In its quest to make the public schools safer, the Department of Education is trying everything from distributing a citywide discipline code to instructing students through “interactive theater” designed to stop bullying.

At a City Council hearing yesterday, however, department officials came under fire from legislators, activists, and union officials who complained of inappropriate safety tactics in the schools – including the use of pepper spray, stink bombs, and chokeholds – and inadequate record-keeping.

“At hearing after hearing, they come forward and they don’t have the most basic information,” the chairwoman of the council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, said. “I don’t doubt their intentions. I don’t doubt that Rose DePinto cares deeply about the public school system. She obviously does. But people don’t have a handle on basic pieces of information, and I just think it’s unacceptable.”

Rose Albanese-DePinto, the senior counselor in the Office of School Intervention and Development, told the committee at the outset of the hearing: “Without a safe and supportive school environment, effective teaching and learning cannot take place.”

She said that to make schools safer, the department has partnered with the New York City Police Department to create the Impact Initiative, which has targeted some of the most dangerous schools in the city.

The department has also spent $500,000 to print and distribute the discipline code in nine languages, she said.

It’s also training high-risk students in peer mediation, and starting this month, it will train 5,000 sixth-, seventh-, and ninth-grade students at dangerous schools in “five days of interactive theater instruction to stop bullying behavior and promote alternatives to fighting.”

Ms. Albanese-DePinto said the strategies are paying off. From January 2004 through January 2005, she said, major crime in impact schools declined by two-fifths from the previous year.

Nevertheless, Ms. Moskowitz questioned some of the disciplinary tactics being used in schools, including reports that stink bombs and pepper spray were used by school-safety agents to keep students in line.

The Manhattan Democrat also said that the interactive theater program wouldn’t top her list of worthwhile interventions, and that she knows of very few parents who have received the discipline code.

When other witnesses spoke at the hearing, the picture seemed more clouded than the one Ms. Albanese-DePinto painted.

The vice president for academic high schools for the teachers union, Frank Volpicella, said violent incidents had skyrocketed at schools whose buildings have been flooded with new students as the department has created scores of new, small, specialized high schools.

He said that according to United Federation of Teachers data, when Walton High School in the Bronx received 439 additional students last year, the number of violent incidents increased by 125% over the previous year. At Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, he said, the student body increased by 260 students and incidents increased by 123%.

“Overcrowding is one of the factors,” Mr. Volpicella said. “It’s time the department take that into consideration.”

The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Donna Lieberman, testified that the police officers who have been stationed at impact schools have helped clear up some safety problems, but have created other hazards.

She said students who attend small, specialized high schools within large, dangerous schools are subjected to the same frisking, patting down, and “attitude” as the students in the larger school.

That, she said, is inconvenient.

She also questioned who’s training the officers to handle youngsters.

Ms. Lieberman said recent incidents at the Bronx Guild High School provide a good example of some of the problems that have arisen under the current administration.

In mid-January, a lawyer, a parent leader, and a teacher all saw a school safety agent pushing a 10th-grader against a wall and putting him in a chokehold that cut off the student’s breathing. The school filed a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board about the alleged abuse – which was apparently prompted by the student’s insistence on wearing a headband into a school assembly.

The principal of Bronx Guild, Michael Soguero, raised questions publicly in late January about the role of police officers in school discipline.

About a week later, the principal tried to stop a safety agent from entering a classroom and arresting a student. Mr. Soguero was arrested and charged with assault, obstructing a governmental administration, and refusing to aid a police officer. Now, parents, teachers, and students are standing up for the principal, who has been sent to a regional office, and stories are bubbling up about the police officer’s removal from another school last year, purportedly after a series of complaints.

A Police Department press aide refused to answer any questions about the agent during a telephone conversation but repeatedly called him a “victim.”

Ms. Lieberman said she has also heard reports from multiple schools about the use of Mace on students – even students who had been tackled to the ground. “That would violate police rules on the street,” she said.

Ms. Albanese-DePinto testified at the hearing that she was aware of two incidents during which pepper spray had been used on students. She said officials of the education department do not carry pepper spray but police officers are permitted to. The press aide at the Police Department declined to answer questions about the procedures for using pepper spray at schools.

Ms. Moskowitz asked the department to find out what paraphernalia safety officers are using in schools. In addition, she asked the department to consider posting a range of incident data on the Internet, where parents could examine the statistics.