Voices in Urban Education
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Learning Environments
VUE Number 19, Spring 2008
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Life without Lockdown: Do Peaceful Schools Require High-Profile Policing?
By John M. Beam, Chase Madar, and Deinya Phenix
John M. Beam is executive director of the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University. Chase Madar is staff attorney at Make the Road New York. Deinya Phenix is a senior data analyst and data manager at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author biographies
Despite the prevalence of zero tolerance discipline policies, some schools in New York City have succeeded in improving safety and discipline without punitive measures.
A substantial body of research has confirmed the link between school safety and academic achievement (Barton 2003; Barton, Coley & Wenglinsky 1998; Bryk, Lee & Holland 1993; Chubb & Moe 1990). According to one overview of indicators of school quality, “An orderly school atmosphere conducive to learning could be an example of a 'necessary, but not sufficient' characteristic of quality schools” (Mayer, Mullins & Moore 2000, p. 42).
Many policy-makers have internalized the “necessary” without the “but not sufficient” half of this proposition. Moreover, they have equated “positive disciplinary climate” with zero tolerance for a wide range of behaviors. Distinctly non-urban tragedies such as the Columbine, Paducah, and Jonesboro school shootings are invoked to create the climate justifying locking down urban schools serving students of color. While concern for gangs has more relevance in discussing order and safety in big city schools, the topic is overused politically and under-examined in terms of its actual relevance to schools, which are often the safest environments available to low-income city youths.
With well over a million students and more than 1,400 public schools with wildly varying enrollments, class sizes, and school cultures spread throughout 250 neighborhoods, New York City's school system is potentially a natural laboratory for studying different approaches to establishing orderly learning environments. According to the New York City school chancellor's discipline policy, “School personnel are responsible for developing and using strategies that promote optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience. They are also responsible for addressing behaviors which disrupt learning” (NYCDOE 2007, p. 2). Intervention and prevention approaches can include a range of counseling, social services, and academic support.
The highly centralized management of the school system has, in fact, pushed a focused and muscular interpretation of this discipline mandate. One of the first policy changes made when City Hall won mayoral control over schools from the governor and legislature was to transfer authority over school security to the New York City Police Department. This change meant that school safety agents (SSAs) were no longer employees of the school system and now worked in a completely separate chain of command from everyone else in a school, with their separate hierarchies intersecting only in the mayor's office.
Has a zero tolerance approach — not only to actual violence and criminal acts but also to rowdiness, lateness, and perceived disrespect of authority (e.g., not producing one's class schedule upon demand), in other words, standard operating procedure for teenagers — enhanced the ability of school personnel to comply with the chancellor's mandate that they be &lduo;responsible for developing and using strategies that promote optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience”?
Consider data from the New York City high schools chosen for the Impact Initiative, a program that increased school police and other security enhancements. These schools were among the city's neediest, lowestperforming schools (Brady, Balmer & Phenix 2007). About a year and a half after the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) implemented the program, these schools had experienced no reduction in dropout and student mobility rates. And there was a decrease in attendance and a dramatic increase in both suspensions and noncriminal police incidents. However, because there was some decrease in major crimes in New York City high schools, the program continues.
Successful Alternatives to Lockdown
Fortunately, there are examples of alternative approaches showing that running schools by lockdown is not the only, or even the most effective, strategy for promoting the “optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience” to which the chancellor and mayor putatively aspire.
This article presents profiles of six high schools in New York,1 studied recently as part of ongoing work with students by one of the authors (Madar) and colleague Sarah Landes, a youth organizer at Make the Road New York, that take a very different approach to school security &151; with excellent results. None of the schools in these school-security success stories have metal detectors, and all of them have extremely low rates of violent incidents (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Disciplinary actions and police incidents in case study schools and other schools
Note: The six schools profiled in this article include five autonomous schools and one complex of four high schools.
