Transmitted via the Access Education New York network, produced by the State Education Department Satellite Broadcast Network and NYNET; broadcast from the NYNET Studios in Albany. For additional information, call or write:

(Music)

>> Rochelle: Hello. This is a "New York Learns Newsbrief." I'm Rochelle Cassella.

The State Education Department will begin producing a series of programs designed to help teachers as they prepare students for the upcoming state exams. Entitled "Test Review," the programs will broadcast live so that teachers can ask questions of other teachers and department representatives about the fourth and eighth grade English and math assessments, the revised English Regents and the new math " A" Regents exam.

The program, to run one hour in length and to be aired to the satellite downlink sites and over the Access Education New York, will feature questions from sample exams and examples of student work.

Look for the first "Test Review" on the fourth grade English assessment to debut on Wednesday, December 9th, starting at 8 p.m.

The State Education Department has seven regional conferences on the topic of school leadership scheduled between now and December 1st. Conferences will take place in the Empire State Convention Center here in Albany on November 9th. State Ed officials will also travel to Purchase, New York; Uniondale and Hauppauge, on Long Island; New York City; the Syracuse area, and the Sagamore Hotel in the North Country. For more details on exact dates and locations for the forum, check out the State Education web page. That's at http://www.nysed.gov/rscs/schlead.html.

School finance for high learning standards is the topic of other public forums to be held in November at four sites in the State. The web site, at http://stateaid.nysed.gov, has the details on locations and dates as well as specific recommendations. Send your testimony to Dr. Deborah H. Cunningham of the SED School of Finance Unit. She can be reached at 518-474-3909.

That's all for "New York Learns Newsbrief." Stay with us for "New York Learns: Teacher to Teacher." We begin tonight with a half-hour question and answer period on regional scoring for the fourth and eighth grade English assessments and then continue with a 90-minute discussion of school safety in "Safe Spaces, Learning Places, Issues for Educators."

(Music)

>> Rochelle: Good evening. I'm Rochelle Cassella.

Welcome to "New York Learns, Teacher to Teacher." In about half an hour, we'll be joining State Education Commissioner Rick Mills and a panel for your scheduled teleconference, "Safe Spaces, Learning Places, Issues for Educators."

Before we begin that discussion, however, we're going to take some time to answers some questions you may have regarding our program of September 22nd. That show dealt with the regional scoring of the fourth and eighth grade English assessments which are being introduced in January, the fourth grade test in January.

Many of you have faxed us and E-mailed us with your questions. You can also call in your questions during this next half hour. That toll-free number, 1-877-280-7400. And here to answer your questions is Jacqueline Marino of the State Education Department. Jackie, welcome back. Good to see you again.

>> Jackie Marino: Thank you.

>> Rochelle: Before we begin answering some questions that we have already received and before the phones start ringing, and we hope that people will call in, let's talk a little bit -- let's just kind of review quickly what we discussed on that program in September.

First of all, the tests themselves, the purpose of the exams, the fourth and eighth grade assessments?

>> Jackie Marino: Okay. There are several purposes, and probably the most important one is that these assessments, all three of them in fact -- Grades 4, 8, and 11 -- will assess students' progress toward the English language arts standards that were developed and established several years ago. So that's a main purpose, is to see how students are developing in their language abilities as defined on those standards. And then in addition, the tests identify students who need extra help but, in the long run, we hope that they will also have a positive impact on instruction.

>> Rochelle: The idea being that teachers can use them as a diagnostic tool, who is having problems in that area?

>> Jackie Marino: That's right; they can.

>> Rochelle: And then for teacher development themselves, some things that they may want to change or adjust not only with individual students but also in the classroom in general.

>> Jackie Marino: Right.

>> Rochelle: Okay. The idea behind the regional scoring... we're not going to have teachers grading his or her own pupils' papers; we are doing it sort of in a group setting here. Why regional scoring for these exams?

>> Jackie Marino: Well, as you know, Rochelle, a good part of this test includes written responses, and whenever you have written responses instead of multiple choice questions, then the question of reliability comes up.

In order to have the most reliable scores, you really need to have common training. Everybody needs to understand the rubrics in the same way, understand the tasks in the same way, see the same training papers.

>> Rochelle: Um-hmm.

>> Jackie Marino: And so regional scoring allows for that. It's also a nice opportunity for professional growth because when teachers come together and they pour over student work and they see the work from students outside of their own classroom, they see a broader range of papers, and from our experience with the scoring sessions, we know that the teachers come away with a lot of ideas for what their students need after they have seen the responses to those tests.

>> Rochelle: It's really amazing when -- and we visited one of the training sessions -- to watch everybody sit around and say, "Well, why did you think it was a one? Why did you think it was a two?" "Well, this reason, this reason"...

So for people out there who are saying, you know, "Scoring day, is this a big chore? Is this a new big thing that we have?," there's really a lot that they're going to gain from it.

>> Jackie Marino: That's right, and it goes beyond just scoring those tests. They're learning about what is good work, what is good writing, and how can I help my students develop those qualities in their writing.

>> Rochelle: All judged against the rubrics that will be available.

>> Jackie Marino: Common rubrics; that's right.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Now, who is going to take these tests?

>> Jackie Marino: Just about all fourth and eighth grade students will take these tests. There will be a few exemptions if they're indicated on student I.E.P.s, and there's some discussion of a very few students whose English skills are extremely weak. But the plan is that as many students as possible should take these tests.

As you mentioned, in addition to getting that statewide data, the tests have diagnostic potential, and if you don't give the test to students, you don't know how well they might do or what their needs are, as indicated. So we want as many students as possible to take them and just about everyone should.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Public schools... private schools as well?

>> Jackie Marino: Definitely public schools. Non-public schools are strongly encouraged to participate.

>> Rochelle: Not mandated to do so but encouraged?

>> Jackie Marino: Not at this point. We don't know yet what will constitute a valid diploma at this point now that the R.C.T.s are being phased out. The requirements for graduation for non-public schools are still under discussion, so until that decision is made, we don't know whether the tests in the lower grades will be required or not. But I know that schools are encouraged, and there's a big interest in it. We had non-public participation in the training sessions for scoring, and judging by the phone calls and the letters, we know there's a lot of interest. And non-public schools have standards, too, and those teachers are eager to show that their program is not inferior to a public school program.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. Okay. Once again, if you have a question that you would like to call in live during the next half hour, it's 1-877-280-7400. That's a toll-free number.

As I said, we did get in some questions, and a lot of these are the commonly asked questions we're finding that still remain out there.

Scores: How are scores set? How are they going to be reported? What's the turnaround time? Everybody wants to know how are these scores going to be reported back, both to me as the classroom teacher, to the district, and then out to the general public?

>> Jackie Marino: Okay. Some of those decisions are still under discussion, but we do know that schools will receive individual score reports on students. Those individual reports will include information on where a student falls in one of several proficiency bands. So you would know, for example, that a student's reading score fell either below proficiency, at proficiency or at an advanced level of proficiency.

You would know that their total language arts score fell in one of those bands. You would have a description of what it means to have a score in that band, what the student is able to do if that's the level of proficiency that is reported. You would also know where the student's score falls with respect to the language arts' standards.

As I mentioned before, all of the tests are tied to the language arts standards; every task is mapped to it. So you will know if a student is stronger or less strong with respect to language for information or language for literary response and expression or language for critical analysis, and that's where the diagnostic value comes in, as being able to see that. So it will be a scaled score, and you'll have that information about the student.

>> Rochelle: And that would be for the individual classroom teacher, who could then go back and say, "Oh, look, John does well here but falls down here. Jane has a problem here. I know I need to do this. Gee, the whole class seems to have a problem here. I need to do this with everybody."

>> Jackie Marino: Exactly. That's right. As far as the report card goes, though, and that's why I'm not sure we know yet what the exact form of the report card is, but I would anticipate that there would be some figures, percentages of students that fall into each of those proficiency bands, for example.

>> Rochelle: This is referring to the school report card, not an individual student's report card?

>> Jackie Marino: That's right, the school report card. So percentages of students that fall within those proficiency bands, probably a reading score, with reference to the reading score and with reference to the total language arts score. But I know that they're still discussing what that might look like.

>> Rochelle: Okay.

>> Jackie Marino: And the turnaround time you asked about, it's likely that it will take about six weeks to get the scores, for schools to get the scores after scoring day.

>> Rochelle: And the fourth graders take the exams in January.

>> Jackie Marino: Right.

>> Rochelle: So by mid-March, teachers -- roughly, don't hold us to the date! But mid- to late-March, teachers will have some sense of what's going on.

Eighth graders don't take these exams until June.

>> Jackie Marino: Right.

>> Rochelle: So then it's going to be the ninth grade teacher who will have this information about the student --

>> Jackie Marino: That's right.

>> Rochelle: -- so that when he or she comes into the ninth grade, these teachers will know what's going on with these kids.

>> Jackie Marino: That's right. They'll know which students really need extra support and in what areas, yes.

>> Rochelle: Because after scoring day, the information goes in -- for somebody who may have been hiding in a cave for the last couple of months, the papers are regionally scored, and then they go back to C.T.V. McGraw Hill and all of the data for those individual breakdowns, for the school breakdowns and the individual student breakdowns, then comes back to the school...

