DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

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SAFE AND DRUG FREE SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES

ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING

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Monday,

October 23, 2006

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The meeting was held in the Barnard Auditorium of 400 Maryland Avenue,
S.W., Washington, D.C., at 9:00 a.m., David Long, Chairman, presiding.

[PRESENT]{.underline}:

DAVID LONG CHAIRMAN

DEBORAH PRICE MEMBER

KIM DUDE MEMBER

FREDERICK ELLIS MEMBER

MIKE HERRMANN MEMBER

MONTEAN JACKSON MEMBER

RUSSELL JONES MEMBER

SHEPPARD KELLAM MEMBER

SUSAN KEYS MEMBER

TOMMY LEDBETTER MEMBER

SETH NORMAN MEMBER

MICHAEL PIMENTEL MEMBER

DENNIS ROMERO MEMBER

BELINDA SIMS MEMBER

MARY ANN SOLBERG MEMBER

HOPE TAFT MEMBER

HOWELL WECHSLER MEMBER

MARIELA SHIRLEY SURROGATE FOR DR. RALPH HINGSON

CATHERINE DAVIS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

[C O N T E N T S]{.underline}

[PAGE]{.underline}

Introductions, Chairman Long 4

Panel I: Association and Organization Perspective

Annie Salsich 9

Bill Bond 35

Peter Pochowski 39

Jerry Barber 52

Panel II: Department of Education, Two Perspectives

Richard Rasa 129

Bernie Tadley 136

Paul Kesner 142

Panel III: State Education Agency Perspective

Susan Martz 224

Cory Green 250

Meredith Rolfe 262

Janelle Krueger 280

Public Comment 338

[P R O C E E D I N G S]{.underline}

(9:04 a.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much. Welcome everyone from across the
country. Glad to be back together again.

The first thing I want to do is, as we open, is to remind us of, first
of all, the charges that were given to us by the Secretary. As we
recall, three in nature, and thus the reason that we are back here today
with our second panel.

Our first panel and the three questions in areas that the Secretary
asked us to focus on was with the state grants program, and that was
from our first set of panelists and panels.

And then today, we are back and our second area that we will be
discussing today will be persistently danger, so the unsafe school
option with NCLB.

And then we will be back the third time with our third focus group that
will deal with data.

Also, a reminder of the schedule, starting at 9:00 a.m. sharp, very
good, thanks to you. Then in just a few minutes we\'ll be starting on
the first panel, and I\'ll introduce them. Then our four panelists will
make presentations, and then as soon as they\'re done, then there will
be a free flow with questions from the committee so that we can better
understand some of the things that you are talking about.

And this first panel will go from 9:10 until 10:20, and then we\'ll take
our first break. But I just wanted to codify the first part of the
morning.

I would like to now introduce our panelists for our first panel this
morning. Annie you have a big smile so I\'ll introduce you first.

Annie Salsich is a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of
Justice, a nonprofit policy and research institute that works closely
with leaders in government and civil society to improve the services
people rely on for safety and services. Annie recently completed a
national research project to examine the unsafe school choice option of
No Child Left Behind.

Prior to this project, she worked as an analyst on AFFIRM, a Vera
demonstration project that trained New York City School safety agents
how to use the techniques of positive reinforcement as a means of
preventing school violence.

She received her BA at Vassar and is now enrolled in a Master\'s program
in social work at Hunter College.

Annie, welcome.

Our next panelist is \-- and, Peter, I\'ll jump over to you \-- Peter
Pochowski, who was appointed Director of the Division of Safety and
Security for the Milwaukee Public Schools in 1999. Previous to his
employment with NPS, the largest school district in the State of
Wisconsin, Peter spent 26 years with the Milwaukee Police Department
where he rose to the position of the department senior captain, a title
he held before joint NPS.

Peter is also the Executive Director of the National Association of
School Safety and Law Enforcement Officers.

Welcome, Peter.

And next we\'ll go to Bill Bond. Bill served as principal of Heath High
School for eight years before coming to NASSP. He is now the resident
practitioner for safe orderly schools, which is generously sponsored by
AID VALIC.

On December 1st, 1997, during his tenure at Heath High School in Peduca,
Kentucky, the tragic school shooting occurred. This shooting, along with
other shootings across the nation, has precipitated his keen involvement
in safe school awareness.

Mr. Bond also represents NASSP, National Committees for School Safety,
and is co-chair of the National Anti-Bullying Campaign.

Bill, welcome.

And last but not least, Jerry. Jerry Barber is the Assistant Comptroller
responsible for the oversight and administration of the State Audit
Bureau within the Office of the State Comptroller\'s Division of the
State Services. Prior to being appointed Assistant Comptroller, Jerry
served as an audit program director for about ten years with the State
Audit Bureau. Jerry is a certified public accountant, certified
information systems auditor, and certified government financial manager.
He has a Bachelor\'s of business administration from Sienna College.

Jerry, welcome.

Again, thank you collectively to all of you that took the time out of
your busy schedule to be here with us and to share your expertise and
your experience. We are definitely looking forward to this, and as we
all know, this is a critically, critically important area for us and the
children of the United States right now.

So, again, thank you, and with that, Annie, let\'s start with you, if we
could.

MS. SALSICH: Okay. Especially thanks to the full committee for inviting
me here today.

As many of you know, and this is helpful for me. I didn\'t realize I was
the absolute first one. So I wasn\'t going to incorporate too much of a
summary of the criteria that states are using, but I will do that a
little bit more since this is the first presentation.

While the unsafe school choice option has received a fair share of media
attention, especially in its first year of implementation, which was
back in 2003 to 2004, nonetheless the mandate has received fairly little
formal analysis by academics and researchers and educators. And with
that as a backdrop, it\'s truly an honor to be here today to share with
all of you findings from Vera\'s 2004 qualitative study in which we
conducted a series of interviews with education officials and parents
and young people and practitioners and researchers to determine how
people in the field were responding and are responding to the unsafe
school choice legislation, and to then compare those responses to a
comprehensive review of the research literature on the issue of school
safety.

Now, our study, and I\'m not sure if this is right, what I\'m about to
say. I believe you have a copy of the report in your folder. You do.
Okay.

Now, the actual report though I have on a jump drive. So if it\'s okay
if we can make copies for the committee members, that would be great.
The actual text is fairly brief. The appendices are longer. So the text
shouldn\'t take too long to read.

The report that we drafted on our study you will have a copy of. The
most pertinent findings of that report are what I\'m going to talk about
this morning with all of you.

It\'s important for me to stress up front though before going any
further that as of yet the report has not been authorized for wider
distribution in the field. So what you will have in front of you is
essentially a confidential draft to keep to yourselves as much as
possible.

However, I do want to state here \-- I\'ll do my little pitch \-- that
it is our sincere hope that we will be able to distribute that to the
wider public and to the field of education fairly soon.

So let me give you a quick road map for the presentation. So ignore this
slide for just a moment. I\'ll just give you a sense of what you have in
store for you for this morning, of what I\'m going to talk about for
about 15 or 20 minutes.

And if someone wouldn\'t mind \-- I\'m sure you\'re doing this \-- but
I\'m getting close to the time, just remind me.

So the presentation will begin with a really brief overview of what our
research and policy questions were that sort of drove this study, what
we aim to answer in doing the qualitative analysis.

Then I\'ll describe briefly the methodology that we used to answer those
questions.

Next I will provide a brief snapshot of the state criteria that states
across the country have been using under the unsafe school choice
option, some of the differences and similarities in those criteria and
the number of schools that have been identified to date.

Following that, the remainder of the presentation will really focus on
what we found and what we heard in the field. Within that, one thing
I\'m particularly going to stress is an issue that we found fairly
remarkable, which was that there was widespread agreement both in the
field and in the research literature as to what constitutes an unsafe
school.

Now, note that I\'m not using \"persistently dangerous\" for a moment,
but what constitutes an unsafe school, and so we\'re going to talk about
that a little bit as well.

And finally, I\'ll wrap up the presentation by highlighting some
strategies that we at Vera, based on our analysis and our findings,
think states could begin to use to better identify and then respond to
schools that are struggling with safety.

Okay. So let\'s start with the research and policy questions. We, of
course, began our study with the very basic analysis of what have states
done. Under the unsafe school legislation, as I think of you know from
the briefing materials, states are required to identify schools that
are, quote, persistently dangerous, and to give students and the parents
within that school an option to transfer to a safe school in the same
district.

In addition, the unsafe school choice option, which I\'m not going to
talk about as much, also has a line in it that talks about even in
schools that aren\'t defined as persistently dangerous. If a child is a
victim of a serious crime, that child has an option of transferring as
well.

What I\'m focusing on more is the criteria of how states are defining
persistently dangerous schools, and persistently dangerous schools is
the language of the legislation. So that\'s the language I\'m going to
be using throughout most of this presentation.

Above and beyond just simply understanding what states have done and
what on paper their criteria are, we wanted to go into the field and
talk directly to people who work in schools on a daily basis or on the
issue of school safety, and hear directly from them what they think is
meant to be achieved by identifying persistently dangerous schools; what
in their experience and their expertise they think actually constitutes
an unsafe school, so for a moment stepping away from the language of the
legislation and talking about safety, not specifically persistently
dangerous; and finally, talking to them about what are some strategies
that states can begin to use to work within the framework of USCO in the
future.

And if anyone has questions because I didn\'t incorporate a lot of
detail about background of the legislation, feel free to ask. You might
have a lot of that in your briefing, but if it\'s not there, just chime
in.

So in order to begin to answer these questions, we conducted a total of
44 interviews with people who were intimately involved or had expertise
in the law\'s implementation where they were or across the country. The
interview pool is comprised of the seven constituency groups that you
see up here. So I\'m not going to go over all of them right now. You can
see them on the slide, and then you can see the breakdown of how many
representatives fell within each constituency group.

The respondents represented rural, suburban and urban jurisdictions from
17 states across the country. So we tried to get a fairly representative
sample of both the jurisdictions and levels of expertise and areas of
expertise.

In the report, which you all have a copy of, there\'s a much more
comprehensive explanation as to why we focused on these constituencies
and who we chose within the constituencies and why.

I mean, obviously 44 people, you have to be fairly discerning and
careful about who you\'re talking to, and so I\'m not going to go into
detail on that. But when you have the draft report, there is a page that
can give you a little bit more background on that.

To guide our interviews, we used a semi-structured interview protocol
that we tailored to a certain degree for each constituency. Now, it\'s
important to stress that it was semi-structured. We worked within
essentially what they call a grounded theory model, which is that we had
some questions that we wanted everyone to address, but we wanted to see
where the respondents took us. We wanted there to be open ended
questions so that we could begin to understand what were the real issues
that people saw within the unsafe school choice option.

Because of that and with the permission clearly from the people we were
interviewing, we taped and transcribed the interviews, and then we used
\-- and this may interest some of you. It may not for others, but just
from a data perspective \-- we used NUDIST, which is the name of a
hypertext qualitative data study software which helps researchers code
and pull meaning out of multiple interviews.

So by that way we were able to sort of see where people were falling
across interviews.

So as I stated, we began our study just by looking at what states had
done. Also, I should mention here, and again, you may be aware of this,
the study fell under a grant, unsolicited grant from the Office of Safe
and Drug Free Schools, and so when I said that it\'s not directly, we
gave the report to the OSDFS leadership, which was a great partnership.

So as a foundation of our study, we turned to see what states had done.
This is a very brief analysis here. There is a lot of things that you
can talk about in the different ways that states chose to use their
criteria, and in our report, as well, there\'s a long appendix that
actually pulls out state by state what states decided to do, and we can
get that to you as well, and that\'s for the first year of
implementation that we focused on, although it hasn\'t changed much.

So essentially, the key areas that states chose to look at and identify
in persistently dangerous schools were within two areas. So they either
picked one or did a combination of the two, which is that they looked at
incident reports of serious violent crimes and/or the disciplinary
outcomes that resulted from those incidents, meaning suspensions and
expulsions.

Also, in general, states tended to look at a minimum of two consecutive
years. Some states required three consecutive years. I don\'t think
there was any state that just called for one year for the criteria to be
met alone.

And so what you begin to see is that the criteria is fairly high, and
it\'s very much based on the rates of incidents that you would consider
the most serious in a school.

So the approaches were somewhat similar. However, the outcomes really
varied in how this played out. To a certain extent they varied. Most
states did not identify any persistently dangerous schools and have yet
to identify any persistently dangerous schools, and the years that I
have up here are for the first two years. The third year, the most
recent year, I actually don\'t have the full name of the states. I think
some changes have taken place. Sometimes schools have appeal systems. So
I didn\'t want to put that up here unless it is absolutely accurate. The
first two years though this is how it played out.

So essentially a school designated persistently dangerous in one state
may not have had that persistently dangerous label if they were in a
different state based on the varying criteria. States are left to
themselves to establish and design the criteria, and that\'s a really
important thing to mention here. There\'s no mandate as to how they go
about doing that.

So in 2003 and 2004, which was the first year of implementation, a total
of 47 schools in five states were designated persistently dangerous
schools. So I\'m not going to mention the numbers here. You have them in
front of you, but it was Oregon, New York, two in New York \-- I come
from New York, and that was a bit shocking, but don\'t put that on the
record \-- New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and Pennsylvania. So these were the
only states that were included here.

And for example, just to give you a sense of how the schools actually
played out, I mean, it was also interesting to see what these schools
looked like. In New York, for example, just because that\'s my area of
knowledge more than the other states, the two schools that were
identified were very small schools. One was a special education school.
Neither of these schools had been on the radar screen of the city, and
New York City does have an impact school list which are deemed sort of
the most high risk, dangerous schools. These two schools were not on
that list.

So I mean, it was just interesting to see how schools fell on these
lists.

In 2004 \-- I\'ve got to get going \-- so 2004 to 2005, a total of 41
schools in four states.

So what you begin to see is that the criteria that has been set is
fairly high, if not impossible, to meet by many states, and there has
been a concern about that.

So let\'s jump to the responses from the field. Through careful analysis
of our interviews, our basic findings suggest that while most people we
interviewed do believe that the intent of USCO, which I\'m going to call
it here, is well meaning; that the idea of giving every child an
opportunity to go to a safe school environment is something that we in
this country need to do.

However, every respondent that we spoke to expressed serious, serious
concerns about this legislation, and we\'ll begin with the first.

The wide majority of interview respondents pointed out that the language
of the legislation is incredibly stigmatizing for schools. To define and
identify a school as persistently dangerous can have huge social,
political, and economic ramifications that extend beyond the local
school.

Two, many respondents felt that this stigma was highlighted due to a
lack of resources that or levels of assistance that were included in the
USCO legislation.

Now, it\'s important to stress here that people weren\'t just saying
money. It is an unfunded mandate, but people were also saying that what
USCO doesn\'t provide is a level of support and assistance and advice as
to just strategic planning about what these schools can do if they are
identified as persistently dangerous.

Now, while USCO allows transfers, many people said that that wasn\'t
sufficient for them, that they would rather than have the youth who was
victimized transfer out of the school or the youth who chose to transfer
out of a dangerous school transfer out, they would prefer to see the
school changed and fixed and improved, and that\'s where the focus
should be.

Nothing in the legislation prevents this from happening, but many
respondents said that working under such a harsh label can be daunting
and overwhelming for schools, many of which are already working under
resourced and really need help knowing how to use their funding in the
most optimal and effective manner to create safe environments.

Third, people talked about the challenge of identifying unsafe schools
across a state, and what we\'re talking about here is data, which I know
is also your third area of focus at the Advisory Committee. People
express some real concerns, including state education officials and
local education officials about the reliability and consistency of
focusing only on incident reports and suspension and expulsion data,
with the understanding that suspension and expulsion data ranges widely
from district to district, even from school to school within a district.

One incident that results in a suspension in one school may not result
in the suspension in another school.

People also expressed concerns just about under reporting, and this was
not an attack on school officials. People said largely this is
unintentional because of poor training sometimes with a staff who are
reporting the crimes, but there is often a fear on the level of school
officials of getting bad publicity and being punished for reporting high
levels of incidents.

One other issue on here is that people were concerned that schools that
may report a high level of weapons incidents and weapons incidents here
can include possession, not use, that some of these schools may be
punished for actual prevention and intervention. So schools that
actually intervene and find weapons before they are used may look to be
more dangerous than those schools that actually never find the weapons.