None of the six high schools profiled in this article are among the city's elite magnet schools.2 In fact, the student demographic data on the schools studied do not seem to differ markedly from that of the more problematic Impact schools. These schools were selected, using a snowball method3 for identifying schools, because of their strong departure from the dominant, officially promoted paradigm. Each of the six schools provided a slightly different combination of evidence of how learning-focused school culture is possible.
Bushwick Community High School
Bushwick Community High School (BCHS) in Brooklyn is a “second chance” school. According to principal Tira Randall,
But BCHS has had only one fight in the past three years, and that was outside of school bounds. BCHS has no metal detectors. The school has 350 students and only one security guard.
Tabari Bomani, a longtime teacher at this school, says,
This culture is backed up by customs and rules. There is plenty of discussion about shared struggle and shared alienation and a rigorous ban on homophobic epithets and the N-word. Another rule is: you fight and you are out.
As anyone who walks into BCHS can immediately tell, these rules get results. The atmosphere is calm and orderly, and students and teachers interact with mutual respect. The school' longtime security guard, Gail Baine, acts more as a counselor than as muscle.
To be sure, BCHS does enforce a disciplinary policy, and every year a couple of students are discharged — as is the norm at any city high school. What sets BCHS apart is that there have been absolutely no violent incidents on its premises in all its four years.
Progress High School for Professional Careers
After a radical overhaul of its security system, Progress High School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is one of the safest high schools in the city — a remarkable achievement, given the school's origins. With 1,100 students, Progress is one of the three selfcontained
smaller schools in the
building that used to house Eastern
District High School, an enormous and
troubled school that dissolved in 1996.
Eastern District had operated with a
heavy-duty security apparatus — permanent
metal detectors, many security
guards, surveillance cameras — which
failed to prevent the school from
chronically making the top-ten list of
the city's most dangerous schools.
In 1996, the Board of Education restructured the mega-school with the participation of community leaders, elected officials, teachers, union representatives, and students. One of the major proposals of the Redesign Advisory Committee in 1996 was the removal of the metal detectors from the buildin's entrance — a proposal the NYCDOE eventually agreed to.
Progress principal William Jusino says,
But in the fall of 2006, the Grand Street Campus, as the building was renamed, opened without scanners. Jusino thinks organized and vocal community opposition to the scanners got them taken out.
“We have a very safe school, and we do it at a fraction of the cost of schools with more scanners and guards. We wouldn't want to go back to the way things were.”
NYCDOE statistics show that Progress is a very safe place. Principal Jusino is deservedly proud.
But has the NYCDOE taken note of this accomplishment?
El Puente Academy
From its beginning in 1993, El Puente Academy High School has trusted its students to act like mature and responsible adults. There are no bells sounding the start and stop of each period. The students — about 175 of them now — know when class is over from the clock on the wall. Nor are there any metal detectors at the entrance. Until the late 1990s, the school didn't even employ any SSAs. Now the school has three SSAs, and they essentially work as greeters at the front door. There has yet to be a fight, let alone a shooting, in this school.
“In discussions about the new building, the students' first question is always, ‘Are we going to have metal detectors? Are we going to have police in schools?’”
Julia Richman Educational Complex
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Julia Richman High School was one of the worst high schools in Manhattan — poor attendance, low graduation rates, and a chaotic environment unchecked by a massive security apparatus, including metal detectors and over a dozen security guards.4 In 1995, the school was shuttered and redesigned into six separate smaller schools — four high schools, a K–8 school, and a junior high school — comprising the Julia Richman Educational Complex (JREC), all of which are flourishing today with a combined graduation rate of 90 percent. The redesign also overhauled the school's security apparatus.
Today, JREC has no metal detectors. The responsibilities of the SSAs have been limited to their more traditional role as intervention of the last resort, meaning that now the educators are in charge of discipline. For example, students who arrive late are no longer berated or penalized by the security guards. “Lateness, that's not a security problem,” says one SSA. “If you're here, I want you to come in.” When students reenter the campus after an unauthorized trip off the grounds for lunch, disciplinary action is taken by the educators, not the guards.
