THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT / THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK / ALBANY, NY 12234

 

TO:

EMSC-VESID Committee

FROM:

James A. Kadamus

SUBJECT:

Policy Issues Relating to Violent and Disruptive Incident Reporting and Criteria for Identification of Persistently Dangerous Schools

DATE:

January 3, 2006

STRATEGIC GOAL:

Goals 1 and 2

AUTHORIZATION(S):

 

 

SUMMARY

 

Issue for Discussion

 

Does the Board of Regents concur with the direction staff propose to address policy issues concerning the reporting of violent and disruptive incidents and the identification of persistently dangerous schools?

 

Reason(s) for Consideration

 

Review of policy in implementing federal and State legislation.

 

Proposed Handling

 

This question will come before the EMSC-VESID Committee on January 9, 2006.

 

Procedural History

 

The Board of Regents discussed unsafe school choice provisions under the No Child Left Behind Act and criteria for the identification of persistently dangerous schools in June 2003 and adopted amendments to Commissioner’s Regulations to comply with federal and State legislation.  In June 2005, the Regents received a report on violent and disruptive incident reporting and the criteria for identifying persistently dangerous schools in 2005.  It included information on the establishment of a School Violence Index and a Supportive Learning Environment Index. 

 

In November, the Regents discussed a proposed amendment to section 100.2 (gg) of the Commissioner’s Regulations that provided a ranking, standard for reporting, and more concise definition of reportable offenses as required by the uniform violent and disruptive incident reporting system for the reporting of incidents by school districts, BOCES, charter schools and county vocational education and extension boards, as required by Education Law section 2802.  It also established the use of a school violence index as a comparative measure of the level of school violence in a school. 

 

Background Information

 

The Department is committed to improving the quality and reliability of the data on violent or disruptive incidents reported by school districts and BOCES through the uniform violent incident reporting system (UVIRS).  The first two years of UVIRS data collection resulted in data of questionable reliability and usefulness in comparing the prevalence of violent and disruptive incidents in schools and school districts across the State.  A number of factors contributed to this result including a lack of clarity of operational definitions and a common standard for reporting incidents.

 

The Department has implemented revised procedures to correct these two areas of concern and proposed amendments to Commissioner’s Regulations to incorporate those changes. Definitions of violent or disruptive incidents that involve the most subjective judgment have been changed to reduce disparities in reporting across school districts by requiring that only offenses that result in the referral of disciplinary charges against the perpetrator or a referral to law enforcement be reported. Changes have also been made to reduce the risk of over-reporting or under-reporting weapons and drug incidents.

 

Department staff have identified a number of policy issues and proposed actions to address them for discussion by the EMSC-VESID Committee at its January meeting.  The policy issues are:

 

·       The timely, accurate and consistent reporting of data by school districts.

·       The establishment of an incentive/sanction system that promotes the accurate reporting of incidents and effective interventions in schools.

·       The identification and weighting of incidents used in designating a school as potentially persistently dangerous.

·       The elimination of reporting bias due to large or small enrollments.

·       The process to determine which schools that have been preliminarily identified should be designated as persistently dangerous.

·       The support to be given to schools participating in violence reduction initiatives and those identified as persistently dangerous.

 

The attached report also identifies the topics to be discussed by the Committee at its March and June meetings.

 

Recommendation

 

The Committee should inform staff if it concurs with the proposed actions to address the policy issues identified.

 

Timetable for Implementation

 

The Committee will continue discussion of violent and disruptive incident reporting and the criteria for identification of persistently dangerous schools at its March and June meetings.


Policy Issues Related to Violent and Disruptive Incident Reporting and Criteria for Identification of Persistently Dangerous Schools

 

 

Background

 

Project SAVE (Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act) was passed by the New York State Legislature and signed into law by Governor George E. Pataki as Chapter 181 of the Laws of 2000 to address issues of school safety and violence prevention.  Among other things, the SAVE legislation added a new section 2802 of the Education Law requiring the establishment of the Uniform Violent Incident Reporting System (UVIRS).