>> Jackie Marino: The data comes back, yes. The teachers will have the test booklets before that, though. They will be returned to the schools right after scoring day. So if the teachers choose to look through the test booklets and see what the kids did, they'll have that information. But the scores themselves go to C.T.V. for analysis.

>> Rochelle: All righty.

>> Jackie Marino: And since you mentioned C.T.V., I should probably inform those who don't know that C.T.V. McGraw Hill is our partner in developing this task, and they were selected because of their willingness to customize a test for New York State and to link it to New York State standards. And we have continued to use New York State teachers in reviewing passages and reviewing tasks, and they will be included in standard-setting and so forth.

>> Rochelle: I think when you said "partner" -- "our partner" is the operative word here because, frankly, it is teachers in the field who really called for these tests; is that not so?

>> Jackie Marino: That's right, in many ways, yes. And certainly the standards themselves, which were developed by teachers in the field, called for assessments that looked more like what we want our kids to really do both in school and outside of school, and teachers have asked for literature passages that one might find in trade books and children's magazines outside of school, and they want kids to be able to answer significant questions and to write about their reading.

So in many ways, while it may not be the test that every teacher or even everyone at State Ed had hoped that it might be, it's a-- it represents some very good thinking on the part of our colleagues in the field. And it goes a long way toward responding to some of those requests and requirements of good assessment.

>> Rochelle: Terrific.

Once again, if you would like to call in a question tonight, the number is 1-877-280-7400. That's a toll-free number.

One of the other questions that was faxed in to us deals with the reading passages you were talking about. Will readers see passages for listening before the test?

>> Jackie Marino: Uh-huh...

>> Rochelle: And what reading speed will be recommended?

>> Jackie Marino: Oh, yes, okay. This refers to the listening passage that appears on both the Grade 4 and the Grade 8 test. And teachers will see that listening passage with the teacher directions a couple of days prior to the exam. And we recommend that teachers read -- the Grade 4 is a story -- and that they read that story at a moderate pace with the good expression, the same kind of way you would read a story to students naturally.

>> Rochelle: Okay. All righty.

Here's question that came in to us: Wouldn't the scores be more valid if the scorers were partnered up or placed in small groups with a facilitator, such as what is being done in the training sessions, instead of graded singly? Is this referring to the fact -- I'm not quite sure what the question or what the fax means, but is it that one -- when I'm sitting at a table with several other teachers on scoring day, I grade this set of papers and it's not that all of us sit at the table and grade one paper --

>> Jackie Marino: That wouldn't be efficient. But remember that the training includes familiarity with the task, just as we did in the pretraining, in the August training. So they'll talk together about the task. They'll have the opportunity to look at the rubrics and review those. They will be seeing anchor papers for each score level. They will be practicing some scoring. So that's the same collegial activity that we went through in the earlier session in August. So it's true that teachers will have their own pile of papers to score, but the training itself will be more interactive.

>> Rochelle: Is it possible also that if I have a paper and I'm looking at it and I'm just not sure, I can ask other teachers at the table, other scorers at the table, to take a look at it and let's discuss this one?

>> Jackie Marino: Sure. And there's also a table leader and there's also something called a Q.C. table, quality control, and someone will be back reading papers to assure that the scores are where they should be. So there are a lot of steps taken to be sure that a teacher isn't out on a limb all by herself wondering if she scored this accurately.

>> Rochelle: So you can ask somebody. And a percentage of the papers will be double-scored, meaning that they will be kicked right back into the cycle from the start?

>> Jackie Marino: Um-hmm.

>> Rochelle: And the idea is that -- the fax makes reference to 60 papers graded in half a day may require supportive feedback in order to get started and continue on an even level, the idea being that the average of 60 papers per scorer...

>> Jackie Marino: Per scorer. That's one task, though. They aren't going to be reading new texts and answering the new questions all the time. They'll be trained in the morning on one task, shown the rubric for that task, seeing lots of papers, anchor papers and then practice papers on that task, and then they'll be asked to score roughly 60 papers.

>> Rochelle: All righty.

Once again, if you would like to phone in a question -- we have some faxed questions here -- but if you would like to phone in a question, you can do so from our toll-free number. It's 1-877-280-7400.

We do have a caller on the line right now, and I understand this caller is from Syracuse. Hi. Do you have a question for us?

>> Caller: I do. Our school has some concerns about the passages, the cultural bias that we seem to see, specifically for children from the city. And I was wondering, you know, what specific things have been done to possibly counteract this?

>> Rochelle: Okay. Thank you, caller.

>> Jackie Marino: I hope the caller leaves her name and number because we do invite -- for every passage that is pretested, we invite a group of -- a committee member, excuse me. We invite a committee, a group of individuals, including educators and members of the public, to participate in a bias and sensitivity review. So every passage that is used on the test is reviewed by that committee and approved, and we're always looking for people who can take part in that review for us.

>> Rochelle: Okay. And was there a process that was gone through in selecting the passages that were being used with those ideas in mind? Yes?

>> Jackie Marino: That's right.

>> Rochelle: Okay.

>> Jackie Marino: We're looking for passages that hold reader's interest at that level, that are not biased, either gender-biased or biased against any particular groups or individuals. We don't want issues that might upset or topics that might upset a student while they're taking -- while he or she is taking the test. So there is a process that the committee goes through in reviewing these passages.

>> Rochelle: Okay. And we do have the caller's name and number for you afterwards.

>> Jackie Marino: Great.

>> Rochelle: And that's a good idea if you're calling in with a question, please give us your name and your number so if we need to get back to you with some additional information we know where to find you. Once again, you can call in your questions: 1-877-280-7400. It's a toll-free call.

Another question that was faxed in to us, and this one is a specific question about a specific scoring thing, and not everybody out there needs to know all the specifics of the scoring, but this is a particular question: When a condition code is applied, if a student does not receive a score, blank because of time not refusal, how will that be indicated?

What does this mean, first of all? (Chuckling)

>> Jackie Marino: Some people who came to this scoring training in August discovered -- found out there at that training that when teachers go to scoring day, you will get a sheet of paper that gives you certain codes. These are things to do with -- if you get a paper that fits into any of these categories, so that it's virtually unscoreable, in fact. If you get a paper that you can't score according to the rubric, then you have a code.

Some codes are for refusal. If a student just writes on the paper, "I don't want to take this test," or "I'm not feeling well today," or whatever, that's an unscoreable paper, and we don't want to put that in with the ones, with the students who got one on the scoring rubric, because that says something else. So that's what those codes refer to, and they will be explained on scoring day, so nobody out in the field really needs to know that ahead of time. These are conditions that may exist with some papers, and these are the codes that will be used to handle those papers.

>> Rochelle: Okay. And will there be something that will differentiate between somebody refusing to take the test and perhaps someone who ran out of time?

>> Jackie Marino: That's right -- well, someone who ran out of time will have a response there. When we pretested and field-tested these, we kept track of how much time it took, and so we anticipate that students will finish in plenty of time. But if it's an unscoreable response, then we would use a condition code.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Another question or statement with request for your comment was faxed in: In this age of portfolio assessment, it seems that the English language arts standards are moving in the opposite direction, creating anxiety instead of creative fervor. Please comment. (Chuckling)

>> Jackie Marino: Oh... how much time do I have? (Chuckling) Portfolios are still a wonderful way to assess students' learning over time in the classroom, and we certainly wouldn't want to do anything or say anything that would exclude that possibility.

But a State test has to be administered in standard conditions within a standard timeframe in the same way to all students or it doesn't mean anything across the state, and you have to be able to say that a score of such-and-such on this test in Plattsburgh means the same thing as a score of such-and-such on this test in Shoreham/Wading River.

So demonstrations and displays such as portfolios are wonderful local assessments, but as some other states have discovered, it's very hard to be able to interpret the results of those extended projects in a way that shows that they are equitable, in a way that shows that the score means the same thing in different places. I think, though, that we have to take small steps toward performance assessment, and all of the new assessments go a lot farther toward fitting the definition of performance assessment than some of our present tests do.

Our present ones were landmark tests in their time, but we have been able to come a little bit farther than that and ask students to write their own responses, to construct their own responses, and to use real children's literature and so forth. So we're making progress toward that, but State tests are not the same -- they don't serve the same purpose and they cannot be the same thing that local assessments are.

>> Rochelle: And I think that's one of the things that we discussed during the teleconference on the 22nd of September was the whole purpose and idea behind these tests and the idea that we're very hung up or we're very in the mode of "Are my students going to pass the test?" and we're missing some of the importance of the diagnostic tool. We can't seem to emphasize that enough, that these tests can really be a wonderful means of helping a teacher find out where a child and an overall class is having some problems and then being able to address that.

>> Jackie Marino: Yes. The anxiety over scoring day is understandable. I mean, these are chaotic times in many ways. Somebody said there was no change without chaos. And certainly people want to know the details. But it would be too bad if we got so hung up on the details of the scoring itself that we forget what -- that one of the purposes of these assessments is to have a positive impact on instruction.

We want teachers and students, too, to be thinking about things like, "How can I learn from listening?" And "How can I make more connections among the things I read?" And "How can I get better at my writing and concentrate on some of the qualities that I'm being assessed on in these writing tasks?" And looking at the big picture and not just...

>> Rochelle: Absolutely. That big picture, keep that big picture in mind.

I'm going to ask you for some of your advice for teachers before we close, but I do have another question from a shy caller who called in and said, "Please ask them this question."

