Kids trapped in dangerous schools are supposed to have an escape hatch \u2014 it\u2019s their right under federal law.<\/p>\n
But a few years ago, New York state education officials quietly changed the rules governing how schools must report violent incidents.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s led to a steep apparent drop in serious offenses \u2014 making it much harder for families to exercise their right to transfer their kids out of unsafe schools<\/a>.<\/p>\n But it doesn\u2019t mean our schools are actually safer, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.<\/p>\n The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 requires every state to enact policies\u00a0giving students enrolled in \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d schools the right to transfer to a safer school within their district.<\/p>\n New York designates a school as \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d if it meets a threshold level of serious violent incidents \u2014 that is, homicide, physical assault, sexual offense or weapons possession<\/a> \u2014 for two consecutive years.<\/p>\n But starting in the 2021-2022 school year, the state tightened the reporting rules significantly.<\/p>\n Now, schools must only report incidents of assault, weapons possession or sexual offenses if they are\u00a0committed by students\u00a0over age 10, constitute a felony, and were reported to police.<\/p>\n All three conditions must now be met for the state to be informed.<\/p>\n As a\u00a0February report\u00a0from DiNapoli\u2019s office noted, the new rules \u201crisk that \u2018violent and disruptive\u2019 incidents are underreported.\u201d<\/p>\n So it\u2019s no surprise that, according to state data, assaults, weapons possession, and sexual offenses plummeted in the last few years.<\/p>\n Assaults, for example, went from 4.9 incidents per 1,000 students in 2017-2018 to 0.5 incidents per 1,000 students in 2023-2024.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, reports of bullying and drug use soared \u2014 safety issues that don\u2019t count toward the \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d designation.<\/p>\n Narrowing what\u2019s regarded as a severe incident makes it far less likely that any school will meet the state\u2019s \u201cdanger\u201d criteria.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n According to my analysis of state data, virtually no schools have met the \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d threshold designation since the pandemic\u2019s end.<\/p>\n In 2018-2019, 50 schools statewide met the threshold for a single year, while 11 schools met the two-year threshold.<\/p>\n By 2023-2024, only seven schools met the single-year threshold \u2014 and no schools at all met the two-year threshold.<\/p>\n DiNapoli last month reported no \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d schools for the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 school years, indicating that the trend is continuing.<\/p>\n But the \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d label is an important policy lever for families.<\/p>\n In 2007, when now-defunct\u00a0Jamaica High School\u00a0was identified as a \u201cpersistently dangerous\u201d school, the city was required to inform parents of transfer options \u2014 and many families grabbed that chance.<\/p>\n But when no schools qualify for the designation because of how offenses are defined, students effectively lose their federally guaranteed right to move to safer schools.<\/p>\n And school safety remains a major concern for New York parents: In 2025, the city\u2019s annual survey of former public-school families found it to be one of the top reasons for leaving the system.<\/p>\n The State Education Department\u00a0claimed that the new reporting rules \u201creflect developmental age and intent,\u201d citing the example of a \u201cminor\u201d event like a kindergartener hitting another kid with a block as one that\u2019s no longer necessary to report.<\/p>\n But even young kids<\/a> are capable\u00a0of\u00a0serious\u00a0acts\u00a0that pose immediate danger<\/a> to other students.\u00a0<\/p>\n And restricting reportable incidents to those that involve law enforcement ignores the fact that administrators often strive to deal with conflicts internally.<\/p>\n In\u00a0Rochester, for example, school officials allegedly failed to call police in 2023 after a student reported a sexual assault to multiple staff members.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s data-collection rules only give schools more grounds to keep troubling incidents out of official records. \u00a0<\/p>\n The comptroller\u2019s February report recommends using \u201ccomplementary methods of data collection,\u201d such as annual school climate surveys, to gauge school safety.<\/p>\n But relying on parents\u2019 and students\u2019 perceptions is no substitute for data on actual incidents.<\/p>\n New York should restore its former standards and stop clouding the realities of school safety.<\/p>\n Parents and students deserve the truth \u2014 and the right, guaranteed by federal law, to escape dangerous schools.<\/p>\n Neetu Arnold is an education policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute. X: @neetu_arnold<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kids trapped in dangerous schools are supposed to have an escape hatch \u2014 it\u2019s their right under federal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56,299,209,9954,6926],"class_list":{"0":"post-160916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-public-schools","15":"tag-school-safety","16":"tag-state-education-department"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}