Finally, I think the most important thing that we heard was over and
over again people said that this label of persistently dangerous has
spurred states to set a threshold that is so high that schools that are
genuinely struggling with safety issues are left untouched and virtually
unseen by the legislation.

And more precisely, that USCO has not advanced a national effort to
identify unsafe schools, an element, a task that everyone we spoke with
thought was incredibly important. so that here, again, is the
differentiation between persistently dangerous, a really loaded label
and term, and what people think still needs to happen, which is states
need to be helped in identifying unsafe schools.

So what I\'m going to do now, and I\'m going to do this fairly briefly
because I have three minutes Dave is telling me, and luckily I can give
you the report. So I can do this briefly and you can get more
information after.

So in light of these findings, we turned to our respondents and asked
them, well, what do you think constitutes an unsafe school. Officials
clearly felt that they needed help. States needed help on how to
identify these schools, and that was a need.

But how do we know what\'s an unsafe school and what isn\'t? And it was
amazing to see the level of agreement across officials, across
respondents and across the research literature, that there are key
factors that people in the field of education believe constitute an
unsafe school.

And what we were able to do with our qualitative analysis and with the
hypertext software is to really code and pull out five factors that seem
to be repeated the most, and you\'ll see them up on the screen here.

So every one we spoke to said that, of course you need to include an
analysis of serious violent crime without a doubt. No one said that that
should be included in a criteria to identify an unsafe school.

However, everyone stressed that you also need to look at school climate
factors, and this is something that, as most of you know, is really a
hot topic in the literature right now, and I have to say it was really
striking to hear that people out in the field absolutely agree, and they
see this in the schools every day in the schools that they work in.

And so they stress that in addition to looking at serious violence, you
must begin to look at and assess bullying, intimidation, and harassment
is one. Studies have shown, and we have citations in the report that
many students are more fearful of the consistent and often severe
bullying that occurs in schools than they are of the serious violent
incident occurring.

And, again, you can look at the citations in our report for that, and
many of the people that we spoke to who work in the field of school
safety on a daily basis stress that they see this all the time in
schools; that what leads up to a serious violent incident are often the
consistent, reoccurring episodes of consistent bullying and harassment
in schools.

The third element were disorder common areas, and for those of you who
work in schools who are on the committee, I mean, this is something that
everyone talked about, and from my work in working on school safety, I
definitely relate to this, which is that people said across the board if
you walk into a school and you see chaos, then that is not a good sign
for the level of safety and the level of positive school climate in the
school.

And they spoke specifically to a few areas. One, which I really want to
highlight, which may seem surprising, is that the majority of people we
spoke to talked about bathrooms. They talked about if you go into a
school and you talk to kids and the kids are afraid to go to the
bathrooms, that is a huge indication of a school that is not safe.

And I can\'t even stress here the repetition that we heard on this issue
around bathrooms. Other hot spots, hallways, stairwells, things like
that, really talking directly to students and hearing from them if they
feel safe or unsafe in areas of the school and if there is a sense of
order that they know will keep them safe in their school environment.

Next we have a lack of emotional connectedness to schools. Again, there
are research studies that point to this. In fact, there\'s one that I
think is worth mentioning by Russ Skiba. It found that students\' sense
of belonging had a greater influence on their perception of safety than
the incidence of serious violence.

So, for example, the survey statement most frequently associated with
perceptions of safety was, quote, I feel welcome when I am at school.

In our interview respondents corroborated this again and again.

Finally, inconsistent disciplinary practices. Very briefly what we\'re
talking about here is no sense of consistency in expectations, and
sometimes you get caught; sometimes you don\'t. That level of
disciplinary inconsistency was brought up again and again as an
indicator of a school that may be unsafe.

And keep in mind that all of these are in conjunction with serious
violent incidents.

So to wrap up, these are two strategies that we are sort of putting out
there in the field as possible ways that schools \-- and before I get
into this, I want to say that these come from an acknowledgement that
states are still required to comply with USCO, that that is not off the
table, and that they still need to work within the framework of the
legislation.

But also, an equal acknowledgement that states are not happy with the
way that they need to work under this legislation, and so what we tried
to do in the findings and in the strategies that we suggest is find a
way and propose a way that states can still work within the framework
and comply with the legislation, but identify and respond, most
importantly, to schools that are struggling with safety in the way that
they deem meaningful and in a way that truly resonates with what they
see as critical issues in schools.

So the two strategies that we propose, the first one is that states
should begin to use multiple data sources to do their school safety
assessments. One of the things that many respondents stressed is that
the anonymous use of school climate surveys are very critical in talking
about this. So, again, assessing directly from students and young people
and staff themselves about what they\'re feeling and what their
perception of safety is in a school is a way to level out and balance
what you\'re seeing in hard paper and sort of quantitative reports.

Specifically, there are many surveys. The Oregon Center uses one.
Hamilton Fish Institute has a great one. Vera has one. There are many
people that are developing these school climate surveys.

They essentially measure climate, perceptions of safety, levels of
respect, and sort of collaboration between school members and can
identify hot spots. Also, to help you figure out what a school can do to
respond to the issues of school safety.

The second strategy is to acknowledge that doing a school climate survey
across an entire state may be very well unrealistic, that it can be
expensive, that you have to deal with passive or active consents. You
know, there are issues that make this hard.

So the second suggestion is to do a watch list, working under the unsafe
school choice option and some states have already done this. What this
means is to identify schools that are struggling and showing signs of
poor climate, you know, unsafe environment similar to using the factors
that we describe, but rather than instantly identify them as
persistently dangerous, put them on a watch list and work with them, and
on those schools do school climate surveys so that you can begin to
better understand what\'s going on in the school.

So both know what it is that you\'re identifying and also know how to
help that school.

Indiana and Florida are two states that have been doing this. There are
many more states that have included this into their criteria, and we
think it\'s something that the federal government and state officials
can begin to look at as well.

So in quick conclusion, I just want to thank you for the time in
speaking here and sharing more importantly not just our findings, but
sharing the voices of the people that we spoke with. I think that\'s
really critical.

And please feel free if you have questions at the end of this to let me
know.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Annie, thank you very much. That was very, very
informative. We appreciate that.

We will be doing just that at the end. After we\'ve heard from all of
the panelists, then we\'ll have a dialogue back and forth of the
committee. So thank you.

Next we\'ll move to Peter Pochowski. Peter?

MR. BOND: He just stepped out of the room.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay. Next, as I said, we\'ll move on to Bill Bond.

(Laughter.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: And, Bill, thank you for being so very flexible.

As I indicated earlier, Bill also today is representing NASSP and has a
lot of personal experience.

So, Bill, if you would.

MR. BOND: Thank you.

I just want to piggyback on what she has started here and what her
research said. When we\'re looking at persistently dangerous schools, I
think about the kids who go to school every day and they\'re going to be
humiliated and intimidated and how they would define a persistently
dangerous school.

The way we\'re looking at it now, we\'re defining a persistently
dangerous school by strictly overt violent acts that we can identify,
the simplest of all criteria. But I think if we interview students, they
would identify a persistently dangerous school by their perception of
how they go to school.

Where you might have very few instances of a fight, where people are hut
with their fist, there are hundreds of thousands of kids that go to
school every day and are hurt by words.

In our business as educators, and I\'m a high school principal, we do a
great job if a kid pops another kid up beside the head. You\'re going to
see a certainty of consequences. Something is going to happen. There\'s
going to be almost 100 percent certainty of consequences.

And many people think you change behavior by how severe consequences
are. You don\'t change behavior by how severe consequences are. You
change behavior by how certain consequences are. They don\'t have to be
that severe. They have to be that certain.

And in the area of bullying or humiliation, the certainty of
consequences is very small, very small. So when we looking a
persistently dangerous schools, I think we need to follow up on what the
research has found and start to look at school climate and how kids are
treated at school and what happens.

And you think, well, you know, that kid is hit up beside the head. I can
tell you by personal experience of being hit up beside the head and
hitting people up beside the head and words, words. Words will cut you
to the heart, and they will do more damage than being hit up beside the
head. And the effect on that child will be longer lasting and be more
detrimental than if he were hit in the head.

So what I would like to see is in this legislation, in this situation,
where we would try to get at this issue of a persistently unfriendly
school, a persistently dangerous school to a child through the use of
school audits, climate surveys.

I think that I\'m not mandating a survey that we\'re going to turn into
the federal government, but I think in this legislation it would be easy
for each state to mandate that a school climate survey be conducted in
the school. The survey could be maintained at the school because it
would be for the use of administrators to make decisions.

I think that I wouldn\'t want to see a survey where the results had to
be sent to the state or you know I wouldn\'t want to see one sent up
here, but we could require a survey be done and the results to be kept
at the school, and if someone from the state wanted to come and look at
the survey, you know, they would have a right to go look at the issues
that were there.

And by doing a survey, school climate survey, school audit, something
along this line, we need to bring into the discussion how unsafe kids
feel because of simple acts, simple acts in school, and I believe that
when you become aware of the data of what\'s happening with kids,
principals, school administrators would take action.

But right now we\'re data driven, and if they don\'t have that data and
if everything we\'re doing is about kids being hit up beside the head,
well, then I think we\'re missing the point of what a persistently
dangerous school is to a student.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Bill. We appreciate that.

Next, Peter Pochowski. A reminder on the introduction that Peter is the
Executive Director of the National Association of Schools, Safety, and
Law Enforcement Officers.

Peter.

MR. POCHOWSKI: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for inviting us.
And I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to address the
concerns that we have about the persistently dangerous and the law in
itself.

I guess we have a case this morning here of bad news and good news. The
bad news is that Annie stole all my thunder, and the good news is that
for the Secretary and certainly for this committee, her and I have not
talked about these issues, hadn\'t met her until an hour ago, and you
can see that across the country, from Milwaukee to New York, to Denver,
California, and Florida, these are the same issues that we\'re seeing
and hearing from the field.

So as I represent my colleagues in MASSLEO and School Safety from across
the country, I think you\'ll hear a continuous theme from all of us.

The first problem that we see is the problem of the 60 percent/40
percent mandate. It seemed to be okay at first because we all know that
there\'s a direct link between drugs and safety, and even before these
most recent incidents, safety has become a much greater concern for us,
not that drugs have gone down, but the safety concerns have risen.

For example, just in Milwaukee we reduced 204 activities down to seven
because we want to be able to focus our energies on those that we
thought we\'d have a chance of succeeding, and a lot of that has to do
more with behavior modification, anger management, character building
because we believe that these are some of the root causes of the
problems.

But the greater need is for teacher safety program, for example, crime
prevention/intervention. We\'re finding that a lot of classroom teachers
certainly in the urban environments are not prepared coming out of
college for what they\'re about to address. The CPI Program, and this is
not an endorsement of any particular program, but it\'s a program like
this where they are taught how to handle these kinds of things that they
didn\'t see and they were not taught in college.

The classroom organization management program, the same thing again, not
an endorsement of any particular program, but teachers are taught to
teach. They\'re not taught how to manage their classroom and how to
manage that class clown. And we found that early on if these people are
trained on how to handle these, you don\'t develop a second or third
class clown.

And then the crisis planning. None of us can predict with any degree of
certainty when the next school shooting will happen. So we have to
prepare everybody to be ready for it, and of course, it has to start
with our teachers.

And I agree with the comments that have been made previously that
bullying is a greater concern for our students than it is for adults, it
seems. They have a different opinion of what\'s unsafe in their schools
than we do. We worry about metal detectors and shootings, and you ask
students about their concerns about safety, and it turns out to be
bullying.

The bathrooms was another big one, and that hallway light that seems to
be out a lot. It has very little to do with the guns. In fact, I\'ve
interviewed panels of kids from School A and School B, both of them that
have reputations as challenged areas of our city, and I\'d ask High
School A, do you feel safe? Yes, I do.

And any problems there?

Well, a few fights and everything else, but it seems to be a gang
bangers fighting each other. So I don\'t feel unsafe.

Well, would you ever transfer over to School B?

Oh, heavens no. That\'s a terrible school.

Now, you ask that same question of the students at School B, and
they\'re perfectly find with their schools, but they wouldn\'t transfer
over to School A either.

It\'s just the reputation and the media that get into this. You\'ll find
out the media is playing a bigger role than I think they should be.

The next issue is the problem of persistently dangerous schools. Again,
I have to agree with Annie that this is a stigma that\'s attached to
people, and it may be unnecessary, and it may be unfair. It does cause
an undue hardship to an already challenged principal. Principals of
today are different than the principals of maybe 20 years, certainly 30
or 40 years ago. When we stamp somebody with that term \"persistently
dangerous,\" the media jumps on that, and I get calls from around the
country and, quite frankly, from around the world, London, Japan, asking
about persistently dangerous schools.

I have a friend who has children in one of the East Coast schools that
was identified with having a significant number of persistently
dangerous schools, and her sister took her kids out of Philadelphia
schools because of that, and that\'s totally unfair. She was perfectly
happy with the schools, but the media made such an issue of that school
district, and quite frankly, I applaud that school district for being
honest and reporting and setting a standard and then maintaining that
standard.

I need to underscore the importance of what the media is doing to our
schools today, certainly in light of the incidents that have recently
happened. I\'ve talked to some of the members of the panel. We\'re
spending a lot of time lately addressing media issues for things that
five, six, seven weeks ago were third, fourth or fifth on my plate. I
was more concerned about bird flu issues this past summer than I was
concerned about Columbine issues, not that they ever go away, but it\'s
a constant shifting of our priority.

But the media, when they get this one, they jumped all over it, and I
haven\'t been able to do anything but work on these issues since then.

Another problem \-- well, I need to go back on the recommendations. I
think there\'s another way to do this. So we have schools, SciFi
schools, schools identified for improvement. We don\'t call them
persistently stupid schools. We call them schools that are identified
for improvement.

If we attach a stigma like \"persistently dangerous\" to a school, that
principal, like those of us in the school safety business, will spend an
inordinate amount of time defending and responding to that, and it takes
their eyes off the ball, and that is to educate our kids.

I think if we tone this term down a little bit, I think it would give
our principals a fighting chance to get done what we want them to get
done.

The other problem is the \-- this is a Department of Education, not just
a Department of Justice compliance problem. It really causes our
principals in some cases to under report. Certainly there\'s laws
requiring people to report crimes, but in a school it\'s not that clear
cut. If a kindergartner steals the milk money of another kindergartner,
then that is a school and a parent problem. But if that happens in high
school, then it\'s a law enforcement problem. And those are clear-cut
examples.

But what about in between. At what point is there a cutoff? At what
point does this become a crime?

And, quite frankly, all of us have jobs where we have to respond. We
have evaluations, but in this case they\'re the ones who make the
decisions in the school whether the police are reported or not, whether
the call is made or not, and if anybody thinks that this is exact and
that 100 percent of these crimes are being reported adequately, it\'s
naive.

I\'m not sure human nature being what it is that all of us would present
information that make us look bad like we\'re not controlling our
schools, and I think as I talk to my colleagues around the country, this
is a significant problem, the potential for under reporting.

I saw this when I first came out. I\'ve done as much as I can to work
with our principals in Milwaukee to talk about the importance of
persistently dangerous schools and how we worked to downplay that
stigma. We will understand internally what that is, but it does need to
be addressed, and I think that that can be changed.

We can eliminate the terms altogether. We could change the terms, and I
think it\'s important that we refocus our energies on the key player
here, and that\'s the principal because the single most important safety
factor in any school, the single most important safety factor in any
school is a principal, and it\'s a principal who is concerned about the
safety of that school.

It\'s not often that you will get a state to say this, that we have too
much flexibility, but the fact of the matter is I share the pain of my
colleagues in Philadelphia and Denver and Jacksonville, Nashville. We
all have the same problem, and the media will take incidents from one
city and then play it off the other cities, getting calls asking about
this particular city, \"Do you think that\'s right? How does Milwaukee
stand up to this?\"

And we\'re not sure that it\'s fair because the criteria being evaluated
is not the same. Football game scores are easy to measure. It\'s the
same ground rules, but it\'s not the persistently dangerous schools.

And the other concern, as Annie pointed out, some states will set the
bar so high, they\'ll set it so high that nobody will ever be declared
persistently dangerous. It circumvents what the law is intended to do,
and it circumvents what information is getting into the hands of our
parents, and I think that\'s a bigger crime.