Each school district has received a letter with a number of staff members that should go to training workshops. Do they want all fourth grade teachers for scoring the fourth grade exams, or can there be a combination? And, once again, what combination, what grade levels do we want to score for these exams?

>> Jackie Marino: This sounds like a letter that probably came from your local BOCES, and each BOCES has set up its own scoring sites and has its own requirements for the numbers of teachers who are being invited from each school. So if you have specifics about that, I would first ask your principal or superintendent to see if the letter clarifies that.

But we're recommending that for the fourth grade test, you invite teachers in Grades 3, 4 and 5. They are the ones most immediately impacted by the tests and would be interested in knowing and learning from this experience. I've forgotten the rest of the question --

>> Rochelle: And what about for the eighth grade tests?

>> Jackie Marino: For the eight, the recommendation is teachers from Grades 6, 7 and 8. And that could include teachers of reading and special ed teachers who work with those populations.

>> Rochelle: Okay. We have just a couple of minutes left, and I'm going to ask Jackie to give some advice to teachers and administrators and educators out there who are going to be involved in scoring and testing and whatever. What quick advice do you have for us, Jackie?

>> Jackie Marino: Okay. Relax, I think, and concentrate on a good, rich language arts program. And as far as feeling confident about scoring day, I would say take advantage of the samplers that have been out there for some time now. Be sure that teachers are familiar with the demands of the test. Be familiar with the rubrics themselves so that you're comfortable using them, and don't worry too much about the details of scoring day and think about the impact of what the tests require and how you can reflect on your practice in light of those requirements.

>> Rochelle: Great. Once again, the big picture. Thank you very much, Jackie Marino. Thank you all for your calls and your faxes and your E-mail questions to us.

Stay with us. We'll be right back with Commissioner Rick Mills, and we're going to be talking about "Safe Spaces, Learning Places: Issues for Educators."

(Music)

>> Rochelle: Hello. On September 23rd, New York State Education Commissioner Rick Mills began his dialogue with parents and community members about how to make schools safe places where children can learn.

During a program that aired on public broadcasting stations, Commissioner Mills and his guests came to several conclusions: First, that the violence which exists in our neighborhoods and cities spills over into our schools; that children cannot learn and teachers cannot teach in an atmosphere of fear. Schools must have the help of parents and communities if they are to make schools safe, and that there are resources available to help accomplish that task.

I'm Rochelle Cassella. We continue that discussion now, this time with an emphasis on issues for school administrators and classroom teachers. As is our policy at the Satellite Broadcast Network this year, we ask that you jot down any questions that you would like to ask and then send them to us via fax, E-mail or telephone between now and November 12th.

Between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 12th, we will answer those questions we received and take any additional questions you have live during that half-hour. And up on the screen is how you can reach us: The State Education Department web site, www.nysed.gov. And you may also access the Safe Spaces, Learning Places web site on the State Education Department's home page.

Now, to continue with our current event, Commissioner Mills is back with me, and we also have in our studio audience school administrators, classroom teachers, mental health professionals, representatives from community partnerships, law enforcement officials and a student. Everybody is here to help us achieve our goal to offer you information that will help you create your own safe spaces, learning places.

We begin with some comments from two nationally recognized experts in youth violence. Geoffrey Canada is president of New York City's Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families and author of the book "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun." Also we hear from Dr. Howard Adellman. He's co-director of the School Mental Health Project at U.C.L.A.

>> Well, I think we have to really keep our eyes open for children who tease, certainly who make fun of, children who are constantly claiming that someone else has taken or done something to them. Very early on, we begin to find that these kids take a lot of attention. And if the schools or if our institutions aren't set up to give children like that attention, they end up taking the issues to the next level and begin to feel that someone is picking on them and, therefore, "I have to become even more aggressive."

We can nip most of this stuff in the bud by teaching children how to deal with their conflicts early on. And when we see children who are constantly involved in conflicts, we have to intervene and that takes time. If you're a teacher who has 25 kids in the classroom, a lot of times they don't feel like they have time to spend..."Here's John. This is the fifth time..." You know what you're going to say? "Look, I can't deal with Johnny right now." But by not dealing with Johnny, that gets taken out in the lunchroom or when the kid goes on his way home, and we have to figure out how to develop programs in schools that allow adults to have time to help that child every single time because it's going to save us down the road.

>> Rochelle: For a school that's evaluating some programs that it might like to put in place, what kinds of things should it look for?

>> Well, one of the things that I try and tell schools is that you have to look at whether or not the program is designed for success. And what I mean by that is when you look at the programs, do they actually talk about where they're going to move children from, where they are, to that next place? And is there a clear way for you to count?

One thing I tell principals who want to have safe schools is the first thing we have to do is to be honest in counting violence. Once you count it, you find out that it usually happens in certain places and with certain people. It happens in certain places because children know they are the places where they are unsupervised and there are more of us than there are them, and if you go into the corner of the playground, nobody is watching you and you can have a fight.

It happens around certain people because children say, "Well, this person won't tolerate any kind of acting out, and this person lets me get away with all kinds of things."

So once we as sort of administrators look at that, we can tell what we need to do to make sure that we create safe places for our children. Those are the kinds of evaluations that I think we have to make with a program, that they should be real clear in saying how they're going to help us get to the common results that we want for our children.

>> We know that in any school there's a range of learners. Some come to school really motivationally ready and able to learn. I don't know any classroom teacher that doesn't want a classroom full of kids who are motivationally ready and able to learn.

And what I'm hearing from a lot of teachers in big cities and poor urban areas and poor rural areas, is that they're not getting very many kids who fit that bill anymore, that the bulk of kids they're seeing every day really fall into the lower part of this continuum, kids who aren't highly motivated after they have been in school, kids who lack certain prerequisites because they didn't pick them up at earlier grades, kids who have become very avoidive and don't even show up for school.

These types of things reflect a whole range of barriers, often external barriers, that could be addressed but which were not. As a result, these youngsters hit these barriers and they're not benefiting from all these nice, instructional reforms. That's one of the reasons we're not seeing achievement tests going up in the way we want. There's too many youngsters here who are not connecting with all these wonderful instructional reforms.

So we really have to move on, and some schools have done that. And what they have done is really said, "We need a component to address barriers to learning." And they have brought the component into the picture and it's a way around this. What it starts to look like we're seeing over and over at different schools is really six areas where they're focusing on to try to develop programs, things really that a school has to shift its whole thinking in terms of police and have these three areas they're focusing on: Instruction, how they govern the school and manage their resources and how they address those barriers.

One of these elements in this component is really focused on the classroom. What can the classroom do differently for kids who are having learning and behavior problems so they don't just have to refer them out for extra help?

Of course, there's a whole range of student and family assistance things that are needed, and those are the traditional services and those are the things that we have tended to focus on almost to the exclusion of some of these other things.

There's a whole aspect in terms of crisis and emergency that we have experienced, especially with things like the school shootings.

But beyond that, there's a whole issue of how we can prevent these things, and there's lots of things we can do in that regard to prevent these crises from happening, and schools are starting to do those more and more when they understand this third piece.

There's a whole need for more support for transitions. We're seeing a lot of kids moving regularly. Schools have to be prepared to welcome those youngsters, provide them with social supports, provide their parents with welcoming and social supports.

Then there's the whole business of how we involve the home in schooling, and that's a whole range of people, not just a small percentage of parents who show up regularly, but how do we outreach and provide opportunities for all those other parents who have not found schools so attractive?

Finally, there's a whole business of outreaching to the community and bringing in volunteers and businesses and a whole range of others.

These six things require a good deal of energy from the school, but they are so critical, and it's only when a school starts to understand that this is a schoolwide problem and not just focus on "how do I get more metal detectors at the door and how do I get more police on campus?" that we start to understand the nature of this schoolwide/communitywide problem and start to make a real difference for the kids.

>> Rochelle: Interesting comments, Commissioner. How do they fit into what we're talking about here today?

>> Commissioner Mills: There's a big conversation about student performance, how to make certain that all students succeed. There are real barriers in the way.

Fear is a tremendous barrier. I mean, how can you learn algebra, how can you learn enough English to pass the Regents exams if you're frightened?

So I very much like the tenor of this conversation. I like what Mr. Canada had to say: You need to be honest in counting the violent events. People so often say, "Well, it's a problem someplace else, but it's not really here." When you start to keep track of things that have happened, when you ask students, "How do you feel? What's made you feel that way?," that will cause you to put a different emphasis on safety.

And I guess one other idea that I picked up from this commentary is that it's not about putting programs in place, but you have to really evaluate the programs, make sure that you have the right one that fits the problem at hand.

>> Rochelle: Every school's needs are different.

>> Commissioner Mills: They certainly are.

>> Rochelle: Okay. We're going to turn to our studio audience right now where we have an impressive array of talent, including Dr. Peter Lucas, who is director of the School Partnership Program of New York University's Metropolitan Center for Urban Education. He's also an educational anthropologist.

Dr. Lucas, you conducted some research into what helps and inhibits schools in their security and safety issues. What are some of the things that we should and should not do in our schools?

>> Dr. Lucas: Thank you, Rochelle, Commissioner Mills. I think before we hear from some of these interesting people about some of their programs and some of their very interesting responses to school violence, if you will, Commissioner, I would like to address the situation in New York City for the moment.

