In May, according to a police report, a high school student, walking through a Jefferson County school parking lot, was attacked by eight kids, a number of them students at the school.
They punched the victim in the face and, for good measure, stomped on his head as he lay on the ground. The school’s security guard and vice principal reported that the student ended up with blood on his face and knuckles.
You know, I’m not a child behavioral therapist, but that sounds an awful lot like a fight to me.
There were numerous other incidents that bear a suspicious resemblance to assault at this particular high school: kids punching each other in the face, students taken to the hospital with abrasions, gouging incidents … you get the idea.
This sort of extracurricular activity goes on in every school, of course. So, many Jefferson County parents may be wondering why their kids’ School Accountability Report has a zero residing in the assaults/fights column this year.
Not a single fight at any high school in Jefferson County? Westminster, meanwhile, a district a fraction of the size, reported almost 700 incidents of fights and assaults last year.
Do we have a substantial pacifist community in Jefferson County and an exceptionally violent one in Westminster? Probably not.
What we have are administrators who are simply following the law, reporting assault incidents only if they are in the first or second degree. Westminster is not. Which district do you think offers parents a more reliable picture of their schools’ safety?
When I ask Pamela Benigno, director of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center, how useful the SAR’s assault numbers have been for parents, she tells me she has “spoken to several school-district personnel and law-enforcement officers, and they all agree that only reporting first- and second-degree assaults does not provide parents with a meaningful assessment of how many fights really take place in a school.”
But the assault numbers aren’t the only ones in the report that warrant critique.
Larry Borland, director of school safety and security for Douglas County, has worked in this field for a decade. He believes schools need to report discipline and criminal activity separately.
“As a parent, you have the right to know what kind of discipline is going on in a school,” explains Borland. “But you also have a right to know how many times lockers have been broken into, how many times the school building has been burglarized, how many thefts students report, and a lot of those things do get reported but never get aggregated in a way that parents can see them.”
Parents may not realize that the only incidents reported on the SAR are those that lead to suspensions or expulsions.
Theoretically, Borland explains, an assault, without an apprehended perpetrator and a resulting suspension or expulsion, wouldn’t even show up on the report sent home with students.
Another, even more disconcerting problem is that not only do SARs fail to report thefts and robberies separately, but they lump sexual assaults under “Other Violation Code of Conduct.”
I suspect most reasonable parents are under the impression that a category of “other” means a collection of less egregious crimes. Not so.
What can parents do? First, they must understand there is only a finite amount of room on the accountability reports for more information. But surely they can persuade the smart folks at the Capitol to come up with reasonable legislation.
After all, the SAR is a sensible way to keep parents informed about the schools’ academic achievement (or failure) and safety statistics, among other things.
“I think we need to report on what happens in the school building. I think parents are capable of understanding what’s really going on,” says Borland.
Sadly, if we continue to water down the SARs’ effectiveness, parents will be stuck with a useless piece of paper.
Or worse, a misleading one.
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 303-820-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
