Public Advocate Seeks Measures To Protect Students

Following recent reports of abuses in city schools, the public advocate yesterday called for the Department of Education to alter the way it protects students.

Betsy Gotbaum proposed involving police officers and child welfare agents in probes of alleged abuses on school buses, widening the scope of the Civilian Complaint Review Board to include complaints against school security officers, and bolstering the training and supervision of those officers.

An investigation by the Daily News this week detailed a litany of abuses on school buses in recent years by drivers, monitors, and students. Also this week, reports emerged of an alleged rape of an 8-year-old schoolgirl by a janitor in Brooklyn, and an alleged beating of a young male by school security officers at a basketball game.

"Clearly we have a problem," the chairman of the City Council's Education Committee, Robert Jackson, said. "If anybody thinks we don't have a problem, they have their heads stuck in the sand."

School officials say such criticism misses the broader picture, which shows that campuses have become much safer in recent years. "We have 1.1 million kids in the system. Inevitably, kids will fall through the cracks," a department spokeswoman, Dina Parks, said. "But 99% of the time that is not the case."

A police spokesman, Paul Browne, said violence on school campuses dropped 20% between the school years 1999-2000 and 2005-06. Since police began unannounced scanning with metal detectors at city schools in April 2006, they have recovered 113 knives and 50 box cutters, he added.