As you know, in the '91/92 school year, we had some spectacular killings in New York City. All of them occurred in the same high school, where students killed other students. It's safe to say we slipped into a crisis mode; the board of education was in a state of shock.

We responded. And how we responded was to a security culture. We upped the amount of security guards, over 3,000 guards, and, as you know, that ranks as the ninth largest police force in the country, larger than even the police force in the City of Boston. We shifted a lot of personnel in the school building around to security responsibilities. We added a lot of technology -- scanning equipment, electromagnetic door locking, emergency telephones. We created a culture of security, if you will.

Seven years later, I think there's been some consequences, some unexpected consequences from this culture of security. I would like to talk about five things.

From my studies, there's one consequence which involves if you bring in a culture of security, you also bring into the school the culture of liability, meaning that schools begin to become very concerned about lawsuits. There were a number of interesting lawsuits in the early '90s where teachers who were injured in school began suing the board of education and began winning some lawsuits. The board of education found themselves in the position, vis-a-vis students and parents and the teachers' union, where they were very concerned about liability issues.

Once you begin to go down this road of liability culture, it seems to me that it's a road you can never go back. You have to constantly be in a position to say to anyone, "You cannot bring a lawsuit against us because we had the most up-to-date security package that was available at that moment." Once you're in that position, you have to constantly upgrade your security package to keep yourself liability-free. Universities are in this position; many corporate institutions, lobbies and midtown institutions and schools are in this position.

As you know, security culture is also very expensive. It's not unheard of for a large public high school in New York City to have a security budget of over $1 million a year.

The second consequence: Once there's a division of school safety that's formed and it becomes a bureaucracy within the board of education, it begins to keep statistics, obviously, to legitimize itself and to keep track of itself.

We have a situation in the last ten years where we begin to compare schools in terms of violence the way we compare schools -- the way we have always done in academics. And, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, the media has gotten access to a lot of different school statistics: Suspension information, types of serious incidents. The board of education actually lists 37 different types of infractions.

But when you begin to compare each other in terms of statistics, the schools are only concerned with the so-called serious incidents, which are weapons possession, narcotics possession, assault, sexual assault, serious vandalism, arson.

The problem is when you begin to only be concerned with the more serious forms of violence, you can imagine that there are a lot of lesser forms of violence underneath those serious incidents.

>> Rochelle: Okay.

>> Dr. Lucas: And they begin to spin out of control because schools are only interested in the serious incidents and reporting the suspensions.

>> Rochelle: Dr. Lucas, for time's sake, I would like to summarize what you and I have talked about before, the consequences, that basically what you're saying is that the school environment changes, physically changes. We have bars on the door; we have things on the wall... So how does a school balance its need to be safe and have some security measures with creating negative security culture?

>> Dr. Lucas: Well, I think this is a good question. I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is if security culture is here to stay, what are we going to do with security culture that's interesting right now? And this is a really important issue.

I think that we have changed the role of the teacher in the school by introducing security measures. Teachers have pulled away from the public space. They have pretty much withdrawn within the classroom because now security guards are charged with security in the public spaces. We have changed the role of the students; we have constructed a new identity for the students.

We have certainly changed the physical school building. We have begun to harden the school building in security culture, and we have begun to strip away some of the traditional aesthetic qualities.

Rochelle, I'm not sure I have the answers to your question, but I think there are a number of different ways that we approach this problem, and it's through community-based organizations, through curricular incentives, through what we do at the university in rethinking what we're doing with teacher training.

But I also think, as I'm speaking about security culture for the moment, I think as a society we have to ask ourselves what are we going to do with security culture that's interesting because if we don't shape it, it's going to continually shape us and shape our institutions.

>> Rochelle: Okay. I'm going to ask you to stop right there. Some of what you talked about, community-based organizations, curriculum, we're going to be talking about later on in the program.

Right now I want to turn to Dr. MacIntyre. One of the things that Geoffrey Canada mentioned in his statement was looking out for risky behavior, warning signs to indicate potential behavior on children's part.

How do we look for those warning signs and yet balance the need to not label children?

>> Dr. MacIntyre: Thank you, Rochelle, Commissioner.

Assessing children in this circumstance is a complicated business, and as much as we know about children and teenagers, there's still a lot of questions that we haven't answered about this.

When you're considering risk in a child, you need to look at the child's individual personality, their current behaviors, stressors in their lives, and a number of risk factors which I want to get into. But before I do, I want to underscore that you cannot reduce this to a checklist and come up with some sort of score and say "when it hits such-and-such a point, now we have a dangerous situation."

This really is the kind of assessment that requires a very competent and thorough evaluation done by a qualified mental health professional. So what I hope to do with this segment is to help administrators and teachers understand some of the things that they can look for that then would highlight for them the need to get a more comprehensive examination.

>> Rochelle: Okay.

>> If we could have the first graphic...

In the research that we have, there are some warning signs and red flags that have been identified that really seem to have a higher predicted value for aggressive violent behavior in children or teens. On the first list you see here, I want to skip to the second one: Bringing a weapon to school.

If a child has in fact a history of bringing a weapon of any kind to school, we know that's associated with a higher risk of dangerous behavior in that kid's future. So that really has to emerge as one of the number one things that people pay attention to.

Others on that list... a child that has a history of past violent or aggressive behavior, and again the research supports that if a child has been violent and physically aggressive in the past, there's a good chance that that's going to occur again in the future.

Also, you see a child that has made violent threats when angry and that that's a pattern in their life. Kids that are into alcohol and substance abuse and use. Here the issue is while ingesting alcohol or a substance, their abilities, their judgment is impaired and their inhibitions are also significantly lessened. So if that's coupled with things like having a weapon present and a pattern of getting out of control, you have a very volatile mixture.

>> Rochelle: Okay.

>> Dr. MacIntyre: If we can go to the next graphic...

Also, we know that kids who have a pattern of having destroyed property, anti-social or criminal behavior are at higher risk; kids that have been cruel to animals, fire-setting where that's been a pattern of behavior, kids coming from families where there are serious conflicts and problems, and kids that have been involved in gangs.

Now, in thinking further about this -- these are some of the warning signs or the red flags -- we also know that there are some factors, and if we could go to the next graphic, which are important to think about in addition to those warning signs.

They really cluster around four dimensions: Personal factors, family factors, community/environmental factors, and school factors. Now, no single factor within these subcategories is sufficient to predict violence or a terrible outcome for a child; it's really going to be a combination of factors.

Let me give you some examples under the categories. Maybe you could put the graphic back up just so people can see that.

Under personal factors, the child that has a history of tantrums and uncontrollable outbursts, kids that are often calling others names, bullying other children, or a history themselves of having been the victim of violence at school or being bullied. Children who have made past suicide attempts, children who are depressed or have some real significant mood swings; kids who are blaming others for their problems and not willing to accept ownership for the consequences; kids who have been recently very humiliated or experienced a severe rejection.

Kids that are also of concern are those who get very preoccupied with weapons, explosives, things of that nature. And then kids who have poor peer relations and are on the fringe of a peer group and interestingly sometimes gang involvement might presume these kids have good social skills. That's not necessarily the case at all. In fact, some of these kids don't have much ability to make friends, which is why they have gotten themselves involved with a gang.

Family factors that also need to be thought about: Families with a history of violence, families where weapons are present or have been used, families where there is use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, families where there is a lot of severe punishment. Many times kids that are violent are kids that have been victimized themselves and horribly abused and suffered some severe aggression in the home.

Community factors that are important to look at: Kids coming from severe economic deprivation are at higher risk, kids where there is little organization in the community, few organized activities and, of course, if the kids have easy access to guns and weapons and that's a part of the culture.

Last but not least, some school factors. Early behavior is very important. Aggressive behavior can appear in children as early as the preschool years and should not be dismissed or minimized. If you look for kids who have had a history from preschool up through the early grades of grade school where there is aggressive behavior, that's going to raise red flags and a high-risk profile. Kids that have skipped school, gotten into fights, misbehaving, had other serious disciplinary problems, been truant, suspended or expelled and certainly those that have experienced academic failure. Many of these kids then really feel like losers in the overall equation.

Having thought about all of that, I guess the take-home message here is for teachers and administrators, if you see a child who has come to your attention, has made some threats, think about the risk factors I have mentioned, think about the red flags and warning signs, and if you have an uncomfortable feeling, then have that youngster evaluated by a qualified mental health professional.

>> Rochelle: I'm going to ask you to pass the mike right over to Dr. Gwendolyn Cooke, representing the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Your reaction to what Dr. MacIntyre just said?

>> Dr. Cooke: Well, I guess I have two types of reactions. One is that creative, energetic little boy who has lots of energy, he might get labeled in a negative way, and that's sort of scary. On the other hand, we don't want something to get out of hand, and so I guess you want to be cautious but you don't want to be overanxious, and it's very easy for teachers and parents and even us administrators to overreact, and so I want to underscore what Dr. MacIntyre has indicated in terms of these are red flags and we pursue them, but we don't label kids.

I can think of gifted kids who would exhibit those behaviors, and it's a matter that he has not been challenged instructionally, that he has not been engaged in the learning. So you have to have an instructional program that is engaging enough for young people to want to learn and be part of it so that sometimes those behaviors that do manifest themselves in a negative way are not there.

