In the past year we have seen Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and their deputies Dennis Walcott, Benjamin Tucker and Lester Young try to stem in-school violence through the implementation of police state measures. "New Beginnings" or "Twilight Schools" were discussed, with frightening overtones of a Soviet Union US Japanese detention camp scenario. There is no doubt that discplinary actionis needed in our schools, but when policy is implemented in a non-transparent way with people who think that they are accountable to no one, then discipline takes on fascist, police-state characteristics. We believe that the Klein/Bloomberg public school reform will not succeed partially due to the lack of planning and strategy in implementing the discipline code.
We asked Mr. Tucker questions last spring when this new policy of suspending violent students was outlined at a CPAC (Chancellor's Parent Advisory Committee) meeting:

1. How do you determine who is the perpetrator when there is an assault in a school between two students and they both deny doing anything? Do you suspend both? Do you punish the student who the Principal says "did it", while perhaps the Principal has a dislike for that child or his/her parent? Who do you believe? What due process rights do you work with to protect all innocent parties?

2. What about when a teacher makes up something about a child, and suspends the child because this teacher or the Principal needs to get rid of the child or his/her parent?

Boy T., Booker T. Washington MS 54

T. was a seventh grade African American special education full inclusion student in one of the 5 programs at MS 54 and his mom was elected to the MS 54 Executive Board when we found out that the Barnes and Noble check for $13,783.77 from the MS 54 PTA fundraiser would not be returned, and had been taken by Superintendent Patricia Romandetto for deposit into a NYC Board of Education bank account.

T's mom along with me, the PTA President, kept asking Larry Lynch "Where is the money?" As the office staff at the school told me that T was not on the roster of the school and they gave me the ATS for all programs at the school to show that there were several, maybe more than 10, children graduated from the restricted environment school P811M on the Upper West Side (Mr. Phillip Santesi, Principal) who were placed in the NOVA Program at MS 54 and not put onto the roster as full-time students. They remained on the roster of P811M because, as Carol Kraus of the District 3 Committee on Special Education told me, these children's teachers were there and paid from the P811M budget. But we asked Ms. Kraus why these kids were not getting any services, their IEPs were, according to AP Bertha McGee "missing", and even their teachers in the NOVA Program did not know these students had IEPs or, of course, what was written in the special needs descriptions.

Mr. Lynch seemed to be particularly interested in creating a large folder for T which characterized him as out-of-control and harmful to the school environment.