My recommendation is that we mandate some criteria, some. Let\'s just
say, for example, you have five criteria in your state. If the federal
government mandated maybe two of those, you\'d have to include these two
criteria. It kind of minimizes the peaks and valleys of the reporting
process, and yet it gives the federal government that control that
they\'re still looking for in the reporting process.

And that ends my recommendations. I would like to say one thing. Even
before the recent events that have happened, cities across the country,
especially the urban environment, with the reduction in funding, COPS
Programs, et cetera, we\'re struggling to find ways to make our schools
safer. For example, in Milwaukee we tried to hire police officers,
Milwaukee police officers, to patrol outside our schools. We had a
number of incidents occurring after school. Our folks did a great job on
the inside. We had some trouble on the outside.

And when the police department could not give us the people, then we had
to take education dollars. The school board had to approve it. A
contentious fight over this, but we all agreed the bottom line is that
we needed those schools to be safe after school.

Now, we\'re looking at, because of incidents that have happened, that
we\'re even taking more money out of our educational dollars to make our
schools safer by adding police officers. Two separate entities in the
City of Milwaukee, we do not have a school police department. We have
the Milwaukee police and the Milwaukee Public Schools, and the service
is directly by assigning one squad card for each of our districts, and
we don\'t think that\'s enough, and yet the police department, number
one, doesn\'t have the money to add to their resources, and number two,
they don\'t have the police officers to add.

So we\'re putting money and looking at putting money into our budget
next year to see if we can\'t hire additional police officers through
the police department to help enhance our safety in schools.

Taking educational dollars for security in schools is not a step that we
enjoy doing. It\'s something that we regret, but we have to do it first.
In Milwaukee we have a very simple model, and that is \"education first,
safety always.\" And I believe that, and I think you for giving us the
opportunity to discuss this.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Peter, thank you very much. We appreciate your being here
and the information you shared.

Next we\'ll be moving to our final panelist on this panel, Jerry Barber,
and a reminder that Jerry is the Assistant Comptroller from the State of
New York.

Jerry.

MR. BARBER: Good morning.

Thank you, David.

On behalf of New York State Controller\'s Office and Controller Alan
Hevesi, I want to thank the Advisory Committee for the opportunity to
present our findings on an audit of school incidents, violent incidents
and disruptive incident reporting that was conducted about a year ago.
We hope that our report adds some transparency and accountability for
the important issues of the identification of persistently violent
schools and the unsafe school choice option.

Today I will only be able to give a high level overview of our audit
report, but it is available. It\'s a public report. It can be obtained
on the Web. You can take a look at the report. It has a lot of detail.
It is pretty data rich.

The agency, the State Education Department\'s response on behalf of all
the school districts in the State Education Department is appended to
the report. So you can see their position on the findings that we had.

I would like to say also that the Education Department was very
proactive and very receptive to the audit results. It was a pleasure
working with them.

At the same time that we released our audit report, they released their
own press conference release and their statements about what they were
going to do to rectify and address the situation. So it was a very
positive experience from that regard.

Another point I\'d like to make is that the audit basically relies on
criteria that are set forth in the law. In our case in New York State,
the SAVE Act became law in July 2000, and it mandated a uniform violent
incident reporting system be established statewide. It became effective
in the 2001-2002 year, and of course it\'s consistent with the No Child
Left Behind Act requirements for the identification of persistently
violent schools and the unsafe school choice option, my point being that
the auditors only audited what was set forth in the law, and that
pursuant regulations and policy, not to suggest that this is the best
model going forward, but it was the criteria that we had at our disposal
to audit against.

A bit of background. I\'ll hopefully make this brief. In New York State,
700 districts outside of New York City with 3,000 schools. Each of the
schools is responsible for filing an annual incident report which rolls
up to the district level, which then rolls up to the state education
department.

In New York City, it\'s a separate reporting mechanism through the New
York Police Department, and I believe there\'s \-- and the New York City
Department of Education oversees it, and there\'s like 11,000 school
buildings in New York City. Our audit focused only on those districts
and schools outside of New York City.

There\'s a separate audit being planned for the City of New York by the
City Controller.

The New York State Education Department summarizes all of the district
reports into a database, computes the violence index, and makes the
statistics public to the governor, to the legislature, to the Board of
Regents. So it\'s a fairly open and available system of information.

Just briefly, the objectives of the audit. What answers we have tried to
provide in doing this work, the schools properly report incidents. The
answer to that question based on, I think, a pretty comprehensive scope
of work was that there\'s a high risk that they are not accurately
reporting factors, quite frequent under reporting.

Does the Education Department accurately compile the data that obtains?
We believe that it was reasonably accurate, the data that was compiled.
There were some data conversions, data error correction problems, but by
and large the data itself, which was the basis for the school rankings
was accurate.

And are schools properly identified as persistently dangerous? There\'s
a high risk that that\'s not the case based on the widespread under
reporting. Again, I want to emphasize that we\'re only using the
criteria that was available to us, pursuant to the law and the
regulations. We audited against the state\'s own criteria. So there may
be other research or other program ways of approaching it. We did not
take that into account.

The scope of the audit. We looked at the entire incident reporting from
its roll-out in September \'01 through the end of our field work in
February \'06. Again, it was schools outside of New York City. We
essentially compared the SED database to the actual incident reports and
data that was on file at 15 school districts, including two large
cities, six small cities, six suburban and three rurals. So we think we
had a very good cross-section of schools. It covered 17 high schools in
total and three elementary schools.

And we focused on the 2003-2004 incident data because SED advised us
that the first two years of data had a higher likelihood of inaccuracy
because of problems in the initial roll-out of the system, lack of
understanding, training, other things that had to be accomplished.

So we went to what we thought was the first reliable year of data,
\'03-\'04, and we also did a phone survey with 35 districts to
understand their interpretations of the law and the requirements and to
get their input as well.

In the New York State violent incident reporting system, there are 17
different types of incidents they had to report. However, only the most
egregious of those go into the calculation of the violence index, and
basically those seven or eight that are included are factored with
enrollment to come up with a score. If your score is 25 or greater, you
are initially assigned the ranking of temporarily in a persistently
dangerous school classification.

If in a subsequent year your score stays at 25 or higher, you risk being
classified as persistently dangerous unless information can be provided
to the Education Department that would convince them to otherwise make
you not persistently dangerous.

In the reporting system there is different information that is provided
in supplemental information for weapons, violence involving weapons. The
system\'s name is the violent disruptive incident reporting system, also
known as VDIR. The reports are due to the Education Department October
31st annually based on the prior year\'s experience.

It\'s a hard copy reporting system, which in this day of technology was
a little bit hard to understand why this couldn\'t have been set up in a
systematic way for on-line reporting, data verification, et cetera. So
it was somewhat cumbersome and somewhat error prone.

Audit results come with a different perspective here. We found that the
system that was designed by New York State pursuant to the law and
regulations was very comprehensive. It was very rich in procedures and
instruction. It did what the law asked it to do.

The problem here was in our opinion the New York State Education
Department\'s oversight of the system was weak at best. In particular,
there seemed to be a lack of concern or a lack of attention to obvious
under reporting. When we went out and did our district audits, we found
in the 17 school districts that I believe it was ten of those school
districts had under reporting of at least 38 percent of their data, and
I think there was eight of them that had 50 percent under reporting.

And this wasn\'t all in the category of other disruptive incidents. It
also spanned into the more higher egregious categories of weapons
possessions and things of that nature. So it was across the board.

I should also say that there were several districts that did it very
well and had a very low error rate, and in some ways, you know, you get
penalized for that in some respects, but there were a few districts that
did very well, but the predominance of them didn\'t.

And the other major problem that we had was that it was kind of
interesting to note that when a school district was temporarily
identified as persistently violent in its subsequent year\'s reporting,
it was able to go back and amend its prior year\'s reporting, and it was
able to do so without documentation or verification by the State
Education Department.

So, in fact, a number of schools that were initially assigned
temporarily persistently dangerous status reversed to safe schools by
amending their prior year data, and that\'s not a problem that someone
corrects their errors by any means, but the point was from the audit\'s
perspective, there was no documentation submitted by the districts to
establish that, no verification performed by the State Education
Department, and as part of an overall problem that there is no
verification at all of what\'s happening in the incident reporting
mechanisms.

So those were problems and it led us to conclude that compliance with
reporting requirements was poor. In fact, there were 15 superintendents
in one county alone that refused to sign their certifications, and that
created quite a bit of controversy in Albany as to whether these matters
should be brought to the attention of school boards or whether there
should be amendments to the law that would create a penalty or a
potential loss of license by a superintendent who failed, but would not
refuse, in fact, to certify their data.

This next table, this is one of the more egregious schools of under
reporting. I won\'t go through it line by line, but as you can see, the
under reporting spans the various categories including some of the more
egregious ones, and this is presented in order of the most egregious
categories.

And the bottom line for this particular school, 144 incidents were
reported for the 2003-4 year to the State Education Department, and our
review of records at the school district, as well as police reports; we
also went to police precincts in this case to gather data; identified
924 reportable incidents. And wherever we had problems in making our
determinations, as I mentioned here, there\'s a lot of confusion about
these penal law definitions that were used in New York State, a lot of
room for interpretation.

We relied on the Education Department to help us make interpretations.
So this was not the case of the auditors who were not program people
making these classifications alone, these determinations alone. We tried
to be very fair about that.

And we talked about this issue that schools would be persistently or
tentatively labeled persistently dangerous and then would get their
status revoked in a subsequent year by amending prior year data. There
was also some instance where the schools all of a sudden in year two had
indices that were below the 25, which was kind of remarkable, and we
thought that should have been verified.

There were also some schools that were able to convince the State
Education Department that they had made progress in their violent
incidents, but had still not hit the violence index threshold of 25, and
a couple of those schools were able to avoid persistently dangerous.

So at the end of the synopsis, I think we looked at the 2003-2004,
2004-2005 years. Twenty-one schools were on the bubble that could have
been labeled as such. Four remained on the list when all was said and
done, and we think that there should have been a lot more work to verify
that information.

As auditors we try to always get to what is the cause of the problem,
and in this case, you know, there was obvious causes of training that
was given late in the process, confusion about penal code definitions, a
lack of verification in monitoring of information, but at some point you
have to ask yourself is this a case of mistakes or deliberate under
reporting or both.

And probably, although the audit report can\'t exactly say that,
there\'s room to believe that there\'s a little of both going on here.

We\'ve already talked about the problems. We need more aggressive
oversight by the Education Department. We need better procedures for
data verification. We need effective and consistent training.

A program was rolled out in \'01-\'02. Full fledged training didn\'t
occur until much later. Districts reported to us that the training was
given inconsistently throughout the state. No records were kept to
assure that the right people were at the training. The whole training
issue needs to be addressed in a more comprehensive basis.

And as part of the process, again, verification of reported numbers,
some routine auditing of all the numbers, some specialized reporting
whenever the numbers are amended, along with documentation.

It\'s also an opportunity if we had a good automated system to begin to
apply analytical review procedures to the data to look for anomalies, to
look for high risk districts, begin to pattern information for targeting
limited audit resources.

And finally, it can\'t be under emphasized, the need for better training
for district officials. We made 12 recommendations. The State Education
Department was in complete agreement with the recommendations, was very
responsive, and began follow-up immediately and began to relook at the
classification of persistently dangerous schools.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to provide the overview of the
audit.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Jerry.

If I could now ask the other committee members to please come up. Annie,
Bill, and Peter, if you could come up, we\'ll now enter into a dialogue
with the committee and give them an opportunity to ask questions, and
hear some answers from experts.

As we do that, we\'ve heard all about you and we know you. I would like
to take this opportunity to briefly introduce the committee members and
have them introduced to you so that you know who is here and where they
are from and who they represent.

Let\'s if I could start with Deborah Price to my right.

MS. PRICE: I\'m Deborah Price, and I\'m the Assistant Deputy Secretary
for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

MR. LEDBETTER: I\'m Tommy Ledbetter, principal at Buckhorn High School
in New Market, Alabama.

MS. SOLBERG: I\'m Mary Ann Solberg, the Deputy Director of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy.

MS. SIMS: I\'m Belinda Sims. I work at the Division of Epidemiology
Services and Prevention Research at National Institute on Drug Abuse.

MR. JONES: I\'m Russell Jones. I\'m a professor of psychology at
Virginia Tech University. I\'m a disaster and trauma expert.

MS. KEYS: I\'m Susan Keys. I\'m the Branch Chief for Prevention
Initiatives in PRIOR E (phonetic) Program at the Center for Mental
Health Services at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration.

MR. WECHSLER: Howell Wechsler. I\'m with the United States Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. I\'m the Director of the Division of
Adolescent and School Health.

MS. SHIRLEY: Mariela Shirley from the Division of Epidemiology at
Prevention Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism representing Ralph Hingson, our Division Director.

MR. HERRMANN: I\'m Mike Herrmann, Executive Director of the Office of
School Safety and Learning Support for the Tennessee Department of
Education.

MR. JACKSON: My name is Montean Jackson, Coordinator of Safe and Drug
Free Schools, Fairbanks, Alaska.

MR. KELLAM: I\'m Shep Kellam. I\'m a researcher and do research and
prevention in schools, work for the American Institutes of Research, and
prior to that was professor at the School of Public Health at Hopkins.

MS. DUDE: Hello. My name is Kim Dude, and I\'m the Director of the
Wellness Resource Center at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and
I think I kind of represent higher education here.

MR. PIMENTEL: I\'m Michael Pimentel. I\'m the Chief of Police for the
San Antonio Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas.

Ms. Taft. My name is Hope Taft. I\'m First Lady of Ohio. I\'m co-chair
of the Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free. I\'m a certified
prevention consultant and been involved in alcohol and drug prevention
and community coalitions since 1986.

MR. NORMAN: I\'m Seth Norman. I\'m a criminal court judge our of
Nashville, Tennessee. I also operate a 100-bed residential treatment
facility for nonviolent felony offenders.

MR. ROMERO: Good morning. My name is Dennis Romero. I am the Acting
Director for the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the Substance
Abuse Mental Health Services Administration.

Thank you.

MR. ELLIS: My name is Fred Ellis. I\'m the Director of the Office of
Safety and Security at the Fairfax County Public Schools, Fairfax,
Virginia.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And my name is Dave Long, and I\'m the County
Superintendent of Schools from Riverside County, California.

Again, thank you all for being here, and we would now, as I have
indicated, like to enter into a question and answer and a discussion
phase.

So I would entertain any questions from the committee, and we will
attempt to keep those in order, meaning one, two, three.

MR. ROMERO: Good morning. This question is for Annie.

In your report under the factors that constitute an unsafe school, you
provided a list of approximately five items. I noticed that under the
second item, which was bullying, intimidation and harassment. Was there
any feedback from the surveys and the research that was done on the
issue of gangs as well, one.

And then the other part of the question is although everyone \--
actually Peter and Annie both alluded to the issue of violence and, more
specifically, you were the only two that sort of alluded to trauma,
although no one said the word \"trauma.\" And I am wondering. That\'s
also an area that we need to be mindful of because of its repetitive
nature and the unhealthy way in which it gets acted out later.

MS. SALSICH: Sure. Interestingly, the issue of gangs did not come up
explicitly in the interviews that we did with people, and I say
\"interestingly\" because I think that there is a lot of media attention
and various attention on gangs, and not to say that it is not an issue.
It is, but when we spoke to people, including young people, and two of
the young people we spoke with come from New York City high schools and
larger schools. I think that there\'s a possibility that implicitly in
what they were talking about that may be an issue, but they were really
focusing on sort of the daily context of feeling uneasy or feeling
scared in school.

Now, whether or not that comes from gang involvement or gang presence in
schools, that may be the case, but they did not explicitly bring that
up.

MR. POCHOWSKI: And I would add that, again, to underscore what she said,
her notes are like she got my notes before we started \--

(Laughter.)

MR. POCHOWSKI: \-- gangs are a problem, but it\'s not as exciting a
problem as the press would and the media would like it to be. In
Milwaukee, again, it\'s not to say there\' not a gang problem because I
can see people saying, \"Oh, my God, you should be in my city where we
have a gang problem,\" but it does not rise to the level that the media,
MTV and whatever, makes it out to be.

But in Milwaukee we\'re introducing a new program. It\'s a prevention,
and this is a word that\'s foreign to some people in this business, is
prevention because if we are not proactive today, we will be reactive
forever. We want to prevent kids from getting into gangs early on, and
we need to put some money and some resources, giving our parents and our
teachers when they start to identify kids who are exhibiting those
behaviors, wearing colors or they\'re wearing their hat to the left or
right or doodling and drawing gang symbols; we need to intervene early
on.