>> Rochelle: Okay. All righty. We're going to go back to some readily accepted research that shows teachers can't teach properly and students can't learn when they're afraid. It was that information that prompted the Wappingers School District to develop a school safety team whose focus is on prevention. We went there with our cameras, and this is what we found.

>> We know from all the research out there that for effective learning to occur in any environment, people have to feel safe and secure. It's a prerequisite. That's why we have a safety team.

Ten years ago, it was very in vogue and very critical to have crisis intervention teams. After crises occur, you think how you deal with that. Unfortunately, it's a sign of the times.

But our team is a prevention team. In the old-fashioned days, it was "lean on me." And I do think you need strong administrators, but you need more than simply governance and discipline. You need prevention, proactive measures, and you need to work collaboratively with your committee.

>> The committee is made up of parents that are in the school district; there's students that are in school; there's social workers, psychologists, classroom teachers that teach the regular five academic subjects; there's teachers that teach electives; there's special ed teachers.

>> And I particularly have great respect for law enforcement. We can say that law enforcement are our allies, that it's a positive force. So their presence in the building is security, giving us a sense of security, and less and less it's necessary, but the reality is in today's world, if you have a football game at night with 1,000 people there, you can have anybody there. They're not just your students that are showing up, and you have to reassure people that this is a safe campus and safe place, and I would much rather have some officers there for prevention than have to be involved because a problem occurred and we didn't have proper supervision. The public expects good supervision.

>> Since we have been involved in the safety committee where we have been trying to do some preventative procedures, the number of referrals or incidents in the building has definitely decreased significantly. I guess it's like almost 66% of what we had in the past. So, obviously, to me, I think the committee is doing its job. The administrators are obviously doing their job, but I think we're helping them out somewhat.

>> Of course, the bottom line is how kids feel. You can have the greatest programs, greatest ideas, but if the students don't feel comfortable in your building, it doesn't mean a bag of beans.

>> Rochelle: Interesting comments, interesting program. What do you think about what is going on in Wappingers?

>> Commissioner Mills: I was just thinking about what the listeners must be thinking about all of the information we're providing.

Certainly we're making them aware. But we need to get beyond awareness here, and I think the example in Wappingers is a clue: prevention is clearly a route. Prevention means planning ahead.

A safety committee can really help you do that planning ahead. It can bring into the problem and solution a lot of talent, and those people who are around that table -- the teachers were there; the principal was there; parents were there; law enforcement was there. Who knows who will be the source of the idea that you need? So you need to have them all there. I really liked seeing all that.

And I liked the comment of the principal at the end that it's really a matter of feeling safe, and so it's not enough to have done all of these things, but you should ask the students, "How do you feel? Do you feel safe? Can you do what you need to do here in school?"

>> Rochelle: Well, they're asking that question in Poughkeepsie. Like the Wappingers School District, it established a safety team and added a little something extra to address its safety needs.

We visited recently and saw the program in operation.

>> Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming in.

>> Good morning.

>> We have a couple of things I wanted to cover in here this morning...

>> We have a school safety committee. It started as a crisis team. The first year I was here, it was -- we put it in place. And now it's become Crisis Team/School Safety.

We have a trained team that reacts if there is a crisis in the building. What do we do? How do we do it? Who has what responsibility? And also a safety team that basically talks about, "What are the things we need to attack, different areas programmatically?"

And that's where we get our proactive assignments and what we're going to work on as we meet on a monthly basis.

>> Warren, you had things you were interested in presenting for the first faculty meeting?

>> At the faculty meeting, I would come in and he would do his safety part, and then I would come in and do my part. And as we go through the year, we would add on to that as to what the teachers could do for their personal safety and the students' personal safety, and we'll work on that through the year.

>> We spent the summer working on a safety plan for the district, which is a blueprint. The plan really says the first step is prevention, all the things that you can do to prevent any kind of crisis, whether it be a natural disaster, whether it be some kind of violent act. And the next step is preparation: What do we do to prepare ourselves in case there is a crisis? And the next step is what methods are we using, that kind of thing, and the last step is resolution.

>> I just wanted to let everyone know that we are going to be continuing to do the student luncheons every week as we have.

>> Every week we do Principal's Lunch. We bring in significant people from the community; we bring clergy in with a group of different students every week. We throw out bagels and pizza and we say, "Let's talk about school and programs. What do we need to make this place better?" We ask the hard questions: "Do you feel safe?" Kids, once you give them a comfort zone, boy, they will tell you a lot of things!

>> There have been a lot of changes in curriculum, a lot of changes in the structure at Poughkeepsie High School. What works and what doesn't work? What do you like? Talk to us.

>> There have been a lot of changes in terms of just the whole atmosphere walking around the school, with security and all that stuff. What I have been hearing is that there was a couple of fights and things like that, and the halls were a bit wilder, and now, since about my junior year, I feel more relaxed walking around the school now because you know that it's safe and really nobody is going to bother you.

>> You don't have to feel afraid to show, you know, who you really are. You don't have to put up a front for anyone else because you can be yourself and be able to walk down the halls and not be afraid of being yourself. So I think that's another plus.

>> We're saying to students, "Don't put little pebbles in the door to keep the door open so other people can come in." Those are the kinds of things we are talking to students about. "If you see something that you think is not quite right, tell an adult in the building."

So we're talking to students about their role; we're talking to staff members about their role. And the role is really consistency. If a school comes together and sets up some rules, one teacher can't say, "I am going to bend it" and another says, "I am going to be more stringent than the rules." We have to come together and be consistent in that, and that's what each school is working on now, that consistency, because that's important.

Once we get that in place, then it's my feeling that we'll go through the roof in achievement.

(Phone ringing)

>> Harriet speaking...

>> I was doing a training on school safety, and I looked over on the wall and I saw this sign for a hotline. And I said, "Wow! That's not a bad idea!" Even if it doesn't work, it's something for kids and adults to work on and say, "Yes, this is something we've tried." Now, if we get it to work and we get feedback and stuff, that's great, but it's just we're going to start. Everybody wants to be safe. We just have to make them believe that we're doing the right thing.

>> Well, I hope you feel free to call back in the future. You have our number. Okay? Thank you.

>> The reception has been great. The parents have supported the blueprint for safety; the newspapers have supported that, and the community has supported it, and the staff members have said, "Thank you." And so I think we're now on the track to making a difference in the educational lives of our youngsters.

>> Rochelle: Commissioner, they're asking the questions that you said were the tough ones to ask: How do you feel? You know, to the students. It's a good program.

>> Commissioner Mills: Yes, it is. And I really like the way the principal began. He said they started with a crisis team and now they're talking about a safety team, getting ahead of the crisis.

Crisis meetings must be pretty frantic. Safety team meetings, where you're ahead of the crisis, is a lot calmer.

We also heard something else here: They're not sharing directives; they're sharing information about what you can do. In other words, that's like sharing authority, sharing power. Here's what a parent can do; here's what a student or a teacher can do... It puts the whole matter of being safe on a different ground, gives you the ability to do something.

>> Rochelle: Very empowering.

>> Commissioner Mills: I think so.

>> Rochelle: We do happen to have that principal right in our office, in our studio. Ted Petersen is right here with us. Ted, your plan and how everything got started?

>> Ted Petersen: Just trial and error, but the big part was that kids had to be involved in it, and parents. We needed to establish a comfort zone for kids, and food is a great way to do it. We also needed to identify significant people in the community who we wanted to bring in, not only as mentors, but to take the kids kind of through the journey of where Poughkeepsie has been and where we're going, because you learn from history.

So in sharing that over food and then, of course, every time we do it -- and we do it once a week, so it's become part of the culture of our school. I'm going on my eighth year there. So it's something we get input all the time, and we remind them, "Success comes from this because you had the idea to move the music program into the school day," or "you had this idea about a student program, about a Latin club..."

So there are all these different pieces, and if you show kids, "Yeah, we respond to you; we listen," and it works with school safety. It's just a matter that we ask that question all the time now. It's important to give kids a release, a place to have a forum to talk about issues in their school.

>> Rochelle: What about the hotline? How does that work?

>> Ted Petersen: You know, the hotline, I have to say it hasn't really caught on in the community; I think it's going to take some time. But it's one of those things it's important to be occupied with something and the training is wonderful. And now we have gotten people who have come to us and said, "We want to be a part of this."

So I think that will give us a jump-up even more. And so they're going to be training our students to be involved in this. And we also have Americorps in the building, President Clinton's Peace Corps...

I'm the kind of person, if you want a home, I'll give you a room; I'll give you some place. And schools have to be like shopping malls, you know, different places for kids to go to meet their needs. And that's what we have done. Now, we're going to be training our students. And just to be trained in it, later on in some type of crisis, or an issue, a kid has that training as his own.

>> Rochelle: One of the things I want to talk about is we have heard a lot about training students and student involvement. Teacher training, what about teacher training?

I'm going to turn now to Marvin Kreps. He's a teacher. And, Marvin, we have been talking a lot about making students feel safe, training for students, bringing students in. This is also a two-way, and teachers have to feel safe in classrooms as well. There's been some evidence out there that teachers don't always feel safe and don't always feel comfortable in dealing with potential problems in their classrooms. What are you finding?

>> Marvin Kreps: Absolutely. I would like to comment on that from a number of points of view. But to start with, I was thinking as we were kind of talking, that we have raised standards and we are talking about reporting results. But I think the third part of that is building capacity, and I think we have to talk about building the capacity of our teachers.

