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Under the No Child Left Behind Act's
"Unsafe School Choice Option," states were
required to develop a system to report
numbers of crimes and violent incidents in
schools. One of the most important
protections in the new law is that
individual students who are victims of
school violence, as well as kids who
attend schools deemed "persistently
dangerous," must be offered a transfer to
a safe school if one exists in their
district. Parents of kids who are victims
of serious school violence must be offered
safety transfers very promptly; parents of
kids who attend "persistently dangerous
schools" must be offered transfers to
other, safe schools before the school year
begins.
So what did NYSED do? We can tell
you what NYSED didn't do:
- It didn't hold public meetings or
solicit input from parents,
disability-related organizations and
any other student-side stakeholders.
Instead, it held meetings with school
district, school board and school
administrators' organizations, and law
enforcement representatives, and came
up with crime and violent incident
definitions, and a crime and violent
incident scoring system that was not
made public - so that parents and
student representatives coud not make
it clear as to what was important to
them.
- It didn't count school rape as a
"countable" school crime or violent
incident - unless it was done at the
point of a weapon and was counted as a
"weapons" crime, until Coalition
co-founder Dee Alpert made such a huge
brouhaha through her
SpecialEducationMuckraker.com web site
that the Board of Regents was shamed
into making NYSED address the issue -
again - and promise to "count"
in-school sexual assaults as serious,
negative events.
- It didn't really require or enforce
reporting by all schools in NYS - and
illegally waived reporting provisions
for District 75 schools, BOCES schools,
and the two State-operated residential
special ed. schools.
December 2006: NYSED has
now made its crime and violent incident
scoring
system public, and it confirms our
fears!
One of the worst things NYSED didn't do
was to "count" the sexual molestation of
severely disabled students as seriously as
it was forced to treat the sexual
molestation of nondisabled students. Under
NYSED's new, "improved," scoring system,
the sexual molestation of students who are
too disabled to legally consent to sex is
reported -- if it is reported at all -- as
an "Other Sex Offense," meaning that the
sexual molestation of a student who is too
disabled to give consent counts only 3/4
as much as the sexual molestation of a
nondisabled student.
While the NYS Penal Code and federal
laws treat sexual abuse of a severely
disabled student who is too impaired to
give consent as a major
felony, punishable by up to 20
years in jail, NYSED trivializes and
discounts it. As a result of NYSED's
shameful actions and inaction:
- Parents have no way to evaluate the
safety of their children's schools if
their children attend any of the
schools which were illegally given a
complete waiver or allowed to not
report all of their crime and violent
incident numbers.
- Parents of disabled students whose
in-school molestation is downplayed and
"counted" as either an "Other Sex
Offense," or whose molestation hasn't
been reported at all are denied the
federally mandated proffer of a
transfer to a safe school for their
victimized children.
We must stop this
outrageous trivialization and downplaying
of school sexual molestation of our most
vulnerable children.
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