The results? In the 2006-2007 school year, SSAs reported only four fights, none involving any weapon more dangerous than thrown fruit.
Much of the credit for this successful transformation of school security goes to the supervising SSA, who has passed on the values of this more traditional approach to school security to all her subordinates. The supervising SSA knows the students by name and cultivates a close rapport with them. And she knows what's at stake. “Kids do stupid stuff all the time. But these are somebody's children.”
Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports
The Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, in the Bronx, has been without metal detectors ever since it began in 2002. “The entire school community takes tremendous pride that they are not needed in the school,” says principal Felice Lepore.
They have not been needed because there has not been a single serious violent incident since the school was formed. Urban Assembly has 325 students and six SSAs, two of whom have been at the school from the start. The SSAs are integrated into the daily running of the school and work hand in hand with the deans, teachers, and school aides. According to Lepore,
Herbert H. Lehman High School
Unlike many of the schools with successful security methods that we examined, Herbert H. Lehman High School is an old-style behemoth, with nearly 4,400 students. There is a reason that Lehman has not been broken down
into smaller units: the place works very
well and has never been on any “persistently
dangerous” list. Lehman is not an
elite school, like the Bronx High School
of Science; it is a neighborhood-zoned
school in the Westchester Square area
of the Bronx with students of every race
and national origin, mostly workingclass.
The graduation rate is 60 percent,
but of those graduating students, 94
percent go to a two-year or four-year
college. Lehman is plainly a high school
that does many things right. Judging
from the low number of violent incidents,
security is one of them.
How has Lehman been able to achieve this success? For starters, the school's security leaders have been working together for over two decades. Principal Robert Leder has run Lehman for twenty-nine years and Juanita Sizemore has been the sergeant in charge of SSAs since 1983. There have never been any metal detectors and, according to school reports, violent incidents are few and far between. Joseph DiMaio, assistant principal for administration and security, credits the success of this low-impact approach to the consistent efforts of Leder and Sizemore.
There are fifteen part-time teachers who also do security work, joining a dozen SSAs and some twenty school aides.
The school has never had metal detectors at the doors and will not be adding any in the foreseeable future. DiMaio says,
On top of that, to get every student through the detectors every morning would most likely require cutting the school size in half; otherwise, it would be impossible to get all the students into the building every morning. Not that DiMaio is categorically opposed to scanners: “I've seen them work and I've seen them not work. But here we have the right people in the right place.”
Juanita Sizemore is one of those right people, and her soft but firm touch with the students is one of the reasons behind the school's nonviolent but orderly ambience.
And she is eager to deal with disciplinary problems right there at the school rather than turn it into a matter for the local police.
Sizemore seems appalled at the now-normal practice of handcuffing high-school students for minor disciplinary infractions, like cursing or going somewhere without a pass.
Why, then, are SSAs using handcuffs more frequently, not just in high schools but even in elementary schools?
Security at Lehman is no cakewalk. The school is badly overcrowded — DiMaio estimates it was probably built for a full 1,000 fewer students than are currently enrolled — and crowd management in the hallways and at the exits is a necessity. However, Lehman trusts its students to control their own actions at school. For example, Lehman is an “open campus” that allows students to leave the building for lunch without special permission. DiMaio says,
Lessons Learned
As a group, the six schools share some or all of a short list of values and practices. These include:
If values and practices such as those identified in six New York City high schools are products of school cultures that successfully minimize negative behavior without metal detectors or muscle, how can we replicate them? How can we protect the ones that are already in place?
We would argue that a centralized bureaucracy can destroy a school's culture much more easily than it can mandate that a school adopt a given culture. The possible combinations of humanity, neighborhood setting, racial and economic particularities, and so on mean that each learning community is unique and will, therefore, develop its own culture. For example, some school leaders “consistently refused metal detectors or other screening devices on their campuses” in a protective attempt to maintain the “respectful, high-achieving academic environment they were working so hard to develop” (Ascher & Maguire 2007, p. 9).
