Testimony of Sterling Roberson before the Committee on Public Safety January 23, 2008

Jan 23, 2008 3:47 PM

Joint Hearing of the City Council Education and Civil Rights Committees On Student Suspensions,  January 23, 2008

             My name is Sterling Roberson. I am the school safety director for the United Federation of Teachers. Thank you, Chairmen Jackson and Seabrook, for soliciting the union’s views on school suspension policies and the realities under which the schools operate.

            In developing a sound school suspension policy—one that neither ignores actual school disruptions nor rushes to judgment and further victimizes at risk children—we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. The UFT testified on school safety at a Feb. 8, 2005 education committee hearing, and many of the suggestions we made at that hearing were incorporated in the Sept. 2007 “Citywide Standards of Discipline and Intervention Measures,” otherwise known as the schools Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12.  How good is it?  It’s a good set of standards, dealing at length with working with—and if need be removing—disruptive students, while also treating them with kindness and a regard for their continued education needs. So the Discipline Code is not in question. 

            What is in question—what we believe is the single largest problem regarding suspensions—is the DOE’s failure to comply with its own existing student removal process, as required by state law. Teachers today do have the right to remove students from their classes, and the procedures are both fair and clearly defined. When principles or district superintendents don’t back up teachers, then students come to believe there are no consequences for disruptions, often making removals the only recourse a teacher has.      Given last spring’s school reorganization, we’ve instructed our members to be sure to pose a series of hard questions to newly empowered principles, including “how do you plan to enforce the school discipline code, including suspensions and establishing a SAVE room as required by state law?” [see NY Teacher, 4-26-07] .

            Another problem is that suspension from class truly ought to be the last remedy, not the first. There are ample early warning signs and ample indication of what interventions disruptive children need; all of which are covered in the Citywide Standards. Yet look what the schools have to work with. There are no guidance counselors assigned to K-5 schools. There are too few guidance counselors and school psychologists in the upper grades. There is often no place for a child to cool out and frequently no provision for a professional to sit down with a kid. We need more guidance and intervention services, not less.

            We also need to better operationalize the interventions the DOE acknowledges are necessary. Here, for example, is a list of possible guidance interventions the Standards itself recommends just for Level 1 (Insubordinate Behaviors) incidents for middle and high school students. It calls for: parent outreach; intervention by counseling staff; guidance conferences; individual and/or group counseling; peer mediation; mentoring program; conflict resolution; development of an individual behavior contract; short-term behavioral progress reports; referral to a pupil personnel team and/or a community based organization; community service; or referral (if appropriate) to a substance abuse counseling service. That’s an excellent list of interventions, but it’s only useful if the list is put into play. Our experience with the DOE is that in the main the Standards are not followed. .    

            The Standards also call for alternate learning instructional spaces, a key recommendation the UFT made in calling for “adequately funding alternative instruction for suspended students at off-campus sites, so they are not allowed to fall through the safety net.”  Only this year has the DOE put resources and structure into those alternate  learning centers, and in real schools, in full equipped schools, despite the state SAVE law’s insistence that this got done even before the Bloomberg administration took office in 2002. Such centers should ensure learning goes on both for children in home rooms, free from harassment, and for those suspended, in quality alternate learning centers, and the UFT is monitoring the progress.

            One of the issues I expect the Council will be interested in is whether there is a racial or ethnic or class imbalance in suspensions. While there are anecdotes suggesting that inner-city kids are more frequently subjected to suspensions, there are also anecdotes suggesting teachers bend over backwards to accommodate disruptive children with difficult home lives. The DOE unfortunately has refused to share its data with the UFT, so we cannot on whether racial or disparities in suspensions even exist.

            We’ve asked before, and we continue to ask, that the DOE operate transparently. Education statistics are the public’s property, not the province of an agency.

             We also believe that a prime motivator of classroom disruption is oversized classes. As school overcrowding and large class sizes are addressed—and the new Contracts for Excellence with the state do address them—we can expect to see a lessening of disruptions, too.

Thank you.