Speaking as a teacher, if I'm stressed out and underskilled, I start to feel some pretty powerful feelings: Fear, anger, frustration. And that stuff doesn't go nowhere, and it affects my ability to handle the kids. So I think a critical part for me as a teacher is being well-trained in the best of what we have to offer in terms of classroom behavior management, the development of pro-social skills in kids, starting at the earliest possible levels. So as our kids come up through, they have developed those problem-solving, conflict-resolution skills to be able to handle problems as they encounter them.

I find it questionable that a child is going to be able to meet very high academic standards if their social and emotional development has not been brought along commensurate with their intellectual development.

So as a teacher, I need to be able to be taught how to facilitate that in my students. If not, you have stressed-out kids in classrooms and stressed-out teachers in classrooms, and I think that's a recipe for inevitable conflict cycles, which around and around that goes and there are no winners.

So I just want to underscore the importance of training for teachers in classrooms.

>> Rochelle: Cycle of conflicts... you have done some training in this area or discussion about that?

>> Marvin Kreps: Yes. Well, the conflict cycle is really-- that graphic is available if you want to go ahead and put that up.

>> Rochelle: Sure.

>> Marvin Kreps: The conflict cycle is really a way of graphically portraying how a student who perhaps has a negative self-concept and a set of beliefs that support that negative self-concept comes into the classroom, and a stressful event of some kind or another occurs. Let's say a limit-setting has to be done. The student shows up late or the student is verbally abusive, that sort of thing. So the teacher responds to that by setting limits on the student, and that creates another stressful event in the life of that student at that moment.

So now you have the initial stressor of possible being late and then the next event... Well, that stirs up powerful feelings in that student. If that student does not have the capacity to manage those emotions and the behavioral repertoire necessary to really handle that, then that's going to manifests itself off in an anti-social behavior.

Well, the environment is not going to stay neutral when that happens; there's going to be a reaction to that. Now, when that reaction occurs, if that reaction is not helpful, de-escalating and focused on conflict-resolution or problem-solving and instead becomes yet another stressful event in the life of that student, then we stir up more powerful feelings.

What we have found at the Life Space Crisis Intervention Institution in studying these things is that relatively small behavioural incidents often cycle around like that to the point of absurdity in a building if those, again, de-escalation skills, crisis intervention skills on the part of those folks right on the spot, working with the kids in real-time... if they don't have them, we have the capacity to make those conflict cycles happen.

So, again, I think that underscores again the importance of that training piece for teachers.

>> Rochelle: Basically. Thank you very much. So, Commissioner, what we're seeing is we need training on both sides of the fence here. Also, what do you think of all the programs we have seen so far going on in schools?

>> Commissioner Mills: They have a lot of common threads. They seem to be about giving skills. We learn how to be violent. Geoffrey Canada's book has been very clear on that. You learn at a very early age how to respond with violence. But you can teach the skills of non-violence and the skills of mediation.

This doesn't have to be the case -- I go to some schools, for example, where the assistant principal is on a walkie-talkie, and I think that one person is carrying the whole burden of safety. And then I go into other places where the students take care of disruptive issues, the parents, the teachers. That's a place where they learn to behave as a team. I think we are seeing examples of that team-building and skill-building that can create a safe school.

>> Rochelle: We have a student here with us. Krystal Johnson comes from New York City. We're going to hear a lot about the peer mediation program that Krystal is involved in. But right now, from a student's perspective, what you have seen going on in some of the other schools, in Mr. Petersen's school, where the kids, the students are asked their opinion and brought into the planning, what do you think about that as a student?

>> Krystal Johnson: Well, what I've heard a lot is that how can a kid learn when they feel frightened or why would a kid actually come to school if they don't feel safe? And an answer that comes to mind is I think, okay, what things can we do to prevent, you know, some incidents from happening so that kids will not feel frightened to come to school? And the hotline which we just saw, you know, is a great idea. You actually have another kid talking to another kid about their problems and what things you can do to prevent certain things from happening.

You have other programs within New York City, like Generation Next, and you have also the Safe Harbor Program, SMART Program, a lot of good programs that gets kids involved with other children to talk about violence prevention, violence. And you also have some programs which go into classrooms to talk to teachers, talk to parents within a community, what things we can really do together to stop violence in the schools so that we can get everybody together, working together so that, okay, now we can set a base that kids will want to go to school, will want to learn and become something in the future.

I also heard that once you set up a comfort zone for a child, that's the place where they feel they can talk to this person and they feel they can learn within the school comfort zone. These programs do set up a comfort zone for these children, and they do make these kids say, "Okay, I like talking to this person. Therefore, every time I have a problem, I do not have to resort to violence; I can go to this person and talk to them. I feel that my respect will be uplifted; I will still have the confidence and integrity that I had before, when I do talk to these people."

That's what these programs really give these children, and I think it's great to have within a school because it changes everything.

>> Rochelle: Great. Great. Basically what we're seeing once again is that it takes everybody to be involved. A discussion with parents and community leaders several weeks ago pointed out that schools can't address this issue alone.

Community partnerships play a very important role in helping schools be safe. We found a good, solid example of a community partnership in New York City and a program that emphasizes the responsibility students feel they have in addressing school safety. We share what we found in this report by producer Wanda Miller.

>> Wanda: The concept of violence prevention is not new. There is no doubt, however, that it has been made priority one as more and more schools search for ways to keep guns, knives, danger out of the classroom.

At the Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Manhattan, the quest for peace begins and ends with students. Students believe that if young people want to be safe, they have to take action, positive action.

>> Most people have conflicts because they don't know something about somebody or they thought somebody said such-and-such about them. So it's out of ignorance you have conflicts, out of ignorance.

>> Wanda: Welcome to the SMART Project. Here, Program Director Sandra Moreales and student mediator Krystal Johnson meet with other students who say they want a hand in stemming violence in their schools.

SMART stands for School Mediators Alternative Resolution Teen Program. It is a school-based mediation program whereby students help resolve conflicts.

>> Conflicts can be done better now because of mediation that we have in school. So conflicts really could turn into a positive thing.

>> Wanda: The students are between the ages of 13 and 16, and they are trained to deal with other students just like them. Many of them have already gone through some sort of mediation process; others are in training. But what they all try to do is deal with conflict before it turns potentially violent or deal with more subtle issues of conflict, such as miscommunication, anger and disrespect.

>> Oh, my goodness! Whoo! Oh, goodness!

>> Wanda: As part of their mediation training, students take part in role-playing. This scene emphasizes the importance of listening skills.

>> We started training them to participate in public speaking, and they do research around issues like domestic violence, conflict resolution and violence, and then they start putting together workshops to speak to their peers. It's been one of our most effective programs.

>> Wanda: It took a collaboration on the part of many -- teachers, administrators, project coordinators and community-based organizations -- to make these programs work.

>> United Way also funds several other initiatives, both after-school as well as extended school-day programs, in the community that we serve. This is not just a mediation program. Elaine Lee, who is the coordinator on-site full-time, provides a host of other services, including individual counseling, group counseling and crisis intervention.

>> Wanda: And how do the students see the program working? What do they bring to the issue of violence prevention that teachers, administrators or even parents cannot bring?

>> They want to talk to somebody who they know will understand them, and who better than us?

>> Well, I wanted to become a mediator because I wanted to help other people solve the situation instead of fighting.

>> I think this program helps them, you know, just sit down without any -- without an audience, or a class, and it helps them just talk it out with themselves.

(Applause)

>> Thank you.

>> We do not coddle; we coach. We model. We are not parents. What we are are coaches and role models for the children in this building and for their sisters and brothers.

>> Wanda: This building is Intermediate School 292 in Brooklyn. And what is happening behind these walls is a model of teaching that emphasizes safety, violence prevention and empowerment for younger students. It's called Safe Harbor.

>> The students really utilize the harbor, you know. They come when they have problems, when their friends have problems, or they have problems at home.

>> Wanda: Tracy Hague has been heading the program for three years. Colleen Jane Fischer is Director of Training for the Generation Next Training Academy.

>> They couldn't imagine what it was going to be like to be 18, what it was like to even go to high school. Now, they can tell you, "Yes, I'm going to go to high school, and I'm going to do what you do" or "I'm going to be a doctor or a lawyer." They begin to see that there is a future, that they can do something about violence.

>> If these teenagers are going to be arrested then who is responsible? The teenagers. So what do we call someone like Paul?

>> The victim.

>> He's the victim, okay.

>> How many of you know somebody or have heard of somebody in the neighborhood who have been a victim like Paul? Everybody?

>> Wanda: By encouraging students to open up to teachers, administrators and other students, they iron out problems they might have either in school or at home and that could erupt into violence. And it doesn't stop there. Parents and the entire faculty are taught coping skills. The goal: To promote social responsibility as everyone's job.

>> We are here to talk about our collaboration as a community-based organization.

>> Wanda: And, again, the Safe Harbor Program is successful because of the collaboration on the part of a wide variety of groups, both inside and outside of the school.

>> There have been many times when the students have had verbal confrontations and have had a need to bring it on the physical level, and Tracy somehow has been able to work through that with the students.

>> I think through the work United Way has done with the C.B.O.'s, we have come to realize and formulate a philosophy that students have many different needs, and we need to provide those needs holistically. Schools for too long had the burden of trying to meet every need, and they can't.

