Audit Report on the New York City Department of Education’s Reporting of Violent and Disruptive Incidents at Its Schools

Executive Summary

The objective of this audit was to determine whether the New York City (City) Department of Education (DOE) has adequate controls in place to ensure that violent and disruptive incidents that occur at public schools attended by middle and high school students are accurately recorded and reported according to certain DOE and New York State Education Department (NYSED) requirements.

DOE is the largest school district in the United States.  According to DOE’s website, the agency serves 1.1 million students in over 1,800 schools throughout the City’s five boroughs.  DOE is responsible for ensuring that its schools are places where students learn and staff teach in a safe, secure and orderly environment.  In furtherance of that goal, DOE issues regulations, known as the “Chancellor’s Regulations,” that all schools are required to follow.  In addition, DOE published a booklet, Citywide Behavioral Expectations to Support Student Learning (the Discipline Code), for Grades K through 12, which delineates expectations for student conduct, identifies conduct that violates DOE’s standards, describes the infraction levels and infractions codes to be used when recording a student’s misbehavior, sets forth a range of permissible disciplinary and intervention measures that schools may use to address misbehavior, and contains the bill of student rights and responsibilities.   DOE’s Office of Safety and Youth Development (OSYD) is responsible for helping schools create and maintain a safe, orderly and supportive environment for students and in that capacity works directly with schools to establish and implement safety, discipline and intervention policies and procedures.

DOE uses its Online Occurrence Reporting System (OORS) to record incidents reported by schools, including those incidents involving students’ infractions of the Discipline Code.   School principals or their designees are responsible for recording such incidents into OORS, along with the applicable infraction codes as defined in the Discipline Code, within 24 hours of an incident’s occurrence.  In addition, DOE uses its Suspensions and Office of Hearings Online system (SOHO) to document students’ suspensions and removals, as well as to document guidance interventions, in those instances where the corresponding incidents have been properly documented in OORS.  These two reporting systems provide school officials with an opportunity to review incident and suspension data that can help them identify trends in student behavior and in school climate that could enable schools to address issues in a timely manner.

The New York City Police Department’s (NYPD’s) School Safety Division helps DOE to provide a safe environment in schools by deploying more than 5,000 school safety agents (SSAs) and 200 uniformed police officers throughout the City’s public school system.  The SSAs stationed at each of the schools are required to maintain an activity logbook and to chronologically record the daily SSA work assignments and those activities (including incidents) that occur in the school and around the school’s perimeter of which the SSAs become aware.  The activity logbook is an official document that serves as a memory aid in legal inquiries.

In July 2000, New York State (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 across the State.  The SAVE Act requires all public schools to collect data and report annually to NYSED violent and disruptive incidents that occur on school property or at school-sponsored events during the school year (July 1 and June 30).  In conjunction with the State Division of Criminal Justice Services, NYSED developed a uniform incident reporting system, the Violent and Disruptive Incident Report (VADIR) that requires each public school in New York State to compile records of incidents, organized by designated VADIR categories.

NYSED uses the VADIR data to calculate each school’s “School Violence Index” (SVI).  The SVI is a ratio that is determined by the number of incidents, the seriousness of the incidents, and the school’s enrollment.   According to the NYC Violent and Disruptive Incidents Report, covering School Year 2015-2016 (posted on the NYSED website in January 2017 of the subsequent school year), there were 1,597 NYC public schools—44 schools had no reported VADIR incidents during School Year 2015-2016, and 1,553 schools reported a total of 41,559 VADIR incidents, ranging from 1 to 271 incidents during that year.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

DOE’s controls need to be strengthened to reasonably assure that violent and disruptive incidents at its public schools are consistently recorded in OORS and ultimately reported in the VADIR system in accordance with NYSED requirements.  Although DOE, through its Chancellor’s Regulations, has given general instructions to school administrators about their responsibilities for reporting incidents that occur at their schools, and provides on-going training to school administrators, it has not established adequate controls to ensure that those instructions are followed on a consistent basis.  DOE has no evidence that it performs any types of audits, reviews or reconciliations to assess the degree to which schools are following DOE regulations and appropriately recording incidents involving students’ behavioral infractions in OORS.

We sampled 10 schools and found that for School Year 2015-2016, of 114 incidents we identified from School Safety Division records as reportable under DOE’s regulations, 24 VADIR-reportable incidents (21 percent) were not recorded in OORS.  As a consequence, among other things, these incidents were not considered for inclusion when DOE reported those schools’ incidents in the VADIR system.

For those incidents occurring at the 10 sampled schools during School Year 2015-2016 that school administrators did record, our analysis found that the VADIR categories that DOE assigned to them generally corresponded to the incident descriptions recorded in OORS.  Of the 3,020 incidents we reviewed, only 56 (less than 2 percent) appeared to be inappropriately categorized.

However, we found that DOE does not require that schools consistently capture all of the information in OORS and SOHO relating to the disciplinary or referral actions taken, which is needed to properly assess whether certain incidents should be reported in VADIR.  Without adequate controls in place, DOE is less able to ensure that violent and disruptive incidents are recorded consistently and accurately.  As a result, DOE is less likely to report them in accordance with NYSED requirements.

In addition, DOE has not provided evidence that management has instituted an oversight mechanism to ensure that DOE schools take appropriate referral, corrective, or disciplinary action in dealing with incidents involving aggressive or harmful behavior by students, and that the actions that schools do take are properly reported in accordance with DOE and NYSED requirements.  In that regard, we found no record of any disciplinary, referral or other corrective action in DOE’s SOHO system for 486 of 589 student-behavioral incidents (83 percent) at our sampled schools; of these, 398 incidents (82 percent) were at an infraction level of 3 or above, which are infractions that DOE classifies as serious or relatively serious.

Audit Recommendations

Based on the audit, we make the following five recommendations:

• DOE should enhance its oversight of the schools’ data entry in OORS to ensure that school administrators understand and comply with Chancellor’s Regulations and record all incidents as required.
• DOE should ensure that school administrators routinely and purposefully communicate with the NYPD School Safety Division to be fully aware of incidents in their schools that are captured in the School Safety Division records, and verify that the incidents are consistently recorded in OORS. Such communications with the NYPD School Safety Division and reviews of incident recordings in OORS should be documented.
• DOE should ensure that violent and disruptive incidents are correctly categorized and included on the VADIR summaries reported to NYSED so that the SVI calculations are accurate.
• DOE should modify and establish controls in the SOHO system to capture all disciplinary and referral actions and the necessary information required by NYSED for these actions, including the licensing and qualification information of school staff providing counseling or treatment services, in order to properly assess whether certain incidents should be reported in VADIR.
• DOE should periodically review the OORS and SOHO systems to identify incidents involving aggressive, harmful, seriously dangerous or violent behavior (Level 4 and 5 infractions) to ensure that school administrators took appropriate actions and recorded in SOHO all disciplinary, referral or other corrective actions taken concerning the students.

Agency Response

DOE stated that it agreed with three of the five recommendations and stated it will take the other two recommendations under advisement.  However, to the extent that DOE stated that it agreed with three recommendations, it qualified that “agreement” by stating for two recommendations that it “agrees with this recommendation inasmuch as it reflects current practice” and for one recommendation that it “agrees with this recommendation to the extent it reflects current practice.” [Emphasis added.]  Thus, DOE effectively rejected the auditor’s recommendation that current practice should be improved in each of these instances.  DOE also expressly disagreed with a number of the audit’s findings.  We address these areas of disagreement in the body of this report.  After carefully reviewing DOE’s arguments, we find no basis to alter any of the audit’s findings.