Reports conceal school fights
Record-keeping quirks hide violence, injuries
By David Olinger
Denver Post Staff Writer
denverpost.com
Sunday, April 10, 2005 -
Five girls ambushed Monica Nealy outside her high school in the middle of the afternoon.
One asked if she liked pain - and knocked her to the ground with a blow to her head. The others held her down, pulled up her sweater and burned her with a cigarette.
Then they told the terrified 10th-grader that they knew where she lived and when she would be alone.
Monica never returned to Aurora Central High School. "They burned me on my hand and on my stomach," she said, leaving scars she can still see. "I was kind of scared to even walk outside."
Aurora police considered the attack on Monica an aggravated assault. But in its yearly report to parents, Aurora Central said there were no assaults or fights during the 2003-04 school year.
Parents got the same report from every other high school in Aurora: There were no assaults or fights last year.
Colorado requires that schools provide to all parents a yearly report - called a School Accountability Report - that is supposed to offer an accurate snapshot of the place they trust to teach and protect their children.
In reality, disclosures of school violence vary wildly from one district to another. Some schools report every punch thrown on the playground. Others did not include assaults that police classified as felonies.
Last school year, for example, Jefferson County schools reported 644 assaults or fights. The Aurora and Cherry Creek school districts each reported one.
A boy who needed staples to close head wounds. A girl taken to a hospital with bruised kidneys. A sexual assault. A knifing. Attacks with a flagpole and a baseball bat. These were some of the incidents police investigated in Denver, Cherry Creek or Aurora schools that reported no assaults or fights last year.
School officials in districts that report almost no assaults or fights say they're simply following Colorado Department of Education instructions that allow them to list only felonious attacks that cause severe injuries - such as disfigurement or damaged organs.
Critics say the state's guidelines are confusing and flout common sense.
How accountable are the accountability reports?
To accept their reliability, you must believe that in the last school year:
Thirteen Colorado grade schools had more assaults and fights than any high school in Denver.
A rural high school in Rifle witnessed more assaults than 25 high schools in Denver and Aurora.
The most violent school in Colorado is a middle school in the suburban community of Fountain.
"I'm well familiar with this highly skewed pattern," said William Moloney, Colorado's education commissioner. "This area is, very candidly, a weakness" in the reports.
The School Accountability Reports, which also include academic ratings for more than 1,700 schools, are among the department's largest yearly projects. The department prints a million copies and features the reports on its website. Schools distribute them to every parent. Realtors show them to homebuyers.
"This is the stuff parents say they want to know: Are schools safe?" Moloney said.
He acknowledged, however, that "a very misleading picture can be conveyed to the public" because judgments on what constitutes a fight or assault vary locally. Some schools "report every last little thing," he said, while others "have a greater fondness for good news."
Monica Nealy's mother, Lori Myers, believes school officials minimized the assault on her daughter.
"My daughter was being swept under the rug because they didn't want the publicity," she said.
School officials say they cannot comment on individual cases, and police reports do not indicate any suspect was arrested. But Monica left Aurora to live with her grandmother in North Carolina after she was attacked. Her mother soon followed.
"There is no doubt," Myers said, that her daughter was viciously assaulted. "How do you ignore cigarette burns through her clothes?" she asked, and "burns on her body?"
Felony attacks excluded
Aurora schools Superintendent Robert Adams called it "a little curious" that no high school in his district reported an assault or fight last year.
Whatever the numbers, "Aurora has always been pretty quick to mete out discipline for threatening behavior," he added. "We have little tolerance for school violence."
He and other school officials say state guidelines restrict what gets reported as a school assault or fight.
Those guidelines exclude all misdemeanor assaults from School Accountability Reports. Felony assaults can also be excluded if the attacker is not identified or not a student at the school, commits the assault off school property, or the school lacks enough evidence to expel the perpetrator.
To appear as an assault on a school report card, the attack must cause "severe bodily harm," said Aurora Central principal Dean Stecklein. His example: "If I broke all the bones in your face."
At one Aurora middle school that reported no assaults last year, police reports describe a child beaten on his way home by five older boys in ski masks, children threatened with a handgun and knives, a boy who "had a pair of scissors pointed at the side of his throat," and a girl who walked home shoeless when a group of kids knocked her down and stole them off her feet.
At another, a 13-year-old girl suffered bruised kidneys and blood in her urine after a girl jumped her from behind.
The girl's mother praised the responses of the school dean and resource officer but differed with the report that no assaults occurred there last year.
The attacker "hit her so hard she had to go to the hospital," said the mother, who wants her daughter's privacy protected. "We went through hell. CAT scans, tests for kidney damage."
A year later, her daughter's grades have fallen; she hangs out with tough kids who protect her; and "she hates school," her mother said.
That attack occurred in the Cherry Creek school district, which reported no assaults or fights at any Aurora schools during an entire school year.