>> It involves the entire school community. We have parents that are a part of working in the program; the teachers are a part of the program. The children know and everyone in the district knows they can come here and see this model work. We're finding success with it, and we're hoping that it becomes a strong model for other schools in the district who would then want to encourage this type of collaboration.

>> Wanda: Tie it all together and the end results, they say, are changed attitudes and student behavior, a safer school.

>> Before we had the Safe Harbor Program, children wouldn't come to school. Our attendance was basically about 78% of the children coming to school every day. Since we've had the program, our attendance rate is now 91% of our children attending school. If you feel safe, you come to school!

>> Rochelle: Impressive figures in terms of children coming back into the classroom. Krystal, I want to go back to you to talk about the peer mediation program that you're involved in. What has it done for you as a student? What do you see that it's done for your peers in the classroom?

>> Krystal Johnson: Well, Generation Next is not just a program where you go out and train kids; it also has leadership components within the program, which means that you learn within a program; you do better with your schoolwork. It just helps with everything.

We have also done some magazines dealing with gun violence and different violence within the community, that young kids can look through and read some articles about what has happened to other kids and they don't feel alone; they're not alone, that this has happened to other people and you can have some type of solution to your problems, and it's just a matter of finding those solutions and going through them and getting on with school.

This program has helped. A lot of kids come to the program, get trained on it and they want to help their peers; they want to go into the classroom and get their friends involved in it. It's a big program where it can expand, that you can have fun with it and you can get your friends involved in it. It's just a big program within a school. It's wonderful.

>> Rochelle: I know that you're very enthusiastic about it, and I think that's great. I want to talk to Lillian Castro a little bit about staff development and community partnerships and what your organization is doing with regard to the teacher training that we talked about?

>> Lillian Castro: Well, the Educators for Social Responsibility, we work in collaboration with the New York City Board of Education. We are in quite a few schools, over 90 schools with the R.C.C.P. program. We have a program called Project STOP, which is Schools Teaching Options for Peace, in the middle schools.

And it basically is what is their needs? What does the school want? Is it the administrators that they want trained? The teachers? We go in looking at a school as a whole, and you can feel when you walk into a school that has embraced a conflict or prevention program and sense that there's a respect, a nurturing within the school...

>> Rochelle: You can feel the difference?

>> Lillian Castro: There's no doubt about it.

>> Rochelle: That's wonderful. Community-based organizations are a big part of the community partnership, and I'm going to ask Richard Rivera to talk a little bit about how does a school and a community-based organization come together to make all of this happen?

>> Richard Rivera: Well, the CATS program, which is run out of the United Way, basically goes out to SURR schools that have been identified as having issues with attendance; students aren't coming to school for a whole host of reasons.

So we engage the schools that have been identified from elementary, middle and high school, in the process of working within their school committees of identifying the needs of the school. What are the issues they're facing?

And then what we do is we go with those needs statements and we roll out our piece, to organizations across the city that we feel would best meet those needs. They respond. Then the committee basically gets to meet and the C.B.O.s do presentations to the school and say, "If we come here, this is what we'll do. This is how we will serve your students, and these are the outcomes we'll reach."

And then the school gets to pick the agency they feel will best work with them. Then our role is basically to help develop and nurture a relationship, a partnership between the agency and school. And it takes time, but we have come to understand that schools are faced with many, many different challenges, and they're not-- they can't do everything.

So the C.B.O.s come in to help support the schools in those different areas. It can range from health education to working with students to get them up in the morning to come to school. Sometimes it's academic. It's a whole host, and it's based on the needs of the community and the school. So it really varies across the five boroughs.

>> Rochelle: So it takes some time and it takes some nurturing, but it's worth the effort?

>> Richard Rivera: Definitely! I mean, we've begun to do the assessments that show the attendance does improve. You saw in the middle school the attendance did rise.

But one of the issues within social services is that it's hard to measure growth. I mean in numbers. But we see it. These community-based organizations, in partnership with the schools, really help transform students' lives. You hear it in their stories and in their work.

It's a safety net. It's that third net between the parents and the school, where the C.B.O.s come in. Many times they're indigenous organizations from the community; they speak the languages of the students, and they help to identify with some of the needs, but they let the students know there are no excuses.

So it really helps to make that difference. And it's preventative. That's what is best about it.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Commissioner?

>> Commissioner Mills: I thought that was just wonderful. Two pieces of really powerful evidence here. One, the hard numbers, going from -- what was it? -- 78% to 91. 91 is still too low. That means you're losing close to a year over 12 years, maybe actually a little more than that. But to go from 78... that's quite an achievement! And then the other evidence, the student Krystal, who stands up and starts talking about leadership. Isn't that what we wanted to do here? If anyone needed any proof that a school needs to work with some human services and with a community-based organizations, we just saw it.

>> Rochelle: Absolutely! Okay.

Some of the schools we know are partnering with law enforcement agencies for their safety and prevention programs. The partnerships vary widely in the form that they take, everything from security officers with a presence in school hallways to officers serving as outside consultants who provide training for teachers and administrators.

The Plattsburgh School District offers a unique perspective on the school/law enforcement relationship. We're going to take a look at that community police program which is being used there.

>> The best way to describe why we brought a community police officer into the school was it's proactive. Both the police department and the school were on the same page in terms of some of the issues that have arisen in the country.

>> We understood fully that crimes and the problems of disorder are not fully a law enforcement situation; it's a community problem. And in order for us to focus on young people and their problems, we needed to build a partnership with the district.

>> When we started the community policing effort, when we had the money and we knew we could get the officer, we had to make sure that we involved all of the stakeholders in the school so that they were ready to accept the officer on a daily basis.

So we started in January with the faculty, with the parent organizations and with the students. And it really took us that spring semester of that year to iron out all of the questions that folks had.

>> People were questioning, "Will he have a gun in the building?" That became an issue for two faculty meetings, what was going to happen with the officer's gun.

>> I was also concerned about the officer's demeanor in the building, whether he's going to be uniformed or not, having a weapon...

>> "Are we going to see the handcuffs come out during the school day?" "Is he here as a security officer?" When all those things were resolved, we were ready on September 1st, the following year, September 1st, to have Officer Velinsky as a daily presence.

>> One of the big things about making this program work is that I had to have ownership of this building. I had to be here with those students for an extended period of time so they could see me as a person. I hoped that I could act as a resource not only for the students but for the faculty and also parents, and to deal with the administration on whatever situations that may come up during each and every day.

I go into the classrooms and make presentations regarding alcohol and substance abuse and teen dating violence, domestic violence, all the situations, all the problems that any one of these kids would face on a daily basis. There's another class, a personal law class, and basically the teacher has asked for my help because of the fact that after 20 years of experience in law enforcement, there's a lot of things that I know that's not in the book.

>> So we have the case of Miranda versus Arizona in 1966 that was decided by the Supreme Court 5-to-4...

>> Having Peter right there helps a lot because he has instant answers and it enabled other students to jump in and ask questions and the thought process goes on.

>> It started to -- that started to be the trend, where that balance would go toward the individual's rights versus law enforcement, okay?

>> There have been several students that I have worked with who have got themselves into some situations outside of the building where Officer Velinsky has been very instrumental in letting them know where the situation might be leading them, what are some of the things they can do to prevent getting into further trouble? He's even gone so far as to assist students with their living arrangements...

>> Well, I had problems at home and stuff, and it finally came down to the point of me basically either being kicked out or leaving the house, whichever one. And so I went to him, and my guidance counselor was also a lot of help, too. He helped me, too, with all the legal issues of what I could do, being 17 and all of this. He kind of helped me out to the way of basically leading me into getting my own apartment and everything. It was a big help.

>> I try to get the parents and children together, to try to talk about things, and if we can close the gap, that helps. If not, we try to make it easier for them outside of the house to survive and continue with their education.

>> He gave me some legal advice on how to go about leaving my house, but he also told me that, for my age and where I stand, I would probably be better off if I didn't leave. And then he told me how I could go about working things out at home to make it better for me to live there. And it worked.

>> Sometimes I look at it as, you know, "Why am I still going to school? Why do I need a diploma?" I know it's better for the future, but I wonder what does the future hold for me? Because I have a long past. I'm only 16. I'm an orphan; I don't have none of my parents. So when it comes to trouble, I can't go to Mom and Dad; it's just me.

>> I'm dealing with a young man right now who just turned 16. He's trying to balance an education with surviving, and he's having a very difficult time about it. So myself, along with some of the teachers, his teachers, are helping him through this.

>> He asked me if we could make some accommodations in the student's schedule, to get him with the same teachers but at a different time of day. We proceeded with that, and as a result, all that collaboration, I think that youngster has a better shot at graduating. There's no guarantee that the other issues in his life won't get in the way.

>> Like two days ago he came to my door in the morning, looking for me, you know. So that shows that he cares, you know. He went around town looking for me, so I have to show up at school.

>> Now, he goes far and beyond what you would think a typical police officer would do, and in doing that, he's built quite a rapport with the students. A lot of students have a lot of trust for him and go with him not just with legal issues but with other personal issues as well. And so he becomes a resource for the students, almost like another counselor in many cases. And that's a good and positive way for the students to view the police as well.

>> As other districts think about a project or a program like this, there are some traps that I think they need to consider carefully.