 

The Board of Regents, in response to the legislation, amended Section 100.2 (gg) of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education in 2001 to establish the uniform violent incident reporting system. The regulation was developed in consultation with the Division of Criminal Justice Services and with legislative and executive staff.  The regulation used definitions of crimes taken from the Penal Law and required schools to record information on violent and disruptive incidents beginning with the 2001-02 school year.  Each school is required to complete and maintain a record on each reportable violent or disruptive incident.  In addition, each school must provide a summary of these incidents by using a Summary Form for Reporting Violent and Disruptive Incidents that is submitted as part of the Basic Educational Data System (BEDS). Each school district and BOCES is required to include a summary of the data in its school district or BOCES report card.

 

The Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO), Section 9532 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act, requires each state receiving funds under ESEA to establish and implement a statewide policy requiring that students who attend a persistently dangerous public school be allowed to attend a safe public school within the local educational agency (LEA). As a condition of receiving ESEA funds, states must certify in writing to the Secretary that they are in compliance with these requirements.  To implement this federal requirement, Chapter 425 of the Laws of 2002 added a new subdivision 7 to section 2802 of the Education Law on unsafe school choice.  This statute requires the Commissioner to annually determine which public elementary and secondary schools are persistently dangerous, based on data submitted through the UVIRS over a period prescribed in regulations, but not less than two years.  Section 120.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provides that schools shall be identified as persistently dangerous pursuant to guidelines based on a minimum of two years of data from the UVIRS. 

 

Steps Taken to Improve the Quality of Information

 

The Department is committed to improving the quality and reliability of the data on violent or disruptive incidents reported by school districts and BOCES through the UVIRS. The first two years of UVIRS data collection resulted in data of questionable reliability and usefulness in comparing the prevalence of violent and disruptive incidents in schools and school districts across the State. A number of factors contributed to this result including a lack of clarity of operational definitions and a common standard for reporting incidents.

 

The Department has implemented revised procedures to correct these two areas of concern and has proposed amendments to Commissioner’s Regulations to incorporate those changes. Definitions of violent or disruptive incidents that involve the most subjective judgment have been changed to reduce disparities in reporting across school districts by requiring that only offenses that result in the referral of disciplinary charges against the perpetrator or a referral to law enforcement be reported. Changes have also been made to reduce the risk of over-reporting or under-reporting weapons and drug incidents.

 

SED and the New York State Center for School Safety provided a series of staff development and technical assistance activities to help staff and administrators understand new reporting requirements through video-conferencing, video-streaming, regional presentations, use of web-based technical assistance tools, and telephone conversations. 

 

To address some of the problems with the reliability of the reported data, the Department has communicated a very clear message to school superintendents to provide the leadership necessary to develop systems to collect and report school and district level data accurately and in compliance with federal and State legislation and Commissioner’s Regulations.

 

Identification of Persistently Dangerous Schools

 

Designation of a persistently dangerous school requires two years of successive data.  Because of the problems with the 2002-03 data that have previously been identified and the extensive changes made in the manner in which data was reported commencing with the 2003-04 school year, the Department identified schools as potentially persistently dangerous by using a transitional standard that factored new data reported for the 2003-04 school year and data for the 2004-05 school year. The transitional standard is a ratio of violent incidents to enrollment in a school and is based upon the number of incidents involving use or threatened use of weapons, serious sexual offenses, robbery, assault with serious physical injury, arson and kidnapping.  The Department used 2003-04 data to make preliminary decisions as to which schools were designated as potentially persistently dangerous. These schools submitted 2004-05 data to determine if their two-year incident rates continued to meet or exceed a serious incident tolerance level. Schools determined to be potentially persistently dangerous after examination of the two years of data were provided one last opportunity to submit additional data to the Commissioner before a final determination was made that a school is designated as persistently dangerous.

 

Policy Issues

 

          The following is a list of policy issues that have been identified by Department staff for discussion with the Regents.  More details and proposed actions to address them follow.

 

·       The timely, accurate and consistent reporting of data by school districts.

·       The establishment of an incentive/sanction system that promotes the accurate reporting of incidents and effective interventions in schools.

·       The identification and weighting of incidents used in designating a school as potentially persistently dangerous.

·       The elimination of reporting bias due to large or small enrollments.

·       The process to determine which schools that have been preliminarily identified should be designated as persistently dangerous.

·       The support to be given to schools participating in violence reduction initiatives and those identified as persistently dangerous.

 

The timely, accurate and consistent reporting of data by school districts.

