NY school officials not reporting all incidents of violence
May 23, 2006 3:33 PM
An audit released by the New York Comptroller reveals that school officials routinely fail to report to the state incidents ranging from minor disruptions to sexual offenses -- with some not reporting on as much as 94.3 percent of the total incidents.
"Here's what we found -- a really stunning failure of the schools to adequately report this information to the state Education Department, which can only lead to a conclusion that there is more violence in schools than has been reported," the comptroller, Alan Hevesi tells The Poughkeepsie Journal. "(There is) a real indication of widespread cover-up of these incidents by school officials and a conclusion that the state Education Department until very recently ... ignored the problem."
Hevesi's office analyzed 15 school districts' compliance with the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act, which took effect with the 2001-02 academic year. Ten districts did not report at least one-third of incidents in high schools. Five districts did not report more than 80 percent of incidents in 2003-04, the year the audit focused on.
Hevesi says the state Education Department is responsible for problems with enforcing the law, which has been labeled from the beginning as confusing. Administrators have said reporting is time-consuming. Districts have worried that reporting would vary between districts, and some minor incidents that had to be reported could lead to a false impression that certain schools are "dangerous."
The largest category of unreported incidents were "other disruptive incidents," the least serious category, Hevesi points out. More than 2,000 of them weren't reported in 2003-04. However, there was also a tendency not to report the more serious incidents, he adds.
State Education Commissioner Richard Mills tells the newspaper that the comptroller's audit confirms concerns the Education Department had about underreporting. There are 17 categories of incidents that have to documented, including kidnapping, arson, robbery, criminal mischief and possession of a weapon.
Based on the report, Mills says, his agency will begin an audit of about 100 school districts in the next few months for their compliance with the state law.
"Obviously when a parent sends a child to school, they want an absolute guarantee that the child will be safe. It's impossible to be certain of that if the data are not trustworthy, so we have to make certain that the data are trustworthy," he said.
The school districts mentioned in the state comptroller's report will be visited, along with others tagged by the department as "high risk," according to spokesman Jonathan Burman.
High-risk districts have low graduation and attendance rates or reported few if any violent incidents, he adds.
Due to the underreporting, some school districts that should be labeled as "persistently dangerous" are not, the audit says. The label is based on the number and severity of incidents in a two-year period, and it requires schools to develop incident-reduction plans.
If schools fail to report incidents, there is less assurance the state is complying with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and the state could lose federal education funding, the audit says. The law allows victims of violence to transfer their children to other schools.
Some school administrators interviewed by The Poughkeepsie Journal felt it was wrong to report certain incidents, Hevesi says, but that's irrelevant because it's the law.
"Some were honest enough to admit that they believed that their neighboring districts were cheating, and they didn't want to be humiliated by the contrast," he says.
The New York State Council of School Superintendents hopes Monday's audit will "bring an end to confusion over how school officials should report violent incidents on school grounds," Robert Lowry, deputy executive director, tells the newspaper.
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