The first thing I think and probably the most important, is to think of this program weaving into the overall philosophy of the school district and the school building. In Plattsburgh City School District, a strict law enforcement role for officer Velinsky would have been a failure. We have in our buildings, and in the high school in particular, some real ownership in terms of the governance of our building. Our students are involved in that; certainly our faculty is; our administration is. And for us to impose on those people a law enforcement person who was walking down the hall with a gun and a uniform, that type of thing, would have clearly been rejected.

>> One of the criteria that has to be out there for police departments involved and participating in these things is that this is not being set up as some sort of undercover narc system for the police department or anything like that. It has to come from the point of view that we're coming in as police officers, a police department, with our people to assist students, to help young people.

>> Prevention is the name of the game in trying to steer these kids in the right direction. That should be the community officer's primary role.

>> If he didn't have the badge, he would not be an officer to me. He's like a friend.

>> How do I gauge this as a success? At the end of the year when we're at graduation and I see these young people walk across the stage and take their diploma, that's a success.

>> I made a decision and I know what I'm going to do, and I'm going to go home and tell my mom.

>> That would be the best thing.

>> I thought so, too.

>> It will work. It will work!

>> Rochelle: Truly outstanding. And here keeping control in our studios with us today is Captain Sloat, the Assistant Director of Training for the New York State Police Academy.

Captain Sloat, the Plattsburgh program seems really terrific. And I know that there are probably a number of them around this state. And the State Police also have some programs that they do with schools. What do you have to offer?

>> Captain Sloat: Well, we have 18 programs, 12 which are up and running, but I would like to comment --

>> Rochelle: Go right ahead.

>> Caption Sloat: -- on that particular program. They definitely picked the right person. He didn't go in there with the strong arm of the law; he went in there to help, and it was picked up by the students and the administration. And I think they're very proud of what they did up there, and they should be.

But getting back to the State Police program, we don't offer the student resource officer, which that is. We go in and we teach administrators; we teach school bus drivers, teachers, students different programs on how to deal with prevention, to prevent each other from hurting each other, a lot of the things we mentioned earlier here.

We go in and look at the school itself. Earlier, Dr. Lucas mentioned hardening devices. We go in and look at the school and see if it's a safe environment. We also teach personnel on how to make their school safer so we don't have to go back.

We have one program, a very popular program, on how to deal with a student bringing a gun to the school. That program is taught to teachers and administrators, and it actually gives them an actual process to do to get the kid out of a crisis environment until the police get there and hopefully so that no shots are fired. It has been successful. There was one place in the state where they did use this and nobody was shot.

We have drug programs. We teach nurses, school administrators drug recognition. We also teach the students to recognize if another student is taking an illegal substance. We went down even to young kids, elementary level, and teach them gun safety, to stay away from guns.

We have a whole multitude of programs, both in the community and in the schools. We consider ourselves part of the community team.

>> Rochelle: How would somebody access your programs? We talked about teachers feeling like they have not really been given that staff development. How could a school access your programs?

>> Captain Sloat: We work cooperatively with State Ed and the Commissioner. We also -- we have nine troops which are in rural areas, and they can call the troop headquarters there throughout the state. We have worked with BOCES under State Ed. Most of your school administrators have attended one of our sessions throughout the state, and they have also got to us through Commissioner Mills, and we appreciate that. We want to be part of the team.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Sitting next to you is Alana Sweeny. Alana is Executive Director of the New York State Council on Children and Families. Alana, you've worked with Commissioner Mills in getting state agencies to collaborate on school safety issues. How do you go about doing that? What's the first thing that schools need to do?

>> Alana Sweeny: Open dialogue. I think that's the first, foremost and most important thing that you can do. You need to be creative and take a look, contact as many people as you can think of that might have some kind of a stake in your school and in the children in your community. And that could include all kinds of players. That could be -- besides your school administrators, there are regional staff of state agencies out in the local areas; there are mental health professionals, your community-based organizations, your Chambers of Commerce. Get business involved. Get parents involved. I can't stress that enough. They have a big stake in this. And get the youth involved.

Sit down and think about what the vision is that you would like to see for your community. From there, you can start with the planning process. And with that planning process, you have a common vision; you have a common goal; you have a direction you want to move in. At that point you can start to think about what kinds of resources and assets do we have at the local level that we can build on? Do we have some very creative outlets? Perhaps we have someone that can have a child express themselves through the arts, for example. We may have a child who's having some problems, and when we get into it, we find out that there's domestic violence in the house. Well, maybe this is something we need to address. Maybe we need to look at our elementary school level and get down with the children at that point and see what we can do to address aggression and bullying. Make it a big plan for the school.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. Thank you. Dr. Cooke?

>> Dr. Cooke: Yes, I think there are two institutions we have not highlighted, and I would like to highlight them: They are the institutions of higher education that are tremendous resources. Various departments within a college or university serve as learning opportunities, internships for high school kids as well as middle school kids.

And then there's the religious community. It's a great resource that we don't explore enough. They can preach our sermon and bring the volunteers in.

So let's not overlook those two as resources for us to link hands with.

>> Rochelle: Ted made reference in his comments that he brings clergymen in to school as well.

>> Treat the clergy. We said there are significant people in our school community, plus the school historians. We use them, train them with us, with our kids in mediation. They're part of our school safety and crisis team. And I'm going to speak at their breakfast tomorrow. So I keep them on my side. (Laughter) That's a real safe place...

But yes, they have really worked with us very well, and they're just another part of that whole community package.

>> Marvin: I just want to pick up on Gwen's comment about preservice training for teachers as we go out and really go on the line. I was trained in a program that was a federal grant to prepare me to work with at-risk kids, and I received one course in classroom behavior management in the course of my entire graduate school program. And that was highly inadequate. I was totally unprepared for the real thing when I arrived on the floor, and I had to learn from a mentoring process, really, by those who had been in the business longer than me.

But I just want to highlight that I think that's a critical part of preservice training for teachers.

>> Rochelle: I know that Dr. Lucas also mentioned the idea that teachers, as they are being trained to be teachers, need to have that kind of training right from the start.

>> Yes. Crisis starts at the university as well. It starts at a few different places. But in the graduate schools of education, we are starting to rethink teacher training. You won't find a class in the School of Education on body culture in schooling and social ecology of violence and human race education...

We're now starting to implement these courses; I'm starting to implement these courses. And it's a radical change in how we're training teachers. Teachers have not been trained in how to respond to violence. They don't understand it; they don't know how to dialogue with it. So we have to radically rethink even what we're doing at the universities.

>> Rochelle: Commissioner?

>> Commissioner Mills: I didn't want to go away too quickly from the contribution that law enforcement makes.

>> Rochelle: Definitely.

>> Commissioner Mills: I just love the measure of success that the officer in Plattsburgh cited. He said it's the student going across the stage at graduation. That's exactly the answer that a teacher would give or a superintendent or parent or whatever.

I think that the world of education and the world of law enforcement need to listen to one another a little bit more. It takes a lot of listening, a lot of soul-searching and effort for the school to open itself. It takes a lot of the same -- it takes a lot of courage for a law enforcement officer who, in his or her daily life, has to wear armor, in every sense of the word. And you can't hug a child if you have armor on, and these men and women are putting aside a very important part of their training, and they're opening up in ways that we have to open up and they're saying, "We have a common task here. We can protect children by giving them some skills."

>> Rochelle: And we can get them to graduate by protecting them as well.

>> Commissioner Mills: Right.

>> Rochelle: It's a shared vision that's truly fantastic. We hope that seeing what some of our schools and communities are doing has given you out there some good places to start and that you're now enthusiastic and eager to get ready to work.

In that case, there are many places you can go for assistance to either get started on your school safety program or to make changes and adjustments to an existing program.

Actually, schools already have in their possession some things that are going to help them out, isn't that right, Commissioner? We're gong to make a shameless plug here, right? Shameless plug, shameless plug. What you have in the Facilitator's Guide right now...we've really kind of started all of this, haven't we?

>> Commissioner Mills: We have. There's a lot of information here, a lot of basic facts, statistics about student behavior, student violence, things that can be done, some of the things that we have described in this program. Lots of phone numbers, the names of individuals and organizations and how you can reach them. There's just a lot of information to fuel the local discussion.

I'm sure we have at least gotten that point across: The discussion has to begin locally.

>> Rochelle: Okay. So start talking, everybody, as soon as we're done here. What we're going to do now is ask Mary Grenz Jalloh. She heads the Upstate Center for School Safety. It's an excellent resource for schools looking for resources and training. Mary, what can you help schools do?

>> Mary Grenz Jalloh: Thank you. We work with school districts to provide training, technical assistance and resources on issues associated with school safety and violence prevention. In particular, we encourage districts to identify school safety teams, such as some of those we have seen on today's taping, and to do that at a building level and to bring the team to a three-day training process where that team will look at risk factors in their environment, look at data specifically addressing those risk factors. We really focus on a database approach to planning. And then to identify action steps that the building can take to respond to some of those risks they have identified.

It's really a data-driven process to do planning, and that helps to really utilize resources in the most effective way that that building can. Essential to that building team are the school principal. The administrator of that building has to be there, to be a part of the process. A parent is absolutely critical. We include our parents in this, and a member of the community. And then the other members of our school staff, who are all working on this jointly in an effort to change for the better the environment for our children in the school culture.

We encourage schools to participate with this as