General News
UFT outlines safety guidelines
Feb 15, 2008 10:28 AM
Sterling Roberson, UFT director of school safety, testifies at a Jan. 23 City Council hearing.
“We don't need to reinvent the wheel, we just have to use it,” UFT School Safety Director Sterling Roberson told City Council members investigating how well and how fairly the school suspension system works.
Addressing a joint hearing of the Council’s education, civil rights and juvenile justice committees on Jan. 23, Roberson said that the September 2007 “Citywide Standards of Discipline and Intervention Measures,” otherwise known as the schools’ “Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12,” offered a sound school suspension policy “that neither ignores actual school disruptions nor rushes to judgment and further victimizes at-risk children.
“What is in question — and what we believe is the single largest problem regarding suspensions — is the [Department of Education’s] failure to comply with its own existing student removal process, as required by state law,” he said.
Even though teachers can remove disruptive students from their classes, hundreds of city schools still do not have a school-specific student removal process or even a way to communicate the policy to students and staff.
“What’s problematic is the lack of citywide implementation, enforcement and training for staff and students,” Roberson said. “When we recently surveyed our members, we found that most had no idea about what to do when a student is disruptive.”
Roberson also insisted that suspension from class “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.”
So why so little prevention on the ground? Roberson explained that, among other reasons, there are no guidance counselors assigned to K-5 schools; if a guidance counselor is needed, the position must come out of the school’s budget. There are also too few guidance counselors, social workers and school psychologists in the upper grades.
The standards also call for alternate learning instructional spaces so that suspended students get the education and help they need — something long advocated by the UFT. Roberson gave credit to the DOE this year for focusing on developing alternate learning centers for those junior and high school students removed from their home school for a significant period of time.
“However, all of the other students who are removed from classes and/or schools are shortchanged because the resources within the schools have not been dedicated to provide alternate learning spaces where instruction can continue and guidance intervention services can be provided,” he said.
The complete text of Roberson’s remarks is available at www.uft.org under News and Issues.
