There, just as in the other boroughs where assaults on teachers have mushroomed and required suspensions for violent students never happened, UFT chapter leaders lit a fire under the DOE. They highlighted the problem and researched why violent students end up being returned to their classes. Then they took it to the streets. They also aggressively used the UFT contract to make the schools safer.

"What our Queens high school members did serves as a model for the union citywide, UFT President Randi Wein-garten said. "It’s the kind of grassroots action we need to take everywhere."

Here’s what they did:

"We wanted to know why incidents were up, so we looked at the data and found that the kids who were creating the problems and who were supposed to be under superintendents’ suspensions were still in the buildings, still running around," Queens HS District Representative Rona Freiser said.

They found that few suspension hearing dates were held or even scheduled. Even in the small number of cases where suspension hearings were completed, no centers existed to house the kids.

Accumulating lists of incidents by date, time and student, Freiser and the borough chapter leaders found that in Queens regions 3, 4 and 5 no hearing dates were held.

In Region 4, there were 50 outstanding superintendent suspensions which were awaiting hearings.

In Region 3, 23 were outstanding, many of them assaults on teachers and other staff members. In region 5, a suspension office didn’t open until November 5.

"Each regional superintendent claimed, ‘it’s not my job,’ " Freiser said. "So incidents were happening in the first and second week and kids removed from classes were still in the halls. The message to every kid was unmistakable: You can do whatever you want, because nothing is going to happen to you. The vast majority of kids who wanted to learn were being shortchanged by this attitude."

Chapter leaders filed school safety grievances on every student who was suspended but didn’t have a hearing date and was still in the building. They created a paper trail documenting that the problem was real and unmistakable. They e-mailed and phoned the schools chancellor and notified local community papers. It got results.

"Now, suddenly, plans came to us, in the third week of October about suspension centers that should have been in place in September," Freiser said.

Identifying the problem originated at the Campus Magnet HS, where a student threw a stapler at a dean last year. The teacher required 44 stitches "and lost a lot of blood," said Freiser. While the teacher has since transferred, the student was back at school in September. Freiser blames the DOE reorganization and its disintegration of the school superintendency for the problem. She said no paperwork was located and no corresponding effort was made to follow-up and keep the kid from returning to class in September.

"If not for the intervention of the Campus Magnet HS chapter leader, who also runs the in-house suspension program, we wouldn’t have known there was a problem," Freiser explained. "That particular case rang a bell for us, and we started looking elsewhere. We found several other kids who were scheduled not to return to their original schools back. Again, we could not find the paperwork. There were no hearing officers in place in any of the other cases, either. What should have been a 40-hour turnaround was taking months."

Because of the union’s intervention, most Queens high schools now have suspension rooms and two of the three Queens regions have suspension centers - with the last expected by no later than the Christmas break. Queens UFTers will follow up with leafletting, contacting elected officials and parents, and demonstrating at selected schools until all suspensions are completed and suspension centers function in every region.

Leveraging from her experience, Freiser urged all UFTers to "go back to your schools, find out about the suspensions and if there are hearing dates. It’s remarkable what you’re going to find out."

But it’s not just the general education schools that lack a safety consciousness. The New Beginnings schools, meant to be havens for troubled children who need targeted help, appear to be little more than holding pens. The one housed at the Jamaica YMCA has had a host of problems already.

Meanwhile, a New Beginnings School in the Bronx was moved because the space originally assigned to it was inappropriate.

Even when the DOE tries to do the right thing safety-wise, there are unanticipated negative consequences. An all-day safety meeting attended by thousands of teachers on election day was marred when curriculum guides on how to explain the discipline code to students came chock full of grammatical and spelling errors.

While the guides may have been a valiant effort to address school safety, one that even recommended exercises using the ancient Code of Hammurabi, it was the editorial bloopers (e.g., "crate a balance bean," or "think about a time when your family work together") that got the city media’s attention. to show how tough he was the chancellor fired a highly-placed official who had titular responsibility for the guides.

The guides were also released without input from the UFT.

"We could have helped them put out a better publication, not to mention caught the errors that made these guides appear illiterate," said Jim Baumann, director of the UFT Safety Department.

(While the guides are being corrected, those interested in the department’s disciplinary code should visit the DOE at its Web site www.nycenet.edu/whatsnew/safetyplanning/default.aspx. The site includes a separate file listing its summary of code changes.)

In the absence of DOE leadership, Baumann thinks school safety has to be the job of the union. That means members aggressively filing "Article 10 Grievances," so named for the section of the UFT-DOE contract that stipulates how safety will be maintained in the schools. Baumann urged members to aggressively file "failure to do an appropriate suspension" grievances when superintendents’ suspensions are treated with lesser penalties.

Baumann added that not just chapter leaders but members need to be skilled at knowing when safety rules are violated, how to fill out and file school safety department incident reports with the union, become aware of the number of school safety officers needed and provided, and know what infractions require principal or superintendent suspensions.

Baumann also recommends that members complain loudly when schools have no updated safety plans. "If the principal is the captain of the ship, as the DOE says, then the captain is obliged to meet with the crew once each month and discuss the safety plan with the staff and parents."

Baumann said the plan must include an internal crisis-response mechanism "designed for emergency responders," which spells out how to respond to problems such as what to do for a sick child or sick colleague. "And it should work like a 911 system by making a call and having a reasonable expectation of a timely and appropriate response. It’s not enough to have a phone. You need a plan. And if the school does not have a working intercom, then it’s supposed to have a fallback system with which to communicate," Bau-mann said.

At a recent teachers safety meeting at union headquarters, a number of chapter leaders attested to how school overcrowding was making a bad safety situation worse. Washington Irving HS’s Gregg Lundahl cited "kids fighting over a chair," and he called overcrowding-induced attacks "the biggest scandal to hit the schools in years.

Forest Hills HS’s Barbara Kaplan said the real losers suffering from the up-tick in violence were "the larger number of kids" whose educations were at risk. Kaplan also blamed overcrowding and a lack of school safety aids for compounding the growing disciplinary problem.