General News
UFT: Safety plans key to school discipline
Nov 26, 2009 2:54 PM
UFTers (background, from left) Linda Vila-Passione, school safety director; Vice President Sterling Roberson; and President Michael Mulgrew during Mulgrew’s testimony.
Testifying at a Nov. 10 City Council hearing on school safety, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told council members, “We need to make sure that every school has a functioning, collaborative safety plan in place. I’m here to tell you they do not.”
Mulgrew said that safety needed to become part of a school’s culture. “There are no easy answers or solutions, of course, but we could make vast improvements in school safety if the Department of Education and school administrators implemented and fully enforced the regulations and protocols already on the books,” he said.
Asked by Councilman Robert Jackson to guess at the number of schools that do not have a fully functioning safety committee, Mulgrew said it was below 50 percent. He said that every year the union files hundreds of grievances because safety meetings and training do not take place.
Joined at the hearing by UFT Vice President for Career and Technical Education High Schools Sterling Roberson and UFT Director of Safety Linda Vila-Passione, Mulgrew said he was in a “frustrated state of mind” because the union has had “a constant struggle” over transparency in the reporting of incidents in the schools. He said that New York City Police Department statistics “involve criminality and do not involve issues that actually lead to a safe school environment.”
The hearing with the Council committees on education, public safety and juvenile justice concerned a bill being considered by the Council that would require the DOE and NYPD to be more transparent about their safety-related interactions with high school students.
In discussing the role of safety agents, Mulgrew said they should not be “agents of discipline” as a way of compensating for the lack of more comprehensive safety procedures. “The agents are in the school to prevent crime,” Mulgrew said.
When questioned about discipline in the schools, Mulgrew said he doesn’t believe it when high schools report no incidents for five years and described the conundrum for administrators and UFT members: “If you report NYPD data,” he said, “the school lands on the persistently dangerous list.”
After Councilman Peter Vallone said he has been told by principals that they are reluctant to report incidents, Mulgrew said, “Anyone who is not reporting is in violation of [the state’s] SAVE [Safe Schools Against Violence in Education] legislation.”
The UFT president said that sometimes a safety plan is nothing more than “paper compliance.” He also said that students must have a role in creating the safety plan.
For Mulgrew’s full remarks, click here.