It is so expensive and so difficult to get them out of gangs. So we need
to spend our time and energies on the front side.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Excuse me. Howell and then Russell, and then Den.

MR. WECHSLER: The first two speakers spoke of the importance of
conducting student surveys and their perceptions of the climate of the
schools. I just wanted to ask Peter whether he thought that safety
officers would agree that that\'s an important mechanism for classifying
schools as acceptable or unacceptable.

MR. POCHOWSKI: I think what was mentioned here is that it should be a
part of that evaluation, a broader criteria. If the kids \-- and, again,
I go back to this interview I had with kids. Now I\'m perfectly fine,
yeah, a little bit of this or that, but they don\'t see it the same way
we do.

But what they see and what their parents see needs to be considered when
we put this criteria together. In fact, it may be the most important
criteria because we\'re customer oriented. These are our customers, and
today as the educational dollar, we\'re fighting more and more to get
that student into our school.

When something like persistently dangerous is tagged onto that school,
no parent wants to send their child there, and it takes a long, long
time for us to undo the damage of that.

MR. JONES: Yes. I guess this is to the panel maybe more of a comment
than a question, but to follow up on Dennis\' earlier question about
trauma, I\'m wondering the extent to which that question or questions
related to trauma were asked in the various surveys that were conducted.

I think the reason that\'s relevant is because we know trauma is
universal and we know that trauma drives many of the behaviors that are
being targeted here.

MS. SALSICH: If I could take a stab at that first, again, it wasn\'t in
the interview protocol that you\'ll see in our report. It wasn\'t a
direct question, but one of the youth that we interviewed and he gave
consent to, you know, have his name and jurisdiction mentioned came from
Springfield where there was a shooting, I think, back in \'98. I\'m
forgetting the exact date.

And so he was in the school. He was a victim of the shooting, but
survived, and so I guess to speak about that, it was interesting to talk
to him. You know, clearly, he had experienced a traumatic experience
within an environment that he thought was safe, and he was very
assertive in saying that he didn\'t think the school was an unsafe
school, you know, even after everything that happened. I think that he
was reflecting on \-- he was saying it was a random act, that there were
signs that should have been picked up, but he even after that did not
see the school as an environment that was unsafe and actually fought
against having metal detectors in the school.

So just as one, that\'s a very specific example. I mean I think you\'re
probably speaking more largely about the volume of trauma that can be
experienced in schools even without a shooting or a serious incident,
but that is an example that we found interesting.

MR. JONES: Yeah, and I guess a very important point is the fact that we
often focus on one trauma, a school shooting. The media, of course, runs
with these kinds of stories, but I think what\'s really essential is the
importance of looking at trauma and just the role of trauma.

I\'m a consultant, in fact, from SAMHSA. To look at the impact of
Katrina on children, for example, and in my numerous visits there, many
people responded that, yes, Katrina, but we lived Katrina 24-7 because
of the trauma, because of the state of affairs in that part of the
country.

So, again, I\'m just highlighting the need to look at trauma and to
actually ask for it on various questionnaires. We know, for example
following 911, 64 percent of a group of adolescents reported that they
had had an incident that would qualify for a criterion one post
traumatic stress event.

So, again, just the importance of the role of trauma when looking at
these schools.

MS. PRICE: Jerry, in fact, your slide is still up. You mentioned the 12
recommendations that you had. I\'m not going to quiz you and make you
list all of them, but can you give us the nutshell of that or maybe give
us follow-up with getting us \-- I\'d be curious to see your
recommendations.

MR. BARBER: Well, actually I have the report right with me. So I can
just give you the highlights, I guess. Just bear with me for a second.

MS. PRICE: Sure.

MR. BARBER: Make site visits to the school routinely based on risk to
determine, you know, which schools ought to be targeted for data
verification.

There was particular recommendations to the schools where we found under
reporting, you know, go back to those schools. You have to do something
there. You have to recalculate and make sure that the persistently
dangerous designation was correct in those instances where you reversed
it.

We talked about streamlining the incident reporting system to make it
more user friendly. It was very cumbersome and prone to error.

Had to remind schools that they had to retain their documentation in
accordance with the law because in some cases documentation was missing.
I think there was a six-year requirement that the data be maintained.

Do a comprehensive review of all the policies and procedures and
material that have been put together, advising the districts on the
subject matter, and eliminate inconsistency. Streamline it clarifying
matters, and follow up with necessary training, and provide a uniform
training program in instant reporting and mandate attendance at the
program, and offer the program early enough in the reporting cycle to
allow timely implementation.

So it was very much process oriented in a lot of cases.

And require districts to affirm their annual incident report that they
have given parents a choice of a different school when their children
are victims of violent crimes.

Automate the process, and I think most of the recommendations are in
that rubric.

MS. PRICE: Thank you. That\'s helpful.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Jerry, would it be possible to get that list, that sheet
to Catherine? Perhaps she could get that to us.

Thank you.

Now I\'ve got and I\'ll try to keep it in order, Shep, Fred, Tommy \--
let\'s see. I\'m trying to keep it. Shep, if you\'ll go ahead, I\'ll try
to keep the order.

MR. KELLAM: I have to own up I\'m a public health psychiatrist, and so
we do a lot of randomized field trials in schools, particularly in
partnership with Baltimore City Public Schools. I think that this is a
really fundamentally important panel.

I want to add a fifth dimension. It\'s almost as if \-- and pick up on
some stuff that you guys have been talking about. Peter alluded to a
kind of developmental picture in this. You train teachers and parents
early on how to manage classrooms.

There\'s a whole body of research that tells us that the problem, the
kids who are at the highest risk of the problems we\'re talking about
are identifiable early on in first grade and probably earlier if we had
a chance to get at how they\'re adapting to the role of student. About
let\'s say somewhere between 25, 15 to 25 percent of the kids entering
first grade, for example, in Baltimore are at high risk of doing the
kind of behavior we\'re talking about.

In a sense, without proper training of teachers, these kids create the
school climate. They, in fact, are the ones that Bill talks about who
are humiliating, insulting, bullying, and occasionally do very terrible
things, not necessarily the kids who may haul out a gun and
indiscriminately shoot six kids out of some kind of more distant
indifferent kind of mental illness phenomenon or some other kind of
situation, but basically the problem we\'re talking about can only be
thought about if we think developmentally.

Kids don\'t show up in high school or are easily manageable if you
don\'t, in fact, recognize that these kids were kids who didn\'t learn
to read in first grade and nobody socialized into the role of student.
There\'s an enormous amount of research data suggesting that the problem
really has to be dealt with early on, not that you don\'t need to
respond to high school, but that you had better start with kindergarten
and first grade because that\'s where the experience and success and
failure really tracks kids into whether they, in fact, go to the college
preparatory courses or whether they go into the trouble in the halls
curriculum.

So I think that that\'s an important dimension for us to think about.
And our own data, and there\'s plenty of data on this, this 15 or 20
percent of kids and 25 percent, if they go into a poorly managed first
grade classroom, the risk of those kids by middle school being highly
aggressive and disruptive is up to 59 times the average kid, up to 59
times.

If the same kid goes into a well managed first grade classroom, the risk
is something like 2.7 times the average kid. That\'s the impact of
teachers having tools.

What\'s the prevalence epidemiologically speaking? About 50 percent of
teachers and not being able to manage their classroom, largely new
teachers, but not necessarily.

The other 50 percent do fairly well even without some special programs
in classroom behavior and management. Read classroom behavior and
management as helping kids to learn how to be students. It\'s not
necessarily economic and class driven. It happens from families that
don\'t prepare kids well of all types and kinds.

So we have to think developmentally. We have to think about giving
teachers and parents tools early on.

And, by the way, the same risk factors that produce school failure also
produce aggression disruption, and they produce drug abuse, and it is
preventable. You can, in fact, intervene early on and show the impact on
the kids who experience well managed and good socialization experience
early on and who do learn to read and learn how to behave as students,
that they are, in fact, markedly reduced in the prevalence of later drug
abuse problems.

So I think that we\'re in need of enriching the framework that you guys
laid out in terms of core foundation. There\'s no question about school
climate being important and early intervention being key.

MR. POCHOWSKI: If I could comment on it, we\'re finding that the
programs that we\'re having the most success with are getting younger.
For example, years ago the DARE program was seventh and eighth grade.
Our officers are coming back saying it\'s too late. They already have
their minds made up.

Then you have to take that tray of square ice cubes, melt it down, and
then put them into the round ice cube tray to refreeze in the direction
you want them to go.

Our gang intelligence unit is directing all of that at our fifth, sixth,
and seventh grade parents and teachers because I agree with you 100
percent, Mr. Kellam. We have to get earlier to have any influence at all
on these kids.

MR. KELLAM: By the way, the predictive power from first grade into age
40 or so doesn\'t really diminish. If you take teachers\' ratings of how
well kids are adapting at being students in the fall of first grade, you
can really identify kids who are going to be in trouble if you don\'t
pay attention to helping them socialize into the role.

I mean, we\'ve got follow-up studies into age 40 of cohorts of kids, the
Woodlawn studies that I was intimately involved in. They have been
followed up into the age 40s, whole cohort of 1966 first graders.

So these tracks begin early on, and you\'ve got to intervene early on,
kindergarten, first grade, second grade. That\'s where they experience
the success and failure, is really moving kids into the course of their
lives.

MR. BOND: Having said all of that, you know that this legislation,
persistently dangerous schools, is basically just a political situation
and it\'s directed towards high schools, and it affected only 41 schools
in the entire United States.

So what I was talking about is very similar to what you\'re talking
about, to use this legislation to be more proactive, to let principals
gather data on these issues early on, and to use the funds and to use
the big stick that you have, and that\'s what you have; you\'ve just got
a big stick, and to get them to do the surveys and get the data.

Because only after they gather the data about students being humiliated
in their schools and so forth like that can they become aware of what
issues they have. Right now there\'s not a push for them to use that
kind of data because there\'s no mandates to do it, and if you wanted to
identify persistently dangerous schools, people in the business, we all
know you could take their reading scores and predict that more
accurately than you could with all this data that you\'re using.

You know, reading scores predict dangerous schools more than the data
that you\'re collecting.

CHAIRMAN LONG: If we could.

MS. SALSICH: Very quickly, just to highlight also and back up, this
comment is that what becomes so difficult when working within high
schools is this notion that there\'s just no hope for these kids. These
kids, you know, the language can be manipulated to say, well, these kids
were like this back in first grade, and now, you know, you see that all
the time in high schools.

And so to really combat that and to say this is a failure of the system,
not of these kids who are 18 years old and in ninth grade, you know, all
of that, that this is something that we as a system need to be held
accountable for.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay. Again as I turn to Fred, I want to check the order
and make sure that I have some semblance here of correctness. Fred,
Tommy, Susan, Russell, Seth.

Did I miss anyone as we get that far?

Okay. Fred.

MR. ELLIS: I don\'t think there\'s much debate about the intent of the
legislation in that I think all legislation starts out with good intent,
and then it recognizes that education can\'t take place in an
environment that\'s disruptive and disorderly and disruptive of the
whole educational process.

And I also think that the intent of the legislation is to force schools
to share data on violent incidents, that culturally, historically they
have \-- I think there is a perception that the education community has
had a rather paternalistic view of discipline data and crime data, and
also to give parents options to get their kids into a safe environment
and ultimately force schools to spend time and effort on safety and
security issues, just as they\'ve spent time and effort on academically
challenged schools.

And I think that that intent is good. I think the one point everyone
makes and I think is a really good one in terms of the labeling being
very harsh, and I think that\'s probably the easiest piece to look at in
terms of this legislation, in terms of the persistently dangerous being
a term that is probably inappropriate and unnecessarily harsh and causes
a lot of unintended consequences.

And I think the other point that\'s well made is the issue of the
culture and climate of the school, but I think here\'s where we run into
a challenge, and I\'d like to hear from the panel, whoever you think is
appropriate.

Two questions. One, how do you measure it? I know there are a lot of
surveys and audit forms and those kinds of things, but in terms of if
you want to include a measurement of culture and climate of a school,
how do you suggest the federal government intercede in that when we
can\'t even get the states to agree on crime data to report from
schools? How are we going to get them to agree on a measurement of
culture and climate, and then set a bar, set a standard, an actionable
standard parameter?

You know, is it 70 percent based on this instrument, blah, blah, blah,
that, you know, Shep develops? You know, I\'m not sure. How do we get
that?

What would that look like I guess is my question, and then also getting
back to a comment Mr. Bond made, I think your comment was that you had
suggested that this climate survey data be kept at the school and not
shared with the state or, God forbid, the federal government.

I kind of would like you to maybe elaborate a little bit on that because
I think that\'s the kind of comment that drives some of the parents\'
concerns and certainly at the federal level.

MR. BOND: The data on school climate that would be collected would be
used to motivate the principals and the staff to make changes. If you
are looking for an accountability system and you want to have a certain
number and you want an accountability system for the state and the
federal government, then so be it. Have an accountability system, but
you can either say our priority is for change and improvement or our
priority is for accountability, but you\'re going to have a hard time
achieving both.

And the reason I suggested that it not be something you mandate that you
send in is because we\'re going to get back in that scenario of how the
test was given, how it was used, and so forth like that.

The survey is simply to give the school administrators the data they
need to use to make changes and to mandate that that data be collected.
I trust the administrators of schools to, if they have data, to follow
through with that, you know. I trust them to do that, and I don\'t see
that we have to have a high accountability system at the federal
government.

But if you want to have a high accountability system, then you lose the
effectiveness of the program, but you can still \-- then you can have
your high accountability, but you right now have an example of a useless
program. You know, you can look. You have high accountability. You have
accountability, but you have completely an ineffective program.

You know yourself 41 schools in the whole United States were affected.
What are we wasting our time talking about it for? You know, you can
keep this legislation there, and it has got high accountability, but
it\'s absolutely meaningless.

And when I suggested surveys, what I suggest is that each state like,
for example, at Mike\'s state in Tennessee, they pick a state survey and
mandate the schools do that. If Mike wants to go do an audit of that
school, he would have access to that survey, but the survey information
could be kept at each school.

But if someone in the State Department at Nashville wanted to go look at
that data at any time, it would have to be made available, but the
important thing about the data is to have it at school in order to
generate change and for people to become aware that they have an issue.

MR. ELLIS: Some would suggest that the important piece is that the data
be available to parents. Is that envisioned in your scenario?

MR. BOND: I think that if parents wanted it, it should be available.
Parents should know that\'s available. That\'s an easy situation to do.

The idea though that you are collecting a school climate survey even at
the state level or at the federal level will make it a useless survey as
opposed to an effective survey.

But if the parents want the data, that should be readily available. That
should be data that\'s readily available. In fact, you could mandate
that that even be made available to any parent at any time they want to
see it.

On the thing of school choice and so forth like that, there\'s a
misconception, I think, of the people of how parents choose a school.
Russell was talking about trauma a while ago. In 1997, I had three kids
killed and five students shot at a school. The school had 486 students.

Three years later, because of school choice, we had 639 students. The
reason parents chose to send their students there was because of the way
they were treated by the staff and by other students, the school
climate, not that a terrible trauma had been there.

It was the only school in the district that increased in enrollment, and
we had been the one who had had the terrible trauma.

To parents and students, a persistently dangerous school is one where
they\'re humiliated and they don\'t feel comfortable and that they are
not learning at high levels. You don\'t learn at high levels when
you\'re humiliated.

MR. POCHOWSKI: Can I add in June of this year I gave an award in
Milwaukee to one of our middle schools for the safe school environment
that was in that school. This was a very active principal. Teachers were
always in the doorways doing what teachers and adults should be doing in
a school, and then six weeks later we added up all of the statistical
data and found out that they were on the edge of a persistently
dangerous school.

I think what Bill is saying has a lot to say about that. The people love
this principal. She\'s aggressive, hands on, completely above board and
honest in reporting everything, and I would submit to you today that if
Tony LaRussa and Mr. Layland were maybe during the seventh inning
stretch given authorization to control the score board, they might not
slip a number in there, just human nature being what it is.

But I think more of the leadership of the principal needs to be the
focus of where we\'re going as opposed to the numbering and reporting
the data because it really is a true review or reflection of what\'s
going on in that school.

