Learn from this horror
The Bronx high school where 18-year-old Abel Cedeno stands charged with murdering one classmate and wounding another with a switchblade long ago let fear and chaos paralyze learning. First things first: Make the new temporary metal detectors brought into the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation permanent, to ensure Wednesday’s horrifying bloodshed is not a harbinger of more to come.
Then, and quickly, the city Department of Investigation must undertake — as Chancellor Carmen Fariña has requested — a rigorous probe of whatever bullying and other bad behavior culminated in Cedeno snapping in history class, plunging a serrated knife into 15-year-old Matthew McCree and 16-year-old Ariane Laboy.
Police revealed yesterday that they believe McCree and Laboy were not even Cedeno’s tormenters; they were just the ones who set him off at the wrong moment.
Dive deep into the evidence. If teachers and staff failed to notice, much less tried to interrupt a pattern of bullying and retaliation, they must be held to account.
Investigators must also determine whether changes to schools’ disciplinary code ushered in by de Blasio tied any hands here.
In 2015, the city imposed new rules requiring written approval from headquarters in Tweed before a school could suspend any student for insubordination. In place of suspensions, which are now seen as taboo, de Blasio and Fariña touted “restorative practices” — laborious attempts to get children to take their bad behavior to heart and self-correct.
Did this school ever request suspensions for Cedeno or any of his alleged bullies? Did staff attempt other interventions?
What’s certain at the outset is that something is rotten in this 545-student grades 6 to 12 school. Safety problems have been allowed to fester — an indictment not only of the current principal, Astrid Jacobo, but likely of her superintendent, Fred Walsh.
On a 2016 Education Department survey, just 19% of teachers there agreed “that at their school, order and discipline are maintained.”
Asked whether, at their school, students harass, bully or intimidate other students, 43% of pupils said yes, some of the time; 31% said yes, most of the time. Just 26% said rarely or never.
Asked whether, at their school, students get into physical fights, a stunning 53% said yes, most of the time; 36% said yes, some of the time. Just 12% said it happens rarely or never.
This is far from New York’s only troubled campus. A March analysis by the Manhattan Institute looked citywide at the period from 2011-12 to 2015-16 and found teachers reporting less order and discipline, and students reporting more violence and less mutual respect.
The city says the schools are safer than ever, citing a drop in the number of serious crimes reported to cops or school-safety agents. And on the most recent survey data, 91% of students citywide reported feeling safe in their classes; 84% said they feel safe in hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms and the cafeteria, and 84% said their schools are orderly and disciplined — all steady or up from the previous year.
State data, however, show an increase in total violent and disruptive incidents reported, as required under law, to Albany.
Get to the bottom of why the unthinkable happened in one city school — and look unflinchingly at facts suggesting that across the system, bad behavior may be growing more common.