City education departments could establish a protective environment in which schools can create their own cultures that allow our children and youth to study and learn in a peaceful, supportive atmosphere.
What might the features of that environment include?
FOOTNOTES
1 One of the schools is a campus containing several schools.
2 These schools had, on average, more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and a higher percentage of Latino students than the citywide averages.
3 The snowball sampling method, used when the desired sample characteristic is rare, relies on referrals from initial subjects to generate additional subjects.
4 Information about Julia Richman comes from Mukherjee (2007).
5 Chief Judge Kaye, majority opinion, Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, 86 NY2d 307.
REFERENCES
Ascher, C., and C. Maguire. 2007. Beating the Odds: How Thirteen NYC Schools Bring Low-Performing Ninth-Graders to Timely Graduation and College Enrollment. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
Barton, P. E. 2003. Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress. Princeton, NJ: Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service.
Barton, P. E., R. J. Coley, and H. Wenglinsky. 1998. Order in the Classroom: Violence, Discipline, and Student Achievement. Princeton, NJ: Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service.
Brady, K. P., S. Balmer, and D. Phenix. 2007. “School-Police Partnership Effectiveness in Urban Schools: An Analysis of New York City's Impact Schools Initiative,” Education and Urban Society 39: 455-478.
Bryk, A. S., V. E. Lee, and P. B. Holland. 1993. Catholic Schools and the Common Good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chubb, J. E., and T. E. Moe. 1990. Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Mayer, D. P., J. E. Mullins, and M. T. Moore. 2000. Monitoring School Quality: An Indicators Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Mukherjee, E. 2007. Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union.
New York City Department of Education. 2007. Citywide Standards of Discipline and Intervention Measures (The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12). New York: New York City Department of Education, Office of Instructional Publications.
Archives
Learning Environments
VUE Number 19, Spring 2008
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Life without Lockdown: Do Peaceful Schools Require High-Profile Policing?
By John M. Beam, Chase Madar, and Deinya Phenix
John M. Beam is executive director of the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University. Chase Madar is staff attorney at Make the Road New York. Deinya Phenix is a senior data analyst and data manager at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author biographies
Despite the prevalence of zero tolerance discipline policies, some schools in New York City have succeeded in improving safety and discipline without punitive measures.
A substantial body of research has confirmed the link between school safety and academic achievement (Barton 2003; Barton, Coley & Wenglinsky 1998; Bryk, Lee & Holland 1993; Chubb & Moe 1990). According to one overview of indicators of school quality, “An orderly school atmosphere conducive to learning could be an example of a 'necessary, but not sufficient' characteristic of quality schools” (Mayer, Mullins & Moore 2000, p. 42).
Many policy-makers have internalized the “necessary” without the “but not sufficient” half of this proposition. Moreover, they have equated “positive disciplinary climate” with zero tolerance for a wide range of behaviors. Distinctly non-urban tragedies such as the Columbine, Paducah, and Jonesboro school shootings are invoked to create the climate justifying locking down urban schools serving students of color. While concern for gangs has more relevance in discussing order and safety in big city schools, the topic is overused politically and under-examined in terms of its actual relevance to schools, which are often the safest environments available to low-income city youths.
With well over a million students and more than 1,400 public schools with wildly varying enrollments, class sizes, and school cultures spread throughout 250 neighborhoods, New York City's school system is potentially a natural laboratory for studying different approaches to establishing orderly learning environments. According to the New York City school chancellor's discipline policy, “School personnel are responsible for developing and using strategies that promote optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience. They are also responsible for addressing behaviors which disrupt learning” (NYCDOE 2007, p. 2). Intervention and prevention approaches can include a range of counseling, social services, and academic support.
The highly centralized management of the school system has, in fact, pushed a focused and muscular interpretation of this discipline mandate. One of the first policy changes made when City Hall won mayoral control over schools from the governor and legislature was to transfer authority over school security to the New York City Police Department. This change meant that school safety agents (SSAs) were no longer employees of the school system and now worked in a completely separate chain of command from everyone else in a school, with their separate hierarchies intersecting only in the mayor's office.