MS. SALSICH: I just want to respond quickly to the survey question as
well because you\'re absolutely right. It\'s really challenging to talk
about how do you validate a survey across a state, how is it measurable
from one state to another, and I have no easy response.

But I do want to point out Florida is a really powerful example, and I
think Lorraine Allen presented at your last meeting about the grants,
but she and her staff have been working really hard to have this tiered
approach to the USCO analysis where they do it on data, and then they
are developing a validated instrument to use across the state.

Validated means that you know what you\'re testing in one school is the
same as what you\'re testing in another school, and that that would be
used as the second tier and that they do have a threshold that they are
proposing as a state.

Now, it\'s not that there\'s any direct threshold that has to be used,
but I think it\'s the preliminary model that could be really interesting
to track and see what happens with that.

So just to answer, it is challenging, but I think there is a way to do
it.

CHAIRMAN LONG: If we could then move to Tommy, Susan, Russell and Seth.

MR. LEDBETTER: We\'ve had a good discussion, I think, but I guess I\'m
still trying to get a handle or grasp what the problem is. In our
previous meeting, we were dealing with a different subject with the
state grants. Today we\'re talking about persistently dangerous schools.

Well, when I go back, I keep hearing some of the same things in your
presentations, and I want to make sure that I\'m not misrepresenting
what you\'re saying.

Annie didn\'t say it, but there was a reference there about the rates of
suspensions and expulsions resulting from serious or violent crimes;
that from one state to another those things, it was almost like they
could be manipulated a little bit.

As a high school principal, I know that if I\'m being criticized for the
number of expulsions or the number of suspensions I have, the next year
those numbers are down. Okay? So I understand what you\'re saying.

But that doesn\'t mean that we have turned our back on incidences of
violent crimes or problems.

But, Jerry, you made reference to one of your objections in here says
the schools properly report instances. I\'m wondering here are we saying
that schools are deliberately misrepresenting those things?

Because one of you, and I went back through my notes and I couldn\'t
find who it was, made reference to the fact \-- and, Annie, I think it
was you \-- that one of the strengths of this legislation in the
beginning, I believe, was the fact that the states had control, had so
much control of it, that the states could set the criteria and so forth.

Well, listening to this panel today, I get the impression that that\'s a
fault of the whole thing because, Peter, you made reference to the fact
that you felt like that at least two out of the five indicators should
come from the federal government, if I understood you correctly.

MR. POCHOWSKI: Yes.

MR. LEDBETTER: That there\'s so much leeway in the interpretation from
state to state. Is that the problem that we\'ve got? Because now I hate
to think that the principals who are out there in the schools are
intentionally manipulating the data. I hate to think that. That may be
the case, but I hate to think that because, you know, I\'m one of them.

And I know that in the State of Alabama all of our instant reports go
into the computer. they all go straight to Montgomery. The state has
them. So it\'s very difficult for us to manipulate all of that data. It
comes back to us at the end of the year from the state.

But from state to state everything seems to be different, and I\'m
wondering is that the biggest problem that we have dealing here because
the definition of an unsafe school or a persistently dangerous school is
different from one state to another.

And some of the data I had made a note. Annie, I was going to ask you. I
think you were the one who identified the number of schools, but you had
a listing of the number of schools that from one year to the next \--
and some of those schools you said would not have been identified as
persistently dangerous if they had been in another state where the
standards were much higher than they were in the state where they are
at.

MS. SALSICH: Yeah, and I didn\'t do an actual analysis of that to run
the criteria on states, but I think that what we heard from our
respondents is that they were very skeptical as to whether, you know, if
they could take the criteria from one state and lay it on top of another
state, you know, what would have happened.

But one thing I want to respond directly to, this notion of what is the
problem. Is it that there\'s so much flexibility? Should there be less?
Should there be more?

When we spoke to people there was such controversy about this. There
were some people who felt that, you know, if you\'re going to mandate us
to do something, just tell us what it is. Just tell us what it is that
we\'re supposed to be looking at, which would, you know, fall on the
side of give us more parameters to work within.

And then many other people felt that, no, the real issue here is that
there should be state flexibility, but there should be more guidance of
how do we go about doing this. So even if you\'re not mandating us as
states as to what we absolutely need to look at, help us try to find the
parameters for ourselves because I think a lot of people that we spoke
to felt that there was just no guidance as to how on earth do you go
about identifying persistently dangerous schools.

So to answer the question, we from our findings did not come out on the
side of that because we wanted to list to the voices that we
interviewed, and they were conflicting. People felt differently about
that issue.

MR. LEDBETTER: Well, I guess my question to any of you is this. This is
federal legislation. Can we fix this federal legislation by giving
specific definitions to the terms?

MS. SALSICH: I don\'t think so, but how do other people feel?

MR. POCHOWSKI: Well, we have made a lot of changes to our constitution,
and it\'s a pretty good document, too. I think this legislation, as Fred
said earlier, the intention was good, and I think with some tweaking \--
will it ever be perfect? No, because we\'re talking about as long as
we\'re recruiting principals from the human race, we\'re going to have
people who are going to try to do the right thing, and I really believe
I\'ve never met a principal who went into the school that day to try to
just modify the figures to make themselves look good.

They went in there to teach kids and administer and in a very tough
environment today. It\'s different than it was a few years back.

But I think that in the absence of respect, there\'s an old Chinese
proverb that I actually made up \--

(Laughter.)

MR. POCHOWSKI: \-- that in the absence of respect fear will do nicely.
We have principals who really want to do right. They want to report the
right stuff, but they don\'t know what the right stuff is.

I was part of a committee to recommend these things, and the principals
are not understanding state law, didn\'t know what a crime was, thought
that stealing the milk money was just stealing milk money. It\'s just
handled here.

But at what point does that become a crime? Some of the information that
was put on the slide from the survey showed an under reporting school. I
didn\'t look at the numbers all on one side. It showed a whole lot of
numbers on the right side, actual numbers versus what the principal
reported.

But I looked at a couple of numbers that she reported or he reported
that weren\'t reported over here. So it showed me that that person was
trying to report some of these things.

So there\'s an educational part of this that needs to be handled so that
they clearly understand what the law is. The criteria that we used, for
example, in Wisconsin has a lot to do with the state law. They don\'t
understand state law. They\'re educators. They want to educate kids.

We have to work together to give them the information, the tools that
they can use to make and report this stuff accurately. There will always
be some faction of us. None of us like to admit it, but the fact is
there will always be a faction who will want to under report to make
themselves look good, and we\'ll have to deal with that through spot
checks by the state, the federal government, and then something has to
happen to that individual.

MR. BARBER: Principals don\'t have to manipulate this law, Tommy, and
you\'re well aware of that. The way this law is structured right now and
the way it\'s interpreted only a principal in Pennsylvania and New York
would even have to be concerned about it. You know, there\'s not any
other states where it\'s even an issue because of the way the law is,
the way it\'s defined in each separate state.

California is a big state. It doesn\'t have one single persistently
dangerous school. What we\'ve got to stay away from is Pennsylvania,
see. That\'s what the data shows you.

But the very idea, first, the word, we all know the word \"persistently
dangerous\" was a death sentence to this legislation. You know, when
that word was attached, then you had already said this is going to be
ineffective, and that\'s the very essence of it, is that word right
there, \"persistently dangerous.\"

MS. SALSICH: I hate to say one more thing, but I think it\'s critical
here. I think this is a really big issue, and I think in coming here
today I was wondering how this was going to come up, you know, because
as an Advisory Committee you\'re looking at recommendations that might
need to occur for this legislation.

Although our findings were mixed on this so that this is purely, you
know, my thought based on the things that I\'ve read and the research, I
would say I would advise to be very hesitant about talking about making
a very structured federal requirement as to what a persistently
dangerous school is.

I think that Peter\'s recommendation earlier was a really wise one of
saying make an element of the criteria possibly mandated, but not all of
it, and the reason I say that is because states honestly, states are
already resentful about this legislation, and I think that what they are
asking for is to be given the support and the advice about how to make
wise independent, flexible decisions and how to really make criteria
that resonates with them, but not to have something forced on them.

I really think it\'s critical to state that because there could just be
a whole other level of backlash if that is the response to how this
legislation needs to be changed, not to say that some of the elements of
the criteria shouldn\'t be mandated, but probably not all.

That\'s just my pitch on that.

CHAIRMAN LONG: I\'m sorry. We\'ll go Susan, Russell and Seth and keep
about two minutes each. I hate to be the person to put the parameters on
it, but we are getting close to the witching hour.

MS. KEYS: Okay. Thank you.

I just wanted to make the comment that I think it\'s reinforcing the
point that has been made several times. Consistently I think you\'ve all
spoken to the point of how stigmatizing the legislation is, and we also
heard that schools get punished if they\'re really good at prevention
and identifying problems, that we should change the school, not transfer
out.

And Bill said can you really have both change, support change at a
school level and also expect the reporting of accountability data. I
think we\'re really in between a rock and a hard place. What I\'d like
to ask the committee to do is to tell us what they think would be
helpful.

How might we describe what it is that we need to have in order to
satisfy our legislative mandate and also be supportive of schools and
not punitive? That\'s one question.

The second question is just out of curiosity. What\'s the data
infrastructure like in states and school systems to actually be
collecting this data? And is that something also that we need to be
considering?

So first of all, what would your recommendations be around language and
data infrastructure?

MR. BOND: I think it was said earlier. We chose a term, \"persistently
dangerous,\" that gave this the absolute null and void of any effect.
It\'s just like we fought the zero tolerance for years. You know, we all
know how absurd it is to suspend a kid from school a year for having an
aspirin, but if you have a zero tolerance policy, it\'s easy for us to
sit back and say, \"We have a zero tolerance policy, and that\'s an
aspirin, and they\'re suspended for a year.\"

And then the public thinks we\'re absurd, and we\'re a laughing stock.
Well, this is a situation where you chose a term, \"persistently
dangerous,\" that\'s just like the term \"zero tolerance.\" It\'s a
policy that you cannot win with. You\'re going to be a laughing stock
because of the way we\'ve chosen this term.

But then you also want states\' flexibility. Well, states have
flexibility, and each state has its own reporting system even within
criminal justice. A felony in one state is not necessarily a felony in
another state. So you\'re trying to mandate a federal law about criminal
activity when the definition is different in all 50 states.

There are some acts that are misdemeanors in Virginia and they\'re a
felony in Tennessee. And so you\'ve got that issue.

What you can do, as I said, to make this effective, to make this an
effective agent for change, we\'ve got to change the terminology where
we\'re looking like we\'re trying to be of an assistance to a school
district and not to be a death sentence.

And when you say \"persistently dangerous,\" look. You\'re just saying
you are through. You know, you are finished as a high school or as an
institution.

And it\'s also geared towards the way the reporting goes. It\'s also
geared toward high school, as someone said. There\'s almost no chance of
an elementary school even coming into play here, but we often know that
what happens in the elementary school is where the most important
education and the most important issues are.

So that\'s why I\'m saying you fundamentally need to look at what
you\'re trying to achieve. Are you trying to help or are you just after
high accountability? If you have no carrots and all you have is a big
stick, so be it. But you need to decide whether you\'re into the help
business or the punishment business.

MS. SALSICH: I jotted down \-- oh, go ahead, Jerry.

MR. BARBER: I\'m sorry.

MS. SALSICH: Go ahead.

MR. BARBER: Just a quick point. I fully understand and appreciate, you
know, the need to make this a help situation, the program needs there,
but I think also that the accountability end of things can\'t be lost.

Just talking with my own friends and family and people in the community,
there is a definite sense that people want to have some way of
understanding what is the level of safety, if you will, as opposed to
persistently violent of a school, and more so today than ever. So
whatever you folks decide to do I think at some point you\'ve got to
keep that accountability perspective there and probably marry it somehow
with this notion of help, and how do you get better.

I don\'t know, but I don\'t think you can weaken it too much. It may
need to be standardized or it may need to be tweaked for language, but I
think people are demanding to know how it is that their school is
behaving in that way.

MS. SALSICH: I just wrote down a few. You asked for recommendations of
what you think could help out with this, and some of them may be
repetitive.

So I think one is the language, right? The language needs to be changed,
the label, and that\'s pretty clear-cut.

I think second is the assessment, that the accountability can\'t be
lost, but there needs to be advice and support as to how to truly
identify a school that\'s unsafe.

Third, I think this is really critical, and whether or not this is
financial resources, which it probably is, and I know that there\'s
probably a tabu on saying this, but I think that schools really need
technical assistance on how to respond to chaos, to poor climate, and to
school violence.

Especially when you\'re talking about large schools or urban schools, it
is really difficult in the midst of busy schedules to know how best and
most effective to respond to the issues, and I think that there are good
models out there of technical assistance that some school safety centers
do, but oftentimes schools can\'t afford that. And I think that that
would be a huge assistance.

And the fourth thing is something that we heard a lot in the interviews
that we did, is that people really wanted to talk about, well, let\'s
flip it and find out how do you identify a safe school, and especially
with high schools. I think that people don\'t know of the really good
models of high schools that maybe you would think would be dangerous
because (a) they\'re large or (b) they\'re in urban areas or they\'re in
an environment where there is gang activity, but they\'re doing really
well.

And I think that people wanted to have examples like that, sort of case
studies to understand what it is that makes a school safe even in the
face of obstacles that everyone would think they wouldn\'t be safe.

And so I think that that\'s another recommendation that this Advisory
Committee could look at, is can you do some case studies like that.

There are lots of case studies for elementary and middle schools because
there\'s more success in turning around a school when it is in terms of
violence for that level.

When it comes to high schools, people are lost. You know, it\'s a lot
more challenging, and so I think that that would be helpful.

As far as the data is concerned, this is something that we heard a lot,
that stages often have very fragmented data systems, and that is a very
big challenge for them.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Russell and Seth.

MR. JONES: Yes, and I\'ll be brief.

I was going to say, first of all, Annie, I was very pleased to hear of
the use of NUDIST in analyzing the data.

MS. SALSICH: Yes.

MR. JONES: I think the need for methodological rigor in the kind of
studies and the kind of projects that are being carried out certainly
require that.

But I hear from the panel, I mean, just \-- I don\'t know if you guys
were given a task that, you know, was doomed to fail. You know, I hear
that there are problems with, first of all, the definition of the
initiative, then the measurement, the assessment, the reliability of the
data, the psychometric properties of the data, and I think, Jerry, you
even mentioned, you know, now what do we do with these data and, you
know, what\'s the analytic plan and that kind of thing?

And I think it kind of raises a philosophical question, and I\'m just
wondering, and this may be more to us than to you guys; I\'m just
wondering what was the thinking and, you know, the definition of the
initiative, the \"persistently dangerous schools.\"

I mean, when you label an initiative with that kind of a term, you know,
you really wonder what can the outcome be. You know, we\'ve learned from
years and years and years of studies and, you know, anecdotes from
individuals in terms of the impact of labeling. You know, if you label a
child as mentally retarded, if you label a child as a bluebird versus a
blackbird, if you label a doll black versus white, on and on and on and
on and on and on, all of the different negative consequences of labeling
we know.

So I guess I\'m just raising kind of a philosophical question. What was
the thinking and the rationale of this particular labeling of the
initiative?

MS. PRICE: Well, I\'m going to jump in and answer the question because
it really was an act of Congress, and Congress is the one who identified
this and drafted this legislation. And I think their intention was to
give \-- when there\'s a school that has consistent negative behavior,
violent behavior, that parents have an option to be able to move their
child out of that school and into another school within that district
because, as we all know, parents are confined to go to the school in
their neighborhood, so to speak, within a parameter.

But I think the only way we can answer the question you asked is to look
at the legislative history and to look at the dialogue that went on on
the floor, either in the committee or on the floor of the Senate and
House to actually see what their thinking was.

But generally, I was in the Senate then, and I can generally tell you
theirs came from a good, you know, as Fred said, a good intention. I
mean, they wanted to be able to allow parents the option to take their
child out of what is perceived to be a dangerous school and put them in
a safe school, and that\'s how this came about.

Now, you know, as many people always say, the devil is in the details,
and I think we\'ve come face to face with the devil in many aspects of
this legislation, but the intent of it was basically to provide for
parents who are concerned for their children.

MR. JONES: Yes. Well, based on that, I guess one of the recommendations
that I would have is that we would have some input in terms of the
wordage of legislation. You know, I guess I just can\'t understand and
appreciate the thinking behind this label.