 

Despite an extensive staff development initiative targeted at providing district staff the necessary information required to report violent and disruptive incidents accurately and thoroughly, the data that we received suggests that some school districts are under and/or inaccurately reporting incidents. Nearly 25 percent of schools did not report any incidents of violent or disruptive behavior. Although Department staff and various regional and State networks continue to provide staff development, either directly or through the use of technology, local education agency staff continue to inform us that they lack confidence that their neighboring districts are reporting data accurately. In addition, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) claims that its current operational procedures for reporting incidents prevents it from providing the Department with all the information required to be submitted by it and every other school district in the State under the uniform violent incident reporting system. Specifically, NYCDOE claims that it is unable to provide information regarding both offenders and victims for violent offenses or information regarding disruptive incidents.. Department staff are meeting monthly with NYCDOE staff and the New York City Police Department to better understand the concerns associated with its reporting system and to devise strategies to align New York City reporting with the rest of the State.

 

The establishment of an incentive/sanction system that promotes the accurate

reporting of incidents and effective interventions in school.

 

The issue of both under and inaccurate reporting of data is best addressed through the development of a system that provides the appropriate blend of incentives and sanctions that helps win school district compliance in responding to the requirement to report violent and disruptive incidents. The current system provides little if any incentive for districts to report data accurately. As a result, district staffs lack confidence that all districts are reporting accurately and thoroughly.

 

An incentive for reporting might be the provision of technical assistance and grants to assist school districts that self-identify schools as ones that would benefit from participation in a violence incident reduction program. In New York City, the Chancellor has classified such schools as Impact Schools and implemented violence reduction programs to address school violence issues. The Department can build from this foundation and acknowledge that schools that have been identified by school districts as Impact Schools or the equivalent and have implemented violence incident reduction plans that meet criteria prescribed by the Commissioner will be exempt from designation as a persistently dangerous school for a period of time while the plans are being implemented. For such schools, their actual designation as persistently dangerous would be delayed for at least two years while their violent incident reduction plans were being implemented, provided that the data for each of those years demonstrates a reduction in the number of violent incidents.  Similar to the self-identified schools, schools that are identified as persistently dangerous and, subsequently, implement violent incident reduction plans that meet the aforementioned criteria would have their persistently dangerous designations removed at the end of the school year in which they were so designated and would be exempt from being designated as persistently dangerous for at least two years while their violent incident reduction plans were being implemented, provided that the data for each of those years shows a decrease in the number of violent incidents. In addition, both of the types of schools would be eligible for financial and technical assistance from the Department and statewide or regional networks.  The potential benefits of this approach are that it will generate rich information regarding program strategies that produce the best results and provide schools and school districts an added incentive to identify and address the root causes of their violent issues.  Another incentive for reporting accurately is the awareness that the reporting will be audited on a regular basis. The Department expects to use the combined capacity of the SED statewide and regional networks and SED staff to conduct audits of violent and disruptive incident reporting.

 

An additional incentive is that the Department is committed to making better use of violent incident data reported to Department staff or in the news media to ensure that districts are reporting accurately. The Department will encourage and formalize the reporting of violent incidents by establishing a school violence hotline. This hotline will allow persons to report anonymously either on-line or by telephone incidents of school violence. These reports along with newspaper accounts of violent incidents will be shared with district staff and will provide Department staff with additional data to verify the accuracy of the reporting in a school.   

 

The final “incentive” for reporting accurately is very strong disciplinary measures that will be enforced if a superintendent is discovered to be willfully under-reporting data. 


 

The identification and weighting of incidents used in designating a school as

potentially persistently dangerous.

 

The major incident categories that are used for the designation of potentially persistently dangerous schools have been identified after consultation with executive branch, legislative, law enforcement and education staff. The categories represent very serious offenses that threaten the safety and welfare of the student body. The issues that require additional attention are the respective weightings of certain incidents, especially weapons that are discovered and confiscated as a result of scanning devices that have been purchased by school officials to keep students safe. The issue of weapons confiscation has broader implications, as many schools do not have these devices. The question to consider is how should weapons be treated that are located in school lockers, backpacks, etc?