Has a zero tolerance approach — not only to actual violence and criminal acts but also to rowdiness, lateness, and perceived disrespect of authority (e.g., not producing one's class schedule upon demand), in other words, standard operating procedure for teenagers — enhanced the ability of school personnel to comply with the chancellor's mandate that they be &lduo;responsible for developing and using strategies that promote optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience”?
Consider data from the New York City high schools chosen for the Impact Initiative, a program that increased school police and other security enhancements. These schools were among the city's neediest, lowestperforming schools (Brady, Balmer & Phenix 2007). About a year and a half after the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) implemented the program, these schools had experienced no reduction in dropout and student mobility rates. And there was a decrease in attendance and a dramatic increase in both suspensions and noncriminal police incidents. However, because there was some decrease in major crimes in New York City high schools, the program continues.
Successful Alternatives to Lockdown
Fortunately, there are examples of alternative approaches showing that running schools by lockdown is not the only, or even the most effective, strategy for promoting the “optimal learning and positive behavior throughout a student's school experience” to which the chancellor and mayor putatively aspire.
This article presents profiles of six high schools in New York,1 studied recently as part of ongoing work with students by one of the authors (Madar) and colleague Sarah Landes, a youth organizer at Make the Road New York, that take a very different approach to school security &151; with excellent results. None of the schools in these school-security success stories have metal detectors, and all of them have extremely low rates of violent incidents (see Figure 1).
of schools |
of students |
|
|||||||||
| Case study schools | |||||||||||
| Non-case study schools total with metal detectors without metal detectors |
74 220 |
93,812 202,781 |
9.43 6.50 |
0.23 0.16 |
0.18 0.15 |
1.65 1.28 |
6.58 2.93 |
||||
| All NYC Schools | |||||||||||
Note: The six schools profiled in this article include five autonomous schools and one complex of four high schools.
None of the six high schools profiled in this article are among the city's elite magnet schools.2 In fact, the student demographic data on the schools studied do not seem to differ markedly from that of the more problematic Impact schools. These schools were selected, using a snowball method3 for identifying schools, because of their strong departure from the dominant, officially promoted paradigm. Each of the six schools provided a slightly different combination of evidence of how learning-focused school culture is possible.
Bushwick Community High SchoolBushwick Community High School (BCHS) in Brooklyn is a “second chance” school. According to principal Tira Randall,
All our students have failed in, and
been failed by, the school system. The
typical male student is eighteen and
has been disconnected for a year or
two from his previous school. Many
of the female students are mothers.
Many of the students work full-time.
Almost all the students are Black or
Latino. There are Crips, Bloods, and
Latin Kings in the school, and the
teachers all know who they are.
But BCHS has had only one fight in the past three years, and that was outside of school bounds. BCHS has no metal detectors. The school has 350 students and only one security guard.
Tabari Bomani, a longtime teacher at this school, says,
I have always been dedicated to the
idea that if you treat people like
criminals they will respond that way.
We have always sought to develop a
school culture that is based on a real
expression of love, camaraderie, and
unified struggle.
This culture is backed up by customs and rules. There is plenty of discussion about shared struggle and shared alienation and a rigorous ban on homophobic epithets and the N-word. Another rule is: you fight and you are out.
As anyone who walks into BCHS can immediately tell, these rules get results. The atmosphere is calm and orderly, and students and teachers interact with mutual respect. The school' longtime security guard, Gail Baine, acts more as a counselor than as muscle.
To be sure, BCHS does enforce a disciplinary policy, and every year a couple of students are discharged — as is the norm at any city high school. What sets BCHS apart is that there have been absolutely no violent incidents on its premises in all its four years.
Progress High School for Professional Careers
After a radical overhaul of its security system, Progress High School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is one of the safest high schools in the city — a remarkable achievement, given the school's origins. With 1,100 students, Progress is one of the three selfcontained
smaller schools in the
building that used to house Eastern
District High School, an enormous and
troubled school that dissolved in 1996.