MS. PRICE: Yes, and that\'s one reason why the function of this Advisory
Committee is to give advice to the Secretary of Education for her to
take into consideration. It\'s advice and recommendations, not a
mandate, about what we\'ve learned about these different issues we\'re
looking at.

Reauthorization for No Child Left Behind, you know, it\'s up for
reauthorization next year. If there are elements that we see regarding
this, regarding whatever we\'re looking at that we think we might have
significant input in, that\'s what we\'re supposed to tell her.

MR. JONES: Yeah, and I think that\'s great.

MS. PRICE: So that\'s basically our job.

MR. JONES: Yeah, that\'s what we do, but because I think what our
wonderful panel is telling us, we\'ve given a charge that\'s really
difficult to fulfil, and I think that\'s possibly a function of the
philosophy of the initiative.

I won\'t ask anymore question. Susan took my other question in terms of
just lessons learned, you know, from each of you, and you have all
shared things that could be different that would enhance the likelihood
of this type of program succeeding.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And I apologize. We are running short here. Seth, here I
waited to have you ask a question. I love the way you talk and now
you\'re not going to.

MR. NORMAN: I\'ll save it.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Seth, go ahead.

MR. NORMAN: A number of my comments related to the diction problems. I
assume that\'s why I\'m on this panel. I\'ve listened all morning long
and I\'ve listened for two or three sessions here, and I\'ve never heard
anything about drugs or drug free environment.

I understand that the law says \"safe and drug free schools.\" Is there
no correlation between safety and drugs in your experience?

I know that in Mr. Barber\'s report there were 924 incidents, I believe,
and only 22 of them involved drugs. Is that true throughout the system
that drugs have very little to do with safety?

MR. BOND: In a real life situation in a school, drugs have very little
to do with the safety of the school. They have to do with the safety of
the community, so forth like that. But drugs have a negative effect on a
school. They have a negative effect on achievement. They have a negative
effect on dropouts. They have a negative effect on a lot of areas, but
they have every minimal effect on whether a school is safe or unsafe.

MR. NORMAN: Then should we reconsider the allocation of funds from the
way they\'re divided now? Some of them go to the drug free portion of it
and some of them go to the safety portion of it under the legislation,
as I understand it.

MR. BOND: I said drugs have a major effect on achievement and dropouts
and a lot of other areas that schools have a mission to accomplish, and
drugs have a very negative effect, but they have a very small effect on
this area of whether the school is safe or not safe.

The drugs lead to unsafe conditions that surround the school, not
necessarily the inside. We\'re certainly finding students with drugs.
There are flights about some drugs, but it\'s not the same impact.
That\'s why I suggested earlier give the states the flexibility because
in some states they may have more of a drug problem.

But the security issue for me is I\'m watching the trend lines, and
they\'re going in the wrong direction for the security issues, and
again, I believe that it\'s important on the prevention side, prevent,
prevent, prevent.

And I also want to remark to Mr. Jones to remember this was very popular
legislation when it was passed, I think among the most popular ever. I
think the country realized something is going on in our schools. We\'re
not sure what. It\'s like the frog in the boiling water. You know if
we\'re sitting around long enough, those of us, all of a sudden we start
reading these headlines and say, \"My God, what happened to my school?\"

My high school that I graduated from a few years back \-- I\'m not sure
if President Lincoln was around to change legislation \-- but I had one
principal and one vice principal in a school, all boys, of 2,000 of us.
Today there\'s a principal, four assistant principals, and ten security
people in that school, and I\'m not sure that I wasn\'t safer back then.

But this is what \-- you know, I don\'t mean to offend or scare people
off, but we sugar coat too many things. You\'re going to lose the
message. This is a new era. We have to look at this.

Drugs certainly play a part in what\'s going on. It has a major part in
our parents, more than the kids, I think, because we don\'t get the
parental support that we really need. Forty percent of our kids go to
bed at night without a father. It makes it difficult for that child to
be raised.

And I raised two children with my wife, and I know how hard it was for
two of us. I take my hat off to those single parents who are doing that,
but a lot of our kids are being raised in an environment that\'s not
even with their parents. Grandparents are raising a lot of our kids.

And those of us who are grandparents, I don\'t have the energy for that
anymore, and it\'s going to reflect in the kids.

So what I\'m saying is we have to have this conversation. This is good
that we\'re talking about it, and I really applaud the Department of Ed.
for giving us this opportunity to analyze what we\'ve been handed.
Let\'s tweak this a little bit and make it that we can all make our
school safer, and that\'s really what the objective of that law was, and
that\'s what our Department of Education is trying to do today.

CHAIRMAN LONG: I\'d like to take this opportunity to thank Annie and
Bill and Peter and Jerry for, as I indicated when we started, taking the
time and coming to us with your years of experience and high level of
expertise.

And I\'d also like to give a stroke and a thank you to the committee for
the quality questions so that we could learn. So thank you very much.

MS. SALSICH: Thanks for having us.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: And with that we will take a break, and we will reconvene
at 11:20.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off the record at 11:11 a.m. and
went back on the record at 11:26 a.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: This is, as I indicated, Panel 2, and as I did as we
started the first time this morning, I would like to introduce our
panelists.

First of all, Rich Rasa joined the Education Department of Inspector
General more than 20 years ago, in the summer of 1982, and Rich has been
the Director of the OIG State and Local Advisory Assistance Staff since
1991.

Prior to coming to the Education Department, Rich was an auditor and an
inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector
General, Foreign Operations Staff, and conducted audits and inspections
of U.S. agriculture programs primarily overseas.

Rich is a graduate of St. Francis College in Loretta, Pennsylvania, with
a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting.

Welcome, Rich.

The second panelist, to Rich\'s right, is the Regional Inspector General
for Audit, Bernie Tadley, has managed ED OIG\'s audit activities for the
Philadelphia office since 1997. This office has the responsibility for
audits that are conducted in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Previously Bernie was the team leader for the non-federal audit and an
Assistant Regional Inspector General. He started his career with the
Department of Labor, OIG in May of \'93 before transferring to ED in
March 1984.

Bernie is a graduate of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, and a
licensed CPA in the State of New Jersey.

Bernie, welcome.

And to Bernie\'s right, Paul Kesner is currently the Director of the
State Grants Program, U.S. Department of Education\'s Office of Safe and
Drug Free Schools. In this role, Paul works with the department\'s
efforts to support states in their efforts to create and sustain safe
and health schools for our nation\'s students.

Prior to coming to the department, he served as the Dean of Student
Affairs in West Virginia and has also served as a teacher and school
principal in the State of Maine.

Welcome, Paul.

And we\'ll start with Rich, then to Bernie, and then to Paul, and as we
did with the last panel, gentlemen, presentation, waiting to hear your
expertise, and then we\'ll enter into a very important part of this,
which is a dialogue with the committee asking questions and talking with
each other.

So, first of all, Rich.

MR. RASA: Good morning, everyone. We have a short statement. Actually
there\'s a longer statement in your packet, and we chose to save time
and give you the Evelyn Wood version this morning. So here we go.

I\'m Rich Rasa, Director of State and Local Advise and Assistance for
the Office of Inspector General, and to my right is Bernie Tadley, our
Regional Inspector General from Philadelphia.

I want to thank you for inviting us to participate today and present the
work that our office has conducted regarding the implementation of the
unsafe school choice option area.

The issue of safe schools is one the OIG has been examining since 1999,
and the USCO specifically since 2004. We chose to review the
implementation of the USCO for two reasons: one, it was new to the ESEA,
and, two, it is an important issue in helping to insure that students
learn in a safe environment.

As many of you may know, we\'ve worked closely with the Office of Safe
and Drug Free Schools in planning our work in this area and have relied
on their expertise and assistance as we work to meet our audit
objectives and fulfill our mission to the U.S. Department of Education.

Starting in 2004, we performed USCO audits in five states: California,
Georgia, Iowa, New Jersey and Texas. We sought to determine whether the
state\'s USCO policy was in compliance with applicable laws,
regulations, and guidance and whether the policy was adequately
implemented at the state and local levels.

In each state, we selected local educational agencies and schools to
visit. We interviewed state and local officials and examined
documentation related to the policy development and implementation, data
collection, and review.

Where applicable, we reviewed parental notification of the persistently
dangerous schools determination and the option to transfer. We also
looked at fulfillment of subsequent transfer requests, and the
development and implementation of a corrective action plan.

Additionally, we reviewed documentation associated with appeals and
adjustments submitted by schools determined to be PDS where applicable.

Following the completion of our field work, we issued individual audit
reports that identified specific issues of concern at the state and
local levels and provided suggested actions to address each concern.

We have a handout for you that includes a summary of these reports which
are available in full text on our Web site, and the handout is in your
binder.

What I\'d like to cover in the time we have allotted are those
overarching issues identified from our audits. These issues we believe
are applicable to other states.

We also talk about the need to strengthen the statutory requirements of
the USCO and provide examples that show how important the proposed
changes are.

These issues were presented to the department in February 2006, which I
will discuss as well.

First, here are three issues we identified during our USCO reviews.

One, some states\' policies may not meet the intent of the USCO. Four of
the five states we reviewed used disciplinary action, such as long-term
suspensions or expulsions, to define a USCO incident for the purposes of
reporting. We discovered that violent criminal acts might not be
factored into states\' determination of PDS due to these qualifiers.

Likewise, requiring a certain grade of long-term suspensions or
expulsions may not be conducive to accurate PDS determinations as these
disciplinary measures are often avoided in favor of other corrective
action, such as the transfer to an alternative program.

The four states that use disciplinary action qualifiers had no schools
that met the criteria for PDS in 2003 or 2004.

Two, USCO was not adequately implemented at the local level. We found
that reporting practices and the level of compliance vary significantly
across states or districts in the states, including our view.

For example, in Georgia, we found 44 unreported USCO incidents,
including aggravated battery, five felony weapons offenses, one
terrorist threat, eight felony drug violations, and 29 non-felony drug
violations.

In Iowa, we found four weapons violations and seven assaults/fights,
including one assault on a teacher. It occurred and went unreported.

In one New Jersey district, two of the schools we visited reported less
than 15 percent of the incidents that occurred. Only one of the four
districts we reviewed was found to be in full compliance with the USCO
reporting requirements in New Jersey.

As a result of the inconsistent reporting, data used to determine PDS
for the audit period we examined may not have been sufficiently reliable
to provide accurate and equitable PDS determinations across districts in
each state.

Three, districts could not demonstrate that victims of violent crimes
were offered the opportunity to transfer. The school districts we
reviewed were unable to demonstrate compliance with the USCO requirement
that victims of violent crimes are to be offered the opportunity to
transfer to a safe school.

States were expected to implement this provision as of 2003-04 school
year. Our review revealed that the school districts had no formal
policies or procedures in place to insure compliance and had no
alternative documentation to show that affected students were offered
the opportunity to transfer.

In February 2006, we presented the department with steps we believe they
should take to insure that the intent of the law is met.

One, requiring the states to insure that violent criminal offenses are
factored into the PDS determination without requiring the offense to be
qualified by disciplinary action.

Two, insuring that states\' annual certification of USCO compliance is
based on verification from districts that documentation is available to
support that incidents have been reported in accordance with the
state\'s policy.

And, three, confirming that districts have implemented policies and
procedures to insure that the transfer option is offered to victims of
violent crimes.

The department concurred with the issues we raised and indicated it does
strongly encourage states to take appropriate action. The department,
however, also made it clear there is no statutory regulatory requirement
in these areas. Therefore, it has no means to mandate or enforce the
action steps without statutory or regulatory change.

With this in mind, we provided the department with interim steps we
believed it could take until Congress would take up the ESEA
reauthorization next year. These steps are:

Insure that state policies are effective for the purpose of, one,
identifying unsafe schools and, two, providing victims of violent crimes
the option to transfer to a safe school at a maximum within 14 days
after the student is determined to be the victim of a violent crime.

Now, I\'m going to turn it over to Bernie who\'s going to talk to you a
little bit about what we think needs to be strengthened in the USCO.

MR. TADLEY: Thank you, Rich.

In our audits, we found issues related to the determination of
persistently dangerous schools in four out of the five states that
resulted in persistently dangerous schools not being identified. Base on
our concern that states were not using effective criteria for
identifying persistently dangerous schools, we conducted additional
research to determine the criteria for persistently dangerous schools
nationwide.

We found that over 50 percent of the states did not follow the
department\'s non-regulatory guidance for setting the criteria used to
determine persistently dangerous schools. We identified some common
trends that we saw in the state\'s USCO policies that are not consistent
with that departmental guidance.

For example, a number of violent offenses being excluded from the
persistently dangerous school determination.

Two, states tend to measure the disciplinary outcomes rather than the
occurred of violent incidents.

And, three, states require thresholds to be met for two or three
consecutive years before identifying the school as persistently
dangerous.

We reviewed the USCO policies in depth and further found in one state
the requirement is that two percent of the student population have to be
a victim of violent crime in each year for two consecutive years before
determining the school to be persistently dangerous.

In addition, there has to be an indication that the perpetrator would
need to be found guilty for an incident to be included in the
determination of a persistently dangerous school. Under this state\'s
USCO policy, a school with 1,000 students could experience four
homicides and seize a weapon from students on 19 occasions each year
without qualifying as a persistently dangerous school.

In another state, the number of violent incidences is compared to the
student population for determining persistently dangerous schools. The
set thresholds and per population range must be met in each of the two
consecutive years for a school to be determined persistently dangerous.
A school with over 1,200 students must have more than 225 violent
incidences in each of the two consecutive years before it would reach
that designation as a persistently dangerous school.

An average school year has 180 days. That means a school would need to
have more than one violent incident per day to occur for two straight
years in that state to be determined a persistently dangerous school.

In another case we saw, a district Office of Inspector General reported
that during the 2003-2004 school year there were more than 1,700 what
they classified as serious security incidents in city schools. Included
in those 1,700 was 464 weapons offenses. None of the schools, however,
had been identified as persistently dangerous.

As another example, a state had a policy that determined persistently
dangerous schools based on one year of incident data. However, the
policy was apparently discarded because it would have identified 36
schools.

In this case an SEA official noted that they were not a big state, and
36 would be a huge number.

In 2003, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and
Work Force, the Subcommittee on Education Reform, held hearings on the
issue of persistently dangerous schools. The hearing was held in Denver,
Colorado.

In his opening comments, subcommittee Vice Chairman Tom Osborne stated
that as of September 30th, 2003, only six states have identified any
schools that are unsafe, and of those six states there are 52 schools,
and I believe 28 of those 52 schools come from Pennsylvania.
Twenty-seven of the 28 in Pennsylvania come from Philadelphia. So
obviously we have a wide range of what people are deeming unsafe and
what they aren\'t.

Three years later, the sentiment appears to hold true. Data collected by
the department for the 2004-2005 school year indicated that while the
number of states reporting persistently dangerous schools has increased
to seven, the number reported for persistently dangerous has decreased
to 36 schools.

Based on the issues identified through our audits and with the
information we continue to gather from the states on USCO policy, it\'s
imperative that statutory changes be considered to strengthen the USCO.
We encourage the department and the U.S. Congress to consider amending
the USCO provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act to require states to
insure that their USCO policies meet the following basic requirements:

That all violent incidents, according to state code, are factored into
the PDS determination without use of disciplinary action qualifiers;

That benchmarks for determining persistently dangerous schools are set
at reasonable levels that are supported by objective and reliable data;

Thirdly, that the persistently dangerous schools are identified based on
the most current year of data.

We thank you for the time and the consideration of the information that
we presented and the ideas that we have, and we\'re now available for
any questions.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And thank you, Rich, and thank you, Bernie. And we\'ll
turn to Paul, and after we\'re finished with Paul\'s presentation,
we\'ll open it to question and answer.

Paul.

MR. KESNER: Thank you, Dr. Long and Assistant Deputy Secretary Price,
members of the Safe and Drug Free Schools Advisory Committee.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to present and reflect on the
challenges of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools and our work with
states on the implementation of the unsafe school choice option under No
Child Left Behind.

As you work toward making recommendations for reauthorization, I\'ve had
the opportunity to work with the state grants program now for about a
year and a half. You\'ve heard the testimony of associations and
organizations this morning, that of the U.S. Department of Education\'s
OIG, and this afternoon you\'ll hear from state representatives and
their implementation challenges, and it doesn\'t sound surprising that
you keep hearing some of the same themes come over again, and I hope
that I\'m not too boring by offering you some things you\'ve already
heard again. If so, I can hush up.

