b"another chance. There are rules for a person being suspended. You don't want to be caught in not working within therules. Depending on the principal, the guidance counselor, there are many ways to work things out. If there was a studentwho had a very good record, you try to work something out so that child does not get suspended. We had a good relation-ship at one of the schools, Jackie Kennedy School. We would work out some community service for some of the studentsrather than suspend them, like working with the custodian. They would have to clean up and do all the things that thecustodian did after school.Were you a supervisor of school safety in a number of different schools?Once I got out of the task force, I was moved to Martin Luther King which was a very troubled school at the time. They had a principal, a female principal, there for a short time, for a year. Then they got Mr. Frank Mickens. He came intoMartin Luther King to really work to straighten it out. He saw me on the task force, he requested me to come work withhim. I was there regularly with the task force, and I became the group leader at that school over 12 other people. Thosetwo years were the hardest times of my job. I learned a lot of stuff and I learned a lot of positive stuff and I learned a lot ofnegative stuff. I thought I was a very quiet person, verbally. By the time I finished at Martin Luther King, I was a changedperson because it was a really hard school. Frank Mickens was an excellent principal to work with. He used to have a baseball bat underneath his coat and we would walk the kids to the subway, he would conceal it underneath his coat. He was a very good principal. He tried to encourage his students, but Martin Luther King was a huge school.How many students?It was about two thousand from all five boroughs. We would have at least five guns a day for some period of time, or we would have narcotics in the school. The way the school was built didnt help. Its on Amsterdam between 66th and65th streets. Its elevated meaning there are two floors below and four floors up above. There was a shop for cars, wherestudents learned auto repair. There was an entrance on 66th street for the cars to go in. The person who was the instructor,who was actually a teacher, was a mechanic, he wasn't a behavior person. Students would let other student in through thedoor when they fixed the cars. There wasnt security down there all the time. And so the traffic would come through andthe guns would come through and the drugs would come through. On the second level of the school, we had Special Ed.You couldn't deploy enough people to cover that kind of stuff. So that was an area where guns and stuff got in.Did you have the scanners then?We did not have scanners. We had a machine later on that you put your student ID in. They would enter on 66 StreetA student who didn't have their ID card would have to step aside and you would have a Dean and an SSO, and it took up alot of time getting two thousand students into the school. Then you would have to move the machine to the main en-trance where visitors would enter. At some point during my stay, the Superintendent Office of the Borough of Manhattanmoved from 50th street and moved to Martin Luther King on the second floor.You had visitors coming to see the superintendent. Then you had people who came to see students and you had parents. You had to really work very hard. Normally, the supervisor doesnt have a post, but is mobile to see what's goingon. But if things occur, you have to be at the front to take that shift through. Some school safety agents were really verysincere, then you had some people who were not sincere. You had some who were afraid of kids and some who wanted 155 "