Eastern District had operated with a
heavy-duty security apparatus — permanent
metal detectors, many security
guards, surveillance cameras — which
failed to prevent the school from
chronically making the top-ten list of
the city's most dangerous schools.In 1996, the Board of Education restructured the mega-school with the participation of community leaders, elected officials, teachers, union representatives, and students. One of the major proposals of the Redesign Advisory Committee in 1996 was the removal of the metal detectors from the buildin's entrance — a proposal the NYCDOE eventually agreed to.
Progress principal William Jusino says,
This happened not without some
struggle. The superintendents
cautioned against it, telling us that if
anything happens, God forbid, the
first question will be, “Why weren't
there metal detectors in place?”
But in the fall of 2006, the Grand Street Campus, as the building was renamed, opened without scanners. Jusino thinks organized and vocal community opposition to the scanners got them taken out.
“We have a very safe school, and we do it at a fraction of the cost of schools with more scanners and guards. We wouldn't want to go back to the way things were.”
NYCDOE statistics show that Progress is a very safe place. Principal Jusino is deservedly proud.
We went from being one of the most
dangerous schools in the city to one
of the safest, among those with the
fewest incidents, and those that we've
had have been minimal. The statistics
speak for themselves. We have a very
safe school, and we do it at a fraction
of the cost of schools with more
scanners and guards. We wouldn't want
to go back to the way things were.
But has the NYCDOE taken note of this accomplishment?
You'd think we'd get a lot of visitors
and a lot of write-up about our success,
but we don't. We're one of the
best-kept secrets in New York. They're
not looking for fewer sites for scanners,
they're looking for more, and
they need ways to justify and explain
all the scanners. The real work isn't
officers working machines — it's how
you communicate with your students
and your staff.
El Puente Academy
From its beginning in 1993, El Puente Academy High School has trusted its students to act like mature and responsible adults. There are no bells sounding the start and stop of each period. The students — about 175 of them now — know when class is over from the clock on the wall. Nor are there any metal detectors at the entrance. Until the late 1990s, the school didn't even employ any SSAs. Now the school has three SSAs, and they essentially work as greeters at the front door. There has yet to be a fight, let alone a shooting, in this school.
“In discussions about the new building, the students' first question is always, ‘Are we going to have metal detectors? Are we going to have police in schools?’”
Our young people have come to really
value this — they know the school is
safe, because they've made it safe, and
they respect what they have. Young
people talk to the staff — they understand
the privilege and the responsibility
about safety. They embrace it!
In discussions about the new building,
the students' first question is always,
“Are we going to have metal detectors?
Are we going to have police in
schools?” Our answer is always, “It's
in your power. If a single person brings
a gun or a knife, that person is giving
this up for all of you.” The students
understand that.
Julia Richman Educational Complex
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Julia Richman High School was one of the worst high schools in Manhattan — poor attendance, low graduation rates, and a chaotic environment unchecked by a massive security apparatus, including metal detectors and over a dozen security guards.4 In 1995, the school was shuttered and redesigned into six separate smaller schools — four high schools, a K–8 school, and a junior high school — comprising the Julia Richman Educational Complex (JREC), all of which are flourishing today with a combined graduation rate of 90 percent. The redesign also overhauled the school's security apparatus.
Today, JREC has no metal detectors. The responsibilities of the SSAs have been limited to their more traditional role as intervention of the last resort, meaning that now the educators are in charge of discipline. For example, students who arrive late are no longer berated or penalized by the security guards. “Lateness, that's not a security problem,” says one SSA. “If you're here, I want you to come in.” When students reenter the campus after an unauthorized trip off the grounds for lunch, disciplinary action is taken by the educators, not the guards.
The results? In the 2006-2007 school year, SSAs reported only four fights, none involving any weapon more dangerous than thrown fruit.
