Audit Report on the Department of Education’s Efforts to Address Student-to-Student Harassment, Intimidation, and/or Bullying in Compliance with Chancellor’s Regulation A-832

This audit determined whether New York City’s public schools appropriately address, investigate, and resolve student complaints of bullying and harassment by other students in compliance with the Department of Education’s (DOE) Chancellor’s Regulation No. A832 (CR-A832).

New York City’s DOE is the largest public school system in the United States. It provides primary and secondary education for more than one million students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12. DOE issued CR-A832¹ on September 3, 2008. The regulation sets forth DOE policy prohibiting any form of bias-related harassment, intimidation, and/or bullying committed by students against other students on account of actual or perceived race, color, creed, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship or immigration status, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or disability. CR-A832 establishes reporting procedures, investigation, follow-up action, and notification requirements for all New York City public schools.

DOE requires all schools to record all behavioral infractions, including bias-related incidents, in DOE’s Online Occurrence Reporting System (OORS), which is the document of record for all reported events. OORS is used to record, track, and report on all behavioral incidents based on disciplinary actions Citywide each year. For the 2009-2010 School Year, DOE reported 8,298 bias-related incidents, representing nearly 6 percent of all behavioral incidents recorded for the school year. Not all of these reported bias-related incidents, however, were classified as CR-A832 violations.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

This audit concluded that DOE provides support to the City’s schools in regards to addressing, investigating, and following up complaints of student-to-student bias-related bullying, harassment, and/or intimidation. However, this support did not adequately ensure that those incidents were treated in a consistent manner among City schools. Further, although OORS is accessed and used by all schools Citywide to report behavioral incidents, the database was not designed, and through at least the end of the 2011/2012 school year, had not been modified to make possible the identification of all incidents that fall under CR-A832. Therefore, for the period under review, reasonable assurance could not be obtained to ensure that the City’s public schools consistently complied with CR-A832.

The audit found that the three surveyed schools complied with some of the key aspects of CR-A832. However, DOE has not developed an effective means to enable it to identify all bias-related incidents that violate CR-A832. Therefore, DOE could not adequately track reported incidents or complaints of student-to-student bias-related harassment that occur at its schools and could not quantify the total number of such incidents for a given school year. Additionally, DOE has not established sufficient controls to ensure that bias-related incidents are treated in a consistent manner among City schools. This is of concern due to the inherent risk that school principals could downplay the reporting of bias-related incidents that occur at their respective schools. Therefore, we could not be assured that all reported complaints of student-to-student bias-related occurrences were appropriately recorded in OORS and subsequently addressed.

Our review of 10 bias-related incidents recorded in OORS for two of the three schools we visited demonstrated that (1) the sampled reported incidents were recorded in the OORS database in a timely manner; (2) the sampled schools investigated and followed up on the sampled incidents; and (3) school officials contacted or attempted to contact parents of victims and/or accused students involved in the sampled incidents. However, schools did not provide the alleged victims (students) with a written report of the outcome of the investigation within 10 days of the sampled incidents being reported or the schools becoming aware of the incidents.

Audit Recommendations

To address these weaknesses, the audit made five recommendations, including that DOE should:

• Modify OORS to allow it to comprehensively and effectively track and identify all bias-related incidents, including CR-A832 violations.
• Ensure that school principals understand what is required of them regarding CR-A832 violations and that they comply with those requirements.
• Enhance its oversight of the school-reporting process and establish more effective controls to better ensure that bias-related incidents are entered in OORS. At a minimum, such oversight should include visits to a sample of schools (selected based on objectively designed criteria) to review their methods for collecting and recording incident-related data and conduct limited testing of supporting school records to ensure that incidents are categorized and reported appropriately.

DOE Response

DOE generally agreed with the audit’s five recommendations, stating that most had already been implemented.