent students get a warning card or participate in “restorative practices,” which often amount to conversations about what they did wrong.
At a minimum, it’s time for a debate about whether these tactics are working.
Students returning to the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation last Thursday were finally greeted with metal detectors. But it was too late. One student was dead, another in the hospital. Their attacker sat on Rikers Island. Our city failed all three. It can’t let that happen again.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
