Audit Report on the Department of Education’s Reporting of Violent, Disruptive, and other Incidents at New York City Public High Schools

AUDIT REPORT IN BRIEF

This audit determined whether the New York City Department of Education (DOE) has adequate controls in place to ensure that incidents at New York City public high schools, including those determined to be violent and disruptive, are consistently entered in the On-line Occurrence Reporting System (OORS) so that DOE can then report them to the New York State Education Department (SED) in accordance with SED requirements.

DOE is responsible for ensuring that its schools are places where students learn and staff teach in a safe, secure, and orderly environment. To accomplish this goal, among other things, DOE issues regulations, known as the “Chancellor’s Regulations,” that all schools are required to follow. In addition, each year DOE publishes a booklet, “Citywide Standards of Discipline and Intervention Measures,” known as the “discipline code.”

In July 2000, the New York State Education Law was amended by the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education (SAVE) Act to improve the safety of children in the public schools. As a result, all school districts, including New York City, are required to report annually to SED violent and disruptive incidents, as defined by SED, that occur in their schools. SED then posts the data on its Web site in its annual “Violent and Disruptive Incident Report” (VADIR). DOE developed and implemented a computer system, OORS, to record incidents reported by the schools. DOE reports to SED only those incidents that are recorded in OORS.

For the 2004/2005 school year, SED asked school districts to report data in 20 categories.
The incident data reported by a school is used by SED to calculate its School Violence Transitional Index (SVTI). The SVTI is a ratio of incidents to enrollment in a school and is determined by the number of incidents, the seriousness of the incidents, and the school’s enrollment. SED’s designation of a school as “persistently dangerous” is based on the school’s SVTI for two consecutive years. The parents of the children attending such a school are to be given the option of sending their children to another school in the district if another school has an available opening.

In the 2004/2005 school year, almost 300,000 students were enrolled in 308 public high schools in New York City. High school enrollments ranged from fewer than 100 students to almost 5,000 students. During the current 2006/2007 school year, New York City has nearly 302,000 students enrolled in 333 public high schools.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

DOE does not have effective controls to ensure that incidents at its high schools are consistently entered in OORS so that DOE can then report them in accordance with the requirements of SED. For the 10 sampled schools, 414 (21%) of the 1,996 sampled incidents that we identified were not entered in OORS. Of the 1,996 incidents, 1,247 (62%) were serious¹ and 174 (14%) of these were not entered in OORS.

Additionally, we found a wide variation from school to school in the reporting of incidents and in the consistent reporting of similar incidents. Based on discussions with administrators at the 10 schools, a significant reason for the variation is the large amount of discretion that administrators have in categorizing incidents at their schools. The effect of this discretion is significant because OORS is the source of the data reported in VADIR for New York City high schools. Therefore, these variations make it difficult for parents, the public, and government officials to rely on VADIR data to assess the relative safety of a school or to compare the safety of different schools. Without more effective central controls, DOE cannot ensure that incidents are, in fact, entered in OORS by its schools and that those incidents determined to be violent and disruptive are reported consistently among schools, so that DOE can report them in accordance with SED requirements.

Audit Recommendations

To address these findings we make three recommendations that DOE:

• Exercise more oversight of data entry in OORS by the schools to ensure that incidents are reported in accordance with DOE regulations. Such oversight should include visiting schools and performing testing of the data entry and reporting process used at the schools.

• Take corrective actions at schools that fail to enter incidents in OORS in accordance with DOE regulations.

• Provide additional training to school administrators regarding how incidents are to be categorized and subsequently recorded in OORS to help ensure that the recording of incidents is consistent from school to school.

DOE Response