Sep 7, 2006 12:30 PM
We’ll wager you had no idea how safe New York City public school are. Forget about the kids and staff members — perhaps in your own school and certainly in ones you’ve heard about from your colleagues — who have been assaulted, attacked, robbed and maybe worse. Small potatoes. The State Education Department has proclaimed that there are only 14 persistently dangerous schools in the city.
Perhaps the SED got that idea from the incidents reported by Tweed. That would be understandable because, based upon the data that gets reported the city believes all is sweetness and light in the city schools — except for cell phones.
Of course, no one who actually works in the city schools believes that. The UFT’s own safety reports for each of the last any number of years shows thousands of incidents. But the union’s statistics are incomplete and, because the Department of Education doesn’t make public its incident statistics, the true state of safety in the schools is not really known. But it seems clear that there are far more than 14 schools in the system that need to be much, much safer.
The DOE is playing a dangerous game here. It doesn’t share unpleasant facts so it won’t look bad. Principals are afraid to file incident reports because it might look as though they don’t have control of their schools. (A recent audit by the state comptroller clearly shows such underreporting.) The same is true when it comes to suspensions. As a result, safety questions are not properly addressed, far too many schools violate the tenets of the SAVE legislation, which is intended to increase school safety, the Discipline Code and school safety plans sit on shelves gethering dust — and the school environment is far from what students, their parents and school staff are entitled to.
Improving safety in the schools will be a top priority of the UFT this year. The Chancellor’s Regulations that actually spell out some decent safeguards, and that have routinely been ignored in the past, will be revisited. And, as the story on page 3 details, the union is combining its school safety and its health and safety operations and decentralizing them in order to be able to respond more effectively to school incidents.
But the most essential ingredient in this full-court press on safety will be the participation of members. Better reporting of incidents is absolutely vital. It is a necessary pre-condition to everything. Without a report of an incident, the union cannot respond. Without collecting accurate data the union’s overall efforts cannot be effective. Toward this end, the UFT is simplifying and expanding the reporting process. There is an online system — click on the button on the home page of the union’s Web site, www.uft.org. They can call the UFT safety hotline at 1-212-701-9407. Incident report forms are available from chapter leaders in the schools. Members can fax a report to 1-212-677-6612. They can call their borough office. And, of course, they should also tell their school administrators.
But notifying the union is the only way members can be assured that the incident will be taken seriously and the only way the UFT will have the data to make school safety the important issue we all know it is — for our students, their parents, ourselves and the public.