Much of the credit for this successful transformation of school security goes to the supervising SSA, who has passed on the values of this more traditional approach to school security to all her subordinates. The supervising SSA knows the students by name and cultivates a close rapport with them. And she knows what's at stake. “Kids do stupid stuff all the time. But these are somebody's children.”
Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports
The Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, in the Bronx, has been without metal detectors ever since it began in 2002. “The entire school community takes tremendous pride that they are not needed in the school,” says principal Felice Lepore.
They have not been needed because there has not been a single serious violent incident since the school was formed. Urban Assembly has 325 students and six SSAs, two of whom have been at the school from the start. The SSAs are integrated into the daily running of the school and work hand in hand with the deans, teachers, and school aides. According to Lepore,
Any time we have an event, we make
it a point to invite all safety personnel
to eat and mingle with us. They are
completely included in our day-today
operation at the school. The SSAs,
deans, and aides are part of any
mediation that takes place among
our students.
Herbert H. Lehman High School
Unlike many of the schools with successful security methods that we examined, Herbert H. Lehman High School is an old-style behemoth, with nearly 4,400 students. There is a reason that Lehman has not been broken down
into smaller units: the place works very
well and has never been on any “persistently
dangerous” list. Lehman is not an
elite school, like the Bronx High School
of Science; it is a neighborhood-zoned
school in the Westchester Square area
of the Bronx with students of every race
and national origin, mostly workingclass.
The graduation rate is 60 percent,
but of those graduating students, 94
percent go to a two-year or four-year
college. Lehman is plainly a high school
that does many things right. Judging
from the low number of violent incidents,
security is one of them.How has Lehman been able to achieve this success? For starters, the school's security leaders have been working together for over two decades. Principal Robert Leder has run Lehman for twenty-nine years and Juanita Sizemore has been the sergeant in charge of SSAs since 1983. There have never been any metal detectors and, according to school reports, violent incidents are few and far between. Joseph DiMaio, assistant principal for administration and security, credits the success of this low-impact approach to the consistent efforts of Leder and Sizemore.
Leder has done a great job of establishing
a safe atmosphere. And we all
have a great relationship with Sergeant
Sizemore. I meet with her constantly,
at least once a day.
There are fifteen part-time teachers who also do security work, joining a dozen SSAs and some twenty school aides.
The school has never had metal detectors at the doors and will not be adding any in the foreseeable future. DiMaio says,
Detectors are a double-edged sword.
You know you're keeping weapons
out, but it would destroy the atmosphere
here. WeÕve made Lehman
friendly and home-like. Scanners at
schools make the ones at airports look
nice and welcoming in comparison.
On top of that, to get every student through the detectors every morning would most likely require cutting the school size in half; otherwise, it would be impossible to get all the students into the building every morning. Not that DiMaio is categorically opposed to scanners: “I've seen them work and I've seen them not work. But here we have the right people in the right place.”
Juanita Sizemore is one of those right people, and her soft but firm touch with the students is one of the reasons behind the school's nonviolent but orderly ambience.
As long as you respect the kids, they
give you that respect back. Even if
a student starts acting out of character,
we try to look at that child as
if he was our own child, or a cousin,
or a nephew.
And she is eager to deal with disciplinary problems right there at the school rather than turn it into a matter for the local police.
If a kid's acting up, I just say, “Look, if
I take you to the precinct, it won't be
the same; they'll be a lot rougher on
you than we are.” That works.
Sizemore seems appalled at the now-normal practice of handcuffing high-school students for minor disciplinary infractions, like cursing or going somewhere without a pass.
Within my twenty-five-year career as
a school safety agent, I can count on
one hand the times I've had to handcuff
a student. Usually when we have
a serious incident, when we come on
the scene and start talking, the kids
are in compliance. Handcuffing is
only if the kids are totally out of
control. And I don't foresee that if I
left Lehman I would ever have to use
this measure.
Why, then, are SSAs using handcuffs more frequently, not just in high schools but even in elementary schools?