I\'m also technologically challenged at times. So I hope I press the one
that says mouse? Oh, the arrows. Okay. And you\'ll notice that the
PowerPoints are bland.

I wanted to start by taking a look at the statute. Clear back in the
back of No Child Left Behind, in Section 9532, and remember that the
safe and drug free schools\' authorizations are at 4112 and back in that
area. So this is in the back of the statute.

There are two parts to the unsafe school choice option, or USCO, which
we quote here. Part 1 deals with persistently dangerous schools. Note
that it says, \"Each state receiving funds under this act shall
establish and implement a statewide policy.\"

The policy is to be statewide, and that definition of persistently
dangerous elementary or secondary school is to be determined by the
state in consultation with a representative sample of local education
agencies.

The second part of the unsafe school choice option calls for the
opportunity for a student who\'s a victim of a violent criminal offense
as determined by the state law be allowed to attend a safe public school
within that local educational agency. This opportunity to transfer can
also be to a public charter school.

As you\'ve already been presented, in school year 2003-2004 there were
47 determinations in five states and in \'04-\'05, there were 41
determinations in four states and \'05-\'06 there were 36 determinations
in seven states.

I want to be clear here that when we use the term \"school year,\"
we\'re referring to the year for which the determination is made, not
the year that the data has been collected. This is the year, for
instance, determinations were recently made for the \'06-\'07 school
year.

States do report the number of persistently dangerous school
determination to the department through their consolidated state
performance report, and that consolidated state performance report has
two parts. Part one is where the persistently dangerous report is
contained, and it is submitted generally each year in the month of
December.

So we will be getting official numbers from states for the \'06-\'07
school year in December. Prior to that point, we Google. We go to
newspapers and everything else to find those numbers. States report them
officially to us in December.

Another interesting thing. The states aren\'t required to offer to us or
to report to us, but I thought you might find of interest in your
consideration today is transfer information, and while they are not
collecting to report it, through monitoring we\'ve asked states to tell
us if they would some examples. We found that the states \-- and I
don\'t have all of the states\' information here, but the few I have I
thought you would find of interest.

Last year Pennsylvania who had several determinations of persistently
dangerous school, had 12 students who transferred because of the
determination of persistently dangerous schools. In other words 12
students opted to go to another school because their school had been
deemed persistently dangerous.

Throughout the state though there had been 47 who transferred because
they had been the victim of a violent crime. So we see more in
Pennsylvania transferring because of victimization than because of
determination.

Interesting number in Maryland, and again these aren\'t audited official
figures, but just some that were given to us. Because of determinations
of persistently dangerous schools, 481 students opted to transfer in
Maryland.

In DCPS, about a dozen students in DCPS, the District of Columbia Public
Schools, does not have any determinations of persistently dangerous
schools, had about a dozen students asking for a transfer because of
victimization.

The Department of Education through the Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools has taken on several efforts in helping states implement the
unsafe school choice on several fronts. One is the non-regulatory
guidance, which I believe you have copies of in your binders.

We have provided workshops at our national technical assistance
meetings. We have also provided meetings to offer assistance and
participated in meetings where we could offer workshops on persistently
dangerous or unsafe school choice implementation.

We have awarded discretionary data grants to states, known as the grants
to states to improve management of drug and violence prevention program.
These grants have been awarded to states to develop, expand or enhance
the capacity of the SEA and LEAs and other state agencies and community
based entities to collect, analyze and use data to improve the
management of drug and violence prevention programs administered to the
state.

And we offer ongoing monitoring and technical assistance as a part of
that monitoring with the states.

The non-regulatory guidance. In May 2004, the department issued
non-regulatory guidance. While the document offers clear direction to
states, the NRG, another government acronym, but it saves saving
\"non-regulatory guidance\" repeatedly for you, is purely that. Notice
in the title \"non-regulatory.\" There\'s no regulation to back it. And
it is guidance. It\'s guidance that is issued to states to follow, and
this guidance highlights some important aspects of USCO and provides
guidance on some provision that may be useful in administering these
requirements.

But you can tell from that that it\'s not mandated, and it\'s not
incumbent upon states to follow that direction or take that guidance.
And any of us who have children know that guidance is often offered and
not always followed, at least in my case, with my daughter.

The NRG offers guidance to states in such broad topics as how to
establish a state USCO policy. It offers guidance on how to identify
persistently dangerous schools. School safety and data collection,
providing safe public school choice options to students attending an
unsafe public school, and identifying violent criminal offenses and
providing a safe public school option to students who have been victims
of a violent criminal offense.

In the very first paragraph of the guidance, to comply we say with USCO
states must, one, establish a state USCO policy; two, identify
persistently dangerous schools; three, identify types of offenses that
are considered to be violent criminal offenses; four, provide a safe
public school choice option and certify compliance with USCO.

One issue. As you\'ve heard today from the Vera report and from others,
the period of time that is used in making determinations of persistently
dangerous schools is not outlined. Many states have defined persistently
dangerous schools as schools that meet established criteria over a
period from two to three years, and we find that is the case in most
situations.

Question B(5) though in the non-regulatory guidance strongly encourages
states to define persistently dangerous based on a shorter period,
specifically one school year. So the periods of time vary from states.

Another issue which we have heard about is data. One of the biggest
hurdles facing implementation of USCO is improving state and district
data collection. As you\'ve heard from previous presenters, this
continues to be a challenge for states and districts.

Some states often find that some of their districts collect good data on
school violence while others do not. This forces defining persistently
dangerous using the lowest common denominator data. For instance, school
safety data is often aggregated by county or district level, not by
school level where determinations of persistently dangerous must be
made.

So the states, one state in particular, I know, face the challenge of
disaggregating the data that had been compiled into a statewide report
to isolate individual schools so that individual determinations could be
made.

Two, consistencies in coding data. In some states, how violent crimes
are defined vary within the state, and in fact, what constitutes a
weapon may vary between counties. How schools report data consistently
remains, as you have already heard, a challenge.

For instance, one presenter today talked about the developmental aspects
of it. Are kids in line in kindergarten who shove guilty of an assault
the same as kids in high school who may get into a shoving match? There
are opportunities here and consistencies in coding data and reporting
accurately what is happening.

The management of data: how the state has defined violent acts used to
determine persistently dangerous schools. Those definitions are not
always aligned with the data and information that the schools are
collecting. You\'ve just heard Rich and Bernie tell of several states
and what they used in their determinations to define persistently
dangerous schools, and those definitions of persistently dangerous
schools do not necessarily align with the information and data that
schools are collecting.

The non-regulatory guidance encourages using information collected for
the requirements of the uniform management information report system, or
the UMIR system, as part of the definition. Data on truancy rates and
data on the incidence of violence and drug related offenses resulting in
suspension and expulsion is already supposed to be being collected on
the school level and is supposed to be reported publicly.

Ideally states would double up on these data collections and use some of
the data that they\'re already collecting as part of their persistently
dangerous definition.

The NRG suggests that objective data encompassing areas that students
and parents would consider in determining a school\'s level of safety,
including violent criminal offenses and making determinations of
persistently dangerous schools. Some states use only criminal offenses.
Some use disciplinary offenses. Some use both.

But what the NRG suggests and offers to school districts is that they
would use objective data, and this objective data would encompass those
areas that the students and the parents feel important in determining a
level of school safety, including, among other things, violent offenses.

Types of data that could be used include information from records
detailing the number of referrals to law enforcement for bringing a fire
arm, which states are already reporting through the Gun Free Schools
Act; results from student surveys about issues such as fights in
schools; or data on gang presence on school grounds.

It\'s important though that the information be attributable to
individual school sites, and it should be valid and reliable.

There\'s a hesitancy to categorize schools as persistently dangerous.
We\'ve heard that already. I keep making sure I\'m on the right slide.

Because of the potential ramifications associated with that terminology
\-- and you\'ve heard that already, and I don\'t want to belabor that,
but it is an important part because the word \"persistently dangerous
schools\" appears in the statute \-- the terminology is much more
pejorative than the terminology used by other No Child Left Behind
Programs, such as failing to make adequate yearly progress.

Locales for schools are labeled as persistently dangerous could suffer
economically should housing and real estate prices have a result of the
stigma of an unsafe area.

No Child Left Behind does not offer funds to supplement any corrective
action schools wish to undertake, and thus, once a school is labeled as
persistently dangerous, the LEA and/or the SEA would have to provide
funds for improvement.

We heard mentioned earlier that it\'s an unfunded mandate.

Also, the cost of transporting students, especially in locales where the
closest school may be a great distance, can be a factor, and then there
are, of course, many LEAs in which there\'s only one high school or one
middle school for students to transfer to, and if they\'re in the school
that\'s unsafe, if they\'re in the school where the victimization took
place, where do they transfer?

And the statute says they shall be offered the opportunity to transfer
to a school within that LEA.

As I mentioned earlier, there are financial constraints. Financial
support for new data collections process, those need to be provided and
offered within the skeleton of what\'s already there. There\'s no
allotment of funds to improve schools deemed persistently dangerous, and
the bussing transportation not only offers a logistic challenge, but
there is a financial challenge there as well.

In cases of victimization, in the second part of the law, often the
burden of transferring is on the victim rather than the perpetrator.
Although the statute says that it can be the other way around, often we
find that that burden is placed on those who are the victim.

In closing, just a few thoughts of my own. There\'s a wide scope of
state laws and regulations, data collections and challenges, and
financial constraints, and I believe we\'ve heard that perhaps because
of these constraints there\'s not the possibility or it probably
wouldn\'t be prudent to offer a model unsafe school choice option
policy. Perhaps it would be more effective to offer a clear list of
items for states to use in policy development as they look at what is
unique in the needs of their state, their community, and their parents
and their students.

There\'s also the issue of nomenclature. We\'ve heard that again, and
I\'ll say it one last time and I won\'t say it anymore. \"Persistently
dangerous schools\" is pejorative.

In Annie\'s presentation, she talked about watch lists. We found in our
monitoring that approximately half of the states offer a watch list for
those states that are especially states that are doing two and
three-year data collection, those states that are nearing becoming an
unsafe school choice and offering some support or technical assistance
to those schools that are on the watch list.

Training and TA for LEAs and collection of data and compliance, and for
those issues that Rich and Bernie mentioned on the accountability,
making sure that it\'s understood how data is to be reported and
collected and turned in.

Thresholds are a definition of what constitutes persistently dangerous.
Could it be that the number of assaults per 100 students or some sort of
threshold like that could be a way of looking at this?

And a clear indication of what data sources will be used and who is
responsible for collecting and interpreting that data. Certainly there
are theoretical underpinnings to the unsafe school choice option that
lie and are important. Implementing and working with states as it\'s
their responsibility to implement the unsafe school choice option is
sometimes difficult at best, and as you all have looked at all the other
things that safe and drug free schools looks at, the unsafe school
choice is one part of that.

We appreciate your time in looking at this today, and we stand ready to
help in any way we can in helping you as you carry out your
recommendations.

Thank you, Dr. Long.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Paul. We appreciate that.

At this time if we could, sa we did with the first panel, offer up
questions and enter into that important phase.

So from the committee, any? Yes, Shep.

MR. KELLAM: The thing that comes to mind first, and this is really an
informative presentation you guys are giving us, we haven\'t talked
about how the information systems you\'re discussing tie into
information systems that already exist in school buildings or don\'t
exist.

For example, some school districts have no computerized information
system. Take Anne Arundel County, for example. So tracking kids over
time is not really so easy. It\'s all hard copy stuff.

In some sense the information systems in general need to be looked at so
that we understand how to integrate the kind of information that we\'re
talking about here into ongoing information systems for efficiency as
well as for use in mentoring and monitoring and fixing the issue in the
building. So that\'s one issue.

And I think there are information systems that could easily \-- for
example, most schools grade kids on behavior, on conduct and deportment.
In some ways those are available to integrate with what is the maximum
level you would tolerate in a school building so that the climate is one
of danger.

Notice I said \"climate.\" And we\'re talking now about how to use the
information to fix the problem and it\'s not just parents who have
information about the school, but the school building itself needs to
understand how to work with parents to formulate ways of moving the
problem forward.

And I think that\'s better developed if we integrate these information
systems so that the reading scores, the algebra scores later on are all
tied into the behavioral issues, if not the psychological. Set aside for
a moment, not very long though.

The other thing that I think that is important for us to think about in
terms of information systems, again, is the developmental issue. Is it
the case that it\'s important to notice kids who are shoving each other
in kindergarten?

If they do it persistently, those are the kids who, in fact, we\'re
worried about in Grades 10, not much beyond because they\'re also
contributing to dropout rates. So disappearing from the school district
is not really such a hot idea as a solution to school climate.

But we\'ve got to talk developmentally. We have to understand how this
is an ongoing socialization process of how to teach kids how to read,
how to do algebra and match and so on, and how to be a student, and it
ain\'t intuitive.

So that process has to be integrated with the data we\'re talking about
collecting and the information systems needs to be integrated with the
ongoing school information systems. Otherwise we\'re going to go nuts
with independent data systems, you know, that have this kind of pristine
quality but will inevitably fail either to maintain reliability and
faithful criteria or to be used for anything other than mish-mash,
blaming schools, which is an old habit. Fire the managers, which is what
we do to superintendents.

I would say that we need to think developmentally. We need to think
about integrating information systems. We need to think about Schools of
Education because teachers are unprepared to teach kids how to behave.

Generally speaking, Schools of Education don\'t train teachers how to
manage classrooms early on or later on. NK doesn\'t require it. The
national accreditation of Schools of Education doesn\'t require as far
as I know how to teach teachers how to manage classrooms.

We\'re talking about an absence of socialization of kids coupled with
the potential for failure to learn that goes on early on, and you can
track these kids from preschool and certainly by first grade through
their life course.

And there\'s tons of research on that. It\'s the most important; other
than gender, early aggressive disruptive behavior is the most important
risk factor we know that tracks kids over the life course.

So I would say that we need to discuss integrating information systems,
understanding the developmental trajectories, and understanding how this
can be used for formative issues, like moving teachers to be more
skilled at managing classrooms.

The epidemiology is that roughly 50 percent of teachers in Baltimore at
least who teach first grade don\'t do it very well and have not gotten
the training. About 50 percent can do it intuitively or whatever way,
but half of the teachers, in other words, who are socializing kids in
the first grade are not able to do that for absences of tools, of
effective, proven tools.

MR. KESNER: If I may add onto that, we took a list of the schools that
have been determined to be persistently dangerous, and looking at this
whole integrated information is interesting because it really does need
to be that. My experience as a teacher and working in a school tells me
that.

But we looked at the schools that have been deemed as persistently
dangerous by all the states and then tried to go and find out where they
were with their education progress, and we found \-- and this probably
isn\'t a surprising answer to the hypothesis \-- that about 75, 80
percent of those schools who were persistently dangerous were also in
need of adequate yearly progress, and they were having challenges there.
So that\'s not a surprise.

What may be a surprise is what was going on in those 20 percent, what
else was going on there and what else was happening there. But there are
correlations and it is an integrated process, I agree.

MR. KELLAM: Well, just to add that those correlations are longitudinal,
not just cross-sectional. So, I mean, if you want to get into what is
going on in the first grade where a kid is misbehaving, it\'s fairly to
learn highly correlated with it, and kids either withdraw, act out, or
both. They become isolated, aggressive, disruptive kids.

It\'s two and a half times more likely among boys than girls. You know,
there\'s all this stuff we know and that we somehow have to bring to
bear and bring it all together. But early socialization is what we\'re
talking about here. It has got to do with reading, behavior.

And, by the way, how you feel about yourself directly stems from how
successful or failing you\'re doing.

MR. RASA: Can I make one comment on the integration of data? We would
agree with that, and the persistently dangerous school area wasn\'t the
first time that we were out doing audits on data systems and recording
data and making sure it\'s accurate, reliable and complete.

If we don\'t have the internal controls in place to make sure that that
happens, which I think ties into your idea of making sure that the
system is efficient and effective in recording the information; if we
don\'t have that, we\'re not going to be able to rely on the data that
we\'re all looking at, that we looked at in five states and Jerry looked
at in New York.

To get ready for this meeting, I read the New York report because,
number one, I find the Comptroller General of New York, their reports,
not only very interesting, but informative and they\'re very much to the
point.