 

The Department is reviewing 2003-04 data to determine the most appropriate response to this concern. The fundamental question associated with this decision is how much of a threat is created by students who attempt to enter the school building with weapons. The Department is considering amending the current weightings to provide the highest point totals to offenses where a person experiences bodily harm or serious psychological trauma. Incidents such as homicide, assault resulting in serious physical injury, serious sexual offenses, and kidnapping would be included in this category.  The second category includes offenses that seriously threaten the safety and welfare of the student. Arson, robbery and all incidents that involve the use of a weapon are proposed to be included in this category. Finally, weapons possession incidents only are placed in the third category and weighted accordingly. Seventy-seven percent of the violent incidents reported for 2003-04 were in this category.

 

The elimination of reporting bias due to large or small enrollments.

 

The 2003-04 data indicated that schools with large school enrollments often appeared to have a very high tolerance for serious incidents before they reach the transitional standard threshold established to identify schools that are potentially persistently dangerous. The threshold was established based on incidents per enrollment. This system, although equitable, allows many incidents to occur at a school with a large enrollment before it reaches the transitional standard threshold.

 

States such as Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Nebraska have provisions that are not enrollment sensitive, and others, such as Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota, have established lower tolerance factors for larger schools or have established a violent incident threshold that, once met, qualifies a school as being designated potentially persistently dangerous. 

 

The Department proposes to establish an upper limit violent incident threshold that upon being reached qualifies a school as being designated as potentially persistently dangerous.     

 

The process to determine which schools that have been preliminarily identified

should be designated as persistently dangerous.

 

          The introduction of the above-referenced steps could result in a larger number of schools being identified as potentially persistently dangerous. It is important, therefore, to continue to employ a two-step process of identification that includes subsequent steps that acknowledge unique situations that may result in “false-positive” findings. This is accomplished through a system that permits schools to provide the Department with additional data that can be considered in making a determination whether to designate a school as persistently dangerous. The current system has two such mechanisms. The first is providing school districts the opportunity to submit a second year of violent and disruptive incident data using the most current data available, and the second is providing school districts with the opportunity to submit additional appropriate data to explain why the designation is not appropriate. Decisions need to be made as to whether other mechanisms should be permitted before a school is formally designated as persistently dangerous.

 

To assist in this process, it is important to consider decisions that might impact the system’s credibility. Too many schools being identified as potentially persistently dangerous will result in the standard being challenged as being too strict and/or rigid. On the other hand, a system that fails to identify schools that are perceived as dangerous by the public based on news media accounts or first-hand information, will result in questions regarding the legitimacy of the criteria or weightings. Finally, care must be taken to ensure that the number of schools identified is commensurate with the ability of the Department and school districts to take meaningful action to address the issues in the schools.

 

The support to be given to schools participating in violence reduction initiatives
and those identified as persistently dangerous.

 

          The designation of a school as a persistently dangerous location should trigger a series of responses by the Department to assist the school. Currently, district staff develops an Incident Reduction Plan (IRP) for schools identified as persistently dangerous. The IRP identifies the activities that the district will adopt to correct the situation at the school. Often these districts lack the resources to meaningfully confront the “root causes” of the problems. The Department has for years assisted schools that have been identified as under registration review because of low academic performance. The Department has a similar responsibility to schools designated as persistently dangerous and is in the process of committing staff and financial resources to these schools. The Department has identified a pool of resources that are available to districts with persistently dangerous schools. These resources are available through an application process that identifies the activities that the districts will take to correct the situations. The activities need to be tied into the Incident Reduction Plan. In addition, the Department proposes to make available significant support and assistance to districts that self-identify schools for participation in a violent incident reduction program.  

 

Next Steps

 

·       Supportive Learning Environment Index.  Time has been allocated during the March meeting of the Board of Regents to discuss the development of a supportive learning environment index that will be a tool to determine how well the schools within a district compare to other statewide schools in providing an environment conducive to academic and personal student growth and development. In addition, time is allotted to discuss a companion effort to identify standards and indicators that will assist district staff in determining how to assess and improve the conditions of schools.

 

·       School Violence Index.  In June, staff will provide additional information on the school violence index. This will include information regarding the design of the index and weightings of specific violent incidents.

 

·       Identification of Persistently Dangerous Schools.  In June, staff will also report to the Regents on the potential designation of schools as persistently dangerous for the 2006-07 school year.