Aurora police reports, however, classified at least four other assaults at Cherry Creek middle and high schools as felonies.
One victim was a boy beaten by a classmate using a watch brass-knuckle style. The beating imprinted "the outline of a watch crown" in his face and fractured a facial bone, police reported.
Another boy had "blood all over his clothing" and "a deep laceration to his right cheek" that caused permanent disfigurement. Another had "a closed head injury" and facial fracture, and a police officer was kicked in the groin during an arrest.
Mary Chesley, an assistant superintendent for Cherry Creek schools, said schools sometimes classify incidents before police do, and what police call an assault may get recorded under "other violations" on a School Accountability Report.
But there were "serious consequences for the assailants" in each case, she said.
Parents aware of irony
The discrepancies in school violence reports begin with a narrow reporting standard from the state - too narrow, some parents and officials say.
By the state's definition, most school fights are not counted as fights. Its Education Department specifically instructs school districts not to report fights in the "assault/fight" category unless a felonious assault is involved.
All other fights are supposed to be reported as "other violations" of conduct standards, a catchall category encompassing everything from cheating on a test to robbery and arson.
In Aurora, for example, Smoky Hill High School reported 930 "other" violations, and Overland High reported 822, but no assaults or fights.
In Denver, police recorded at least 345 assault arrests at high schools last year. Accountability reports at those schools listed only 38 assaults or fights last school year - but 3,866 "other" violations. Those numbers exclude alternative schools.
Seven Denver high schools reported no assaults for the year.
One was Thomas Jefferson, where a boy was taken to the hospital after he was beaten with a flagpole.
At John F. Kennedy High, which also reported no assaults, one boy was stabbed "in his left forearm, drawing blood," during a school disturbance, police reported. Another punched his girlfriend "several times in the head" and bit her four times in the chest.
At Montbello High, where a student was fatally stabbed earlier this year, the accountability report for 2003-04 listed a total of two assaults or fights - but 207 "other" violations.
"Two a year? Come on," said the Rev. Leon Kelly, a father and anti-gang activist who knows many Montbello students. "Oh man, they get that in a day - or more."
Denver police records, which count misdemeanor arrests, list 58 assaults at Montbello last year.
At Manual, which has three high schools under one roof, only one assault/fight was reported last school year.
That strikes Tonya Hope, a parent group leader, as absurd.
"I would say there are two fights a week," she said. "I drive up and see them myself."
Her son Dominique, a freshman, said someone gets injured in most of the fights he sees. "When they fight, they fight hard," he said.
DPS Superintendent Jerry Wartgow said school districts obviously differ in their interpretations of reportable assaults and fights, and police have their own definitions.
"There's no question that needs to be clarified," he said. "Parents certainly need to have consistent determinations if the report's going to be useful at all."
When a fight is a fight
In the main hallway at Fountain Middle School, a student mural displays messages of mutual respect. "No name calling." "No putdowns." "No dissing." "Peace in middle school."
The hallway is quiet despite a school policy of keeping classroom doors open. Students and teachers call it a secure school with relatively few fights.
"I can't remember seeing one," sixth-grader Kaitlyn Mileto said, shaking her ponytail. "It feels safe."
Eighth-grader Cole Nelson remembers seeing one boy get pummeled as he lay on the ground, "and he got his nose a little bloodied up. That's about the worst I've seen."
Yet judging by accountability reports, Fountain Middle is the most violent school in Colorado. It reported 70 assaults and fights last year - nearly twice the total reported by all Denver high schools.
"We report fights very literally at this school," principal Deb Keiley said. "We have high expectations of the students."
Scanning her office computer, Keiley described a typical incident logged by the school as an assault: A boy wrestled a classmate to the ground to get a volleyball. The other boy got mad and hit him in the face.
The principal is also the mother of two students at her school. As a parent, she expects a full account of school fights on her yearly report card.
"When parents are looking at this, what do they think a fight means?" she asked. "I don't think parents are thinking these are all felony assaults."
Jefferson County, which also reported school fights as fights, showed more violence on accountability reports than the next nine largest districts combined.
Its school officials say if they had adhered strictly to state guidelines, they would have reported one or two assaults or fights during the school year, not 644.
Marilyn Sonnkalb, who collected Jefferson County school data, expects the district to conform and put nearly all school assaults and fights in the "other" category this year. And "yes, it will be tough for the parents to determine how many fights there were in a school," she said.
The 2000 Colorado law that created School Accountability Reports requires schools to disclose assaults and fights but did not define either.
In part to avoid treating hallway scuffles as major safety incidents, state education officials say a task force decided to limit the "assaults/fights" category to felony assaults. They acknowledge most assaults and fights therefore get reported as "other" violations, not violent incidents.
Department officials also say they lack the resources to audit district reports of school violence.
"There is confusion out there on what assaults and fights are. Part of that is there are different policies at the local level," said David Smith, a department program director.
"Parents want to know the real story. Our data should be accurate." |