It could come from a lack of experience
and a lack of verbal skills. If
that's the only way they know how to
get a kid to follow the rules, then the
guards need more training. For you to
just cuff a student because he's misbehaving
or acting irate, that doesn't
sit right with me.
Security at Lehman is no cakewalk. The school is badly overcrowded — DiMaio estimates it was probably built for a full 1,000 fewer students than are currently enrolled — and crowd management in the hallways and at the exits is a necessity. However, Lehman trusts its students to control their own actions at school. For example, Lehman is an “open campus” that allows students to leave the building for lunch without special permission. DiMaio says,
We trust the kids with this responsibility.
Most of them can handle it, but
some do not. Still, we try to treat them
like adults, at least a little, to get them
used to responsibility.
Lessons Learned
As a group, the six schools share some or all of a short list of values and practices. These include:
- no metal detectors in the school's
current incarnation and an express
desire on the part of faculty and
students to keep them out, in the
face of pressure from central office
- a conscious policy or practice
of trusting students to behave
responsibly
- clear and simple rules, formed with
some student input
- an adult perception of students as
people and someone's children
- a principal who has established
authority over the SSAs and
defines role and behavior standards
for them
- a clear delineation of responsibilities
for discipline (faculty) and
bona fide safety concerns (SSAs)
- strong leadership from senior SSAs
- constant communication between school staff and SSAs and integration of SSAs into the school community through meetings and community events
If values and practices such as those identified in six New York City high schools are products of school cultures that successfully minimize negative behavior without metal detectors or muscle, how can we replicate them? How can we protect the ones that are already in place?
We would argue that a centralized bureaucracy can destroy a school's culture much more easily than it can mandate that a school adopt a given culture. The possible combinations of humanity, neighborhood setting, racial and economic particularities, and so on mean that each learning community is unique and will, therefore, develop its own culture. For example, some school leaders “consistently refused metal detectors or other screening devices on their campuses” in a protective attempt to maintain the “respectful, high-achieving academic environment they were working so hard to develop” (Ascher & Maguire 2007, p. 9).
City education departments could establish a protective environment in which schools can create their own cultures that allow our children and youth to study and learn in a peaceful, supportive atmosphere.
What might the features of that environment include?
- an institutional modeling of respect
for students, demonstrated by providing
the “instrumentalities of learning”
5 with resources, especially space
and class size, distributed in sufficient
quantity and targeted to the real-world
needs of individual children and youth
- an explicit acknowledgement that as
people, students have a set of basic
civil and human rights that must be
respected
- a clear line of authority in which the
principal has the same formal, frontline
responsibility for the SSAs as he or
she does for all other professional and
support staff in their schools — such
authority would be in keeping with
the chancellor's claim that the principals
are the CEOs of their buildings
- new, explicit rules of engagement and
chain of command for police officers
who enter a school
- authority for students to submit
complaints about SSAs to the Civilian
Complaint Review Board
FOOTNOTES
1 One of the schools is a campus containing several schools.
2 These schools had, on average, more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and a higher percentage of Latino students than the citywide averages.
3 The snowball sampling method, used when the desired sample characteristic is rare, relies on referrals from initial subjects to generate additional subjects.
4 Information about Julia Richman comes from Mukherjee (2007).
5 Chief Judge Kaye, majority opinion, Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, 86 NY2d 307.
REFERENCES
Ascher, C., and C. Maguire. 2007. Beating the Odds: How Thirteen NYC Schools Bring Low-Performing Ninth-Graders to Timely Graduation and College Enrollment. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
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Brady, K. P., S. Balmer, and D. Phenix. 2007. “School-Police Partnership Effectiveness in Urban Schools: An Analysis of New York City's Impact Schools Initiative,” Education and Urban Society 39: 455-478.
Bryk, A. S., V. E. Lee, and P. B. Holland. 1993. Catholic Schools and the Common Good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chubb, J. E., and T. E. Moe. 1990. Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Mayer, D. P., J. E. Mullins, and M. T. Moore. 2000. Monitoring School Quality: An Indicators Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Mukherjee, E. 2007. Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union.
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