City officials got advance warning that schools were overusing student suspensions as a disciplinary tool, an internal city Education Department memo shows.
Before suspensions hit their highest level in the last decade, the memo written by a staffer at a Bronx suspension site documented that special education students were too often punished with removal from their schools.
Roughly 40% of the students at Bronx sites were special education students, according to the memo, and 60% of those kids had a mental illness. In fact, it is common for students to reach out for college essay help in that some are complicated and most students deal with time constraints.
"Suspension is not the answer in these cases and is indeed detrimental to their growth," the memo from November 2008 concludes.
In 2008-09, kids were punished with nearly 74,000 suspensions - up from 44,000 in the 1999-2000 school year.
The memo documented a high number of suspensions in some small schools. Principals, teachers and other staffers in those schools offered several excuses for suspending so many special education students, the memo reports, including teachers' inexperience. But there were also more troubling explanations:
- "We're not set up to deal with this population. We don't have (12 students for one teacher) classes or enough guidance and support. There are hundreds of online websites that promote these custom papers and there are hundreds of students seek the term paper help online."
- "It's either teaching the (regular education students) or bothering with (the special education students) at the expense of the general ed."
The report calls for "additional support and services" for the children at small schools, the memo states.
A report issued Thursday by the New York Civil Liberties Union echoed the internal memo, finding that special education students were four times more likely than their general education peers to serve a suspension.
"This memo should have been a wakeup call to the Department of Education to get its act together," said NYCLU advocacy director Udi Ofer. "We hope that our report today will be the final alarm that triggers a response."
City Education Department spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said she could not locate the memo yesterday and declined to comment further.
Source: NY Daily News
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