And as I read through that report, I mean, that is the most recent
example of the similar kind of information that we found in the five
states that we reviewed. If you don\'t have time to read our work, I
would definitely read Jerry\'s because it is a very large state. He
talked about a lot of unreported violations, which ties back, I think,
to this idea of the effectiveness of the system that\'s in place,
whether it\'s in New York or California or Texas, Georgia, any of these
other states that we\'re looking at.

One of the things he pointed to was this idea of certification and that
some superintendents and maybe school principals did not want to certify
their data. We\'ve run into that before on other programs we looked at,
and one of the things that we try to make sure is that when people
certify, that if they\'re aware of weaknesses in their system, that we
give them the wherewithal to say what those weaknesses are so that they
can do full disclosure.

I certify, but I know that we have some issues here. I know that our
definition that was developed at the state level for PDS doesn\'t
necessarily match up very well with what\'s collected. So we\'re trying
to maybe possibly fit square holes into round situations there.

So the idea of certifying but with full disclosure. I\'m certifying that
I have weaknesses in my system, and therefore I can sign this statement.
I think that\'s something that we see in this program and we see in any
program we go out and do data audits on.

CHAIRMAN LONG: If we could go Fred, Kim, Russell, Belinda.

MR. ELLIS: Mine will be quick.

I appreciate the information you guys reported. I think it\'s very
helpful and enlightening unfortunately on the data collection and
reporting, which is I think to a large extent why we\'re here.

My question, I guess, really is for Mr. Kesner in terms of some of the
things that Department of Ed has recognized and kind of made some
recommendations that you\'ve reported here in terms of, you know, the
issues with the nomenclature, use of the watch list, training, and TA,
and coming up with thresholds and those kinds of things that we\'ve
talked.

One of the things you didn\'t talk about though is one of the issues
that you did identify, the transfers, transfers of the kids. Obviously
the school systems seemingly don\'t do a great job of notifying parents
and students who are victims of serious violent incidents that they have
a right to transfer, and that has all kinds of implications, not only
for cost, as you mentioned, bus transportation, but also in the
victimization, again, of a victim.

So my question to you, Mr. Kesner, is do you have any suggestions or
opinions on what, if anything, that portion of this law should, might,
could look at suggested changes in terms of transfer options, you know,
and particularly addressing the issues where there are no options
available for the student to land.

And is it appropriate, for instance to ask or require the victim to
move?

MR. KESNER: I think we can, first of all, in the report that OIG gave,
and we concurred with that, the school districts have a burden and
responsibility to insure that a victim after at least 14 days after
knowing that they\'re a victim, be offered that opportunity to transfer.

And we are aware, too, that the choice should be the victim\'s, an din
our guidance we offer school districts, you know, you can choose to move
the victim or you can choose if the perpetrator is known, you can choose
to move the perpetrator, and some states do that. Some school districts
do that, move them to an alternative school.

So I think it would be incumbent upon states to look at all of their
options and look at their options also when it seems like there\'s a
burden that they can\'t get around. For instance, one middle school,
what do you do? How can we look at addressing within our own situation
the best way for our children to be safe?

Some schools where it\'s open enrollment, it\'s not that much of an
issue. A student has the right to go anywhere in the state that they
really want to, but within states where that isn\'t the case, I think
that\'s something \-- part of the flexibility of this needs to be that
the state look at and the local district look at what can we do to make
this a better opportunity for a student to be in a safe learning
environment where they feel comfortable in learning.

MR. RASA: I\'d also like to add something. In preparation for this, we
also looked at this 2003 hearing that took place. When we read through
it, there was quite a few folks, and I imagine some of you folks may
have been at that hearing in Denver.

One of the themes in that hearing that we read through was the
importance of parents and the information that gets to them and making
sure that the information is on time. In this case of the victim
transfer policy, that\'s real important.

I mean, we know of actually a couple of years ago when we were first
getting into this work where I was looking at the news one night, and
this very issue was right on Channel 4 where a girl at a school had been
harassed over a period of several weeks and now was beat up and put in
the hospital.

And what came out in the news was this idea that the school
administrators knew about the situation well in advance, and the
question I had at that point was did the parents of that child know that
they were going through that situation.

And I think it\'s real important as we proceed through our work, and
we\'re going to be issuing a perspective paper of the OIG on this
subject in the next couple of months probably. Actually we wanted to
issue it before this meeting so that you all would have it, but we also
wanted to listen to what was said at this meeting and use that
information to help us develop some more ideas.

But we definitely consider this idea of victim transfer option to be
very important, and the idea of information getting to parents as they
need it.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Kim.

MS. DUDE: Well, first, understand that I come from a higher education
perspective, not a K through 12. So keep that in mind when I make my
statements.

But it seems to me this legislation is very ironic in that in a sense,
it penalizes the schools that are doing the most about the situation
because there\'s clearly a difference between the number of situations
that actually happen and the number of situations that are actually
caught.

And so the fact that the schools that are doing the most and actually
holding students accountable and accurately reporting them are more
likely to get this PDS designation. So the reward is not in there to do
more, which seems ironic and, honestly, sort of foolish.

And it also is counterproductive in that what I have found through my
work is that the more students know that their fellow students are being
held accountable for something, the less likely they are to do the
particular offense. For example, if I know through self-reported data,
mind you, I know what percentage of my students drive under the
influence of alcohol; I also know what percentage of my students are
arrested for a DWI; and I know that as that number of students who were
arrested went up, the number of students who drove under the influence
went down.

And so the school districts that are, in fact, doing the most are the
ones who probably, that logic would tell you, the students would then do
it less often because they know they\'d be getting in trouble for it.

And whereas the schools that are either not doing anything about it or
are doing something about it but not telling anybody because they don\'t
want to get this designation are not only not reporting it, but, in
fact, could be creating a system where the students think, \"Oh, I\'m
not going to get caught. So I might as well go ahead and do it.\"

And I love the quote that Bill Bond said. I even wrote it down. It says
you don\'t change behavior by the severity of the consequences. You
change the behavior by the certainty of consequences.

So the school districts that are going to consistently enforce and do it
with certainty and let people know they\'re doing it, not only the
parents, but the state or whoever else, the federal government or
whoever else they\'re reporting it to, those should be the schools we
are rewarding. And instead, it sounds to me like those are the schools
we are, in fact, penalizing.

And also find that when I talk to parents during freshman orientation
and I tell them how bad the situation is on campus and how much we\'re
doing about it, they\'re thrilled to find out we\'re doing something
about it, and they\'re not as likely to take their son or daughter and
send them to a different college because we\'re admitting we have a
problem and we\'re admitting we\'re doing something about it.

And I explain to them if you\'re visiting a campus that says they don\'t
have a problem, they\'re either living under a rock or trying to pull
the wool over your eyes, and so the parents appreciate that honesty. And
so I guess I\'m finding this whole conversation and the fact that this
legislation exists to be ironic, foolish and counterproductive.

And I think we should be rewarding these very schools that are doing the
most about it.

MR. JONES: Thank you.

Yeah, I agree. You know, a very basic tenet of behavioral sciences and
more specifically the functional analysis of behavior as pointed you by
B.F. Skinner many years ago, behavior is a function of its consequences,
and I\'m wondering the extent to which there is buy-in by children,
parents, teachers, school systems, and states.

You know, what is the feedback loop or what is in it for them? I mean
obviously it\'s not working. I think we can say that. The reporting, you
know, on and on and on, but what\'s the incentive? Do we know what the
incentives are for folks to be involved in this particular initiative,
and then to what extent are those incentives being provided to
individuals?

MR. KESNER: I would say intrinsic motivators.

MR. JONES: We know that often doesn\'t work.

MR. KESNER: Right. And I guess part of that, part of the foundation of
No Child Left Behind is the flexibility that entities, states, local
entities can work around issues that are important at the home front and
then they can deal with developing programs for accountability around
those issues that they feel are important.

And perhaps that\'s what we need to look at with this more, and as we
look at states determining \-- and that\'s probably, I would think, why
that is in the law, that in conjunction with a representative sample of
local education agencies, what is it that\'s important within the state
and how do we go about it?

And you\'re right. There must be a motivator. There must be a reward,
and I think sometimes we look at doing the right thing. That\'s good,
and we should emulate that, but there needs to be more that principals
and superintendents can put in their pocket and say, \"I\'ve got some
resources to assist me in doing this and working with that.\"

I agree wholeheartedly. As Kim was talking about the higher ed., part of
the Campus Crime Act was not to identify schools, but just to list
numbers. These are things that occur. These are things that happen.

And it\'s part almost of a consumerism. Not only are schools reporting
campus crime, but they were reporting graduation rates, how their
athletes were doing, were they persisting, were they graduating, were
they dropping out, and those sorts of things, almost a consumerism type
of action or student right to know act.

And in many ways maybe this all gets at saying that label right up
front, \"persistently dangerous schools.\" So rather than offering a
motivator, maybe we\'re offering a dis-motivator.

MR. RASA: I think we heard a lot this morning about disincentives, and
so probably we don\'t need to go into that a whole lot, and there\'s
maybe even a whole lot shorter list of incentives that want to make
people get into the game, report the right numbers, and that somebody
would use that data.

I\'ll take you back again to that 2003 hearing. Right in the middle of
it \-- and it\'s a package about this thick of everybody\'s statements
and what people said like we\'re doing today \-- somebody said, \"Well,
who\'s the customer? Who\'s the customer for this?\"

And I think if you take it down to the lowest level, the customer is
your parent of the child that\'s going to that school where possibly
incidents are going on. If that parent doesn\'t know about those
incidents, and we heard a lot of information this morning from the
survey from the Vera Institute and all the other folks, if the parent
doesn\'t have that information and that information isn\'t accurate,
reliable, complete and on time, that kid will probably continue to go to
that school without the parent\'s knowledge that that school may have
some problems.

Now, as we all know, if the parent has some knowledge, and it\'s good
knowledge and good data, maybe they can operate better at some of these
parent-teacher meetings and that sort of thing and find out what\'s
really going on. What we need to do is make it easier for them to get
that data, and I think it\'s about as simple as that.

If we take it down to the lowest level of the customer, the parent, the
student, all right, what are we going to do for them in making sure that
they know what\'s going on at their school?

And it works from there. That\'s your incentive.

MR. JONES: You know, I just think that at an even more basic level,
just, you know, the involvement of children and parents in the whole
initiative I just think would do so much.

You know, I was at a meeting in New York City at Columbia, the Center
for Poverty for Children in Poverty, and we were just talking about the
importance of engagement, the importance of having individuals involved
with the development of particular initiatives and, therefore, their
buy-in. I mean, there were Native Americans around the table. There were
Asians. There were African Americans, and just the importance of being
part of the process.

We continue to do this. We come up with our programs and our ideas, and
we throw it out to people and say, \"We want you to do A, B, and C,\"
and they were not part of the process.

One of the things that we did in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in August
was to actually carry out focus groups with 100-plus crisis workers to
find out from them what they felt were the needs of the people, were
their needs in terms of the recovery process, problems that they had
faced, et cetera, possible solutions.

You know, I just don\'t hear any of that kind of thinking taking place
in this initiative, and therefore, it\'s not working.

You know, one thing that I haven\'t heard all day is the whole notion of
cultural competence. To what extent are we considering the belief
systems, the backgrounds, the race, the ethnicity, et cetera, of
individuals that are involved in these initiatives?

You know, that\'s across the board, you know, not only the children, but
the parents, you know, the administrators, et cetera. You know, what\'s
in it for them? And the extent to which they are not a part of
the developing process of the initiative, boy, I really don\'t think
it\'s going to work.

And we\'ve got lots and lots of research that demonstrates that, you
know, in psychology and sociology, et cetera. The whole notion of
engagement, getting individuals involved at the ground level, getting
their feelings, thoughts, et cetera, I just think that\'s a key piece
that\'s really missing.

MS. PRICE: Russell, if I could respond to that, while it may have done
it badly and not be ideal, but one of the elements about having states
make those definitions and determinations and the school districts,
that\'s what that\'s supposed to be doing.

Now, I mean, initially that was looking to having the community identify
the issues of that community around all of No Child Left Behind, but
this element particularly.

Now, it may have done it badly, and in the long run we may see that,
well, we need some base line definitions or something and then build on
that, but you know, that was the thinking when they developed this
legislation, and that was how they would incorporate that.

One element that I think Paul mentioned \-- I don\'t remember actually
if he did or if I just know it so I think he did \-- but while school
districts are not required to tell the Department of Education, there\'s
no requirement for them to tell the Department of Education what schools
are identified as persistently dangerous until they do their
consolidated report. There\'s two questions, and there they identify
numbers in December.

But the requirement is that 14 days prior to the beginning the first day
of school, they have to identify themselves, and generally it\'s done in
the newspapers, the results of who is identified as persistently
dangerous.

So parents then can see that and make the choice. Granted, if the school
only has one high school or only has one elementary school or vice
versa, there\'s not a lot of choice involved in that, but that 14 days.

And that\'s why Paul said we search the newspapers. We do Lexus Nexus
searches, Google searches and all of that, and that\'s how we accumulate
that information prior to when it\'s out there in the December
consolidated report.

You know, one of the things we\'re talking about is there are a lot of
issues regarding this legislation that, you know, are problems. You
know, I think we\'ve identified that. I think tomorrow is really where
we need to start saying, well, considering all we\'ve heard, how do we
move forward.

But you know, they made their best effort on the Hill when they drafted
this, and now we\'ve learned a whole lot more about it, and it needs
addressing.

MR. JONES: Yes, and I think, you know, I hear exactly what you\'re
saying. They were good intentions and having states involved, et cetera,
but I think the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and I think we
can see that it is not working and, therefore, there are some very
fundamental, yeah, basic steps at the very baseline level that need to
be taken that haven\'t been.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Belinda.

MS. SIMS: I appreciate all of the comments made after this panel because
some of the things that I was thinking about have been addressed. Kim, I
really appreciate what you were saying about sort of the irony of this
whole thing.

And I wanted to find out in the audits of the data systems or trying to
account for these numbers were you able to sort of figure out what was
done. What accounts for the improvements in the numbers that we see, for
example, for Pennsylvania?

There are three school years reported here, and it was 28 in one school
year down to 14, down to nine. What did they actually do? Is it just
that because they started, you know, identifying these problems and
providing whatever the consequences for the problems that the numbers
went down or did they actually do something else that would have been
more positive in terms of improving the climate and other things that
have been said about what we might need to do to address the problem?

MR. RASA: I\'ll let Bernie and then I\'ll fill in.

MR. TADLEY: Well, I\'m going to dodge the question unfortunately. We
actually didn\'t audit Pennsylvania, and some of the things we couldn\'t
really say as far as what happened between one year to the next.

In our audits we took the initial year that the PDS determinations were
made in the five states that we looked at, and we looked at issues about
how the policy was developed, whether the policy was being implemented
properly at the state and at the local level, and those are some of the
issues that we had.

Specifically for the improvement in Pennsylvania, I couldn\'t really
address as what may have happened. We really didn\'t do that through
audit.

MR. RASA: And Bernie is right. We didn\'t audit Pennsylvania. However,
when the data goes down like that, it doesn\'t necessarily mean \--
it\'s hopeful that there were improvements and hopefully that maybe
schools got better. Unfortunately in some cases because the data goes
down, it could be that there were appeals made and that the school may
have the same data and somehow was able to fix it, and we\'ve heard this
morning from New York. Again, I direct you to that report. It is the
most current on a big state, and there are issues that are plainly
stated in that report that talk about that situation where appeals are
made, the data disappears, or the data disappears and there\'s no
documentation, the worst case scenario.

Auditors don\'t like it at all when we go out and we don\'t find any
documentation to support a decision, and in this case where the data
goes down.

Certainly if we went out and we found out that there were action steps
that were taken in regards to previous year\'s data and that there was
verifiable information that showed that schools did improve somehow,
that would be your best case scenario.

MS. SIMS: I think I would be even more worried if numbers only improved
because appeals are made and then, you know, numbers are taken away
versus \-- even though there seem to be numerous problems with this
program, schools who do identify problems, if they don\'t then use that
information to make genuine improvements in what they\'re doing, that\'s
a bigger problem.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Mike.

MR. HERRMANN: Thank you.

It strikes me one of the real challenges for this committee is trying to
reach an acceptable level of improvement given existing resources, and
you know, when you start talking about different states and data
collection and whatnot, it\'s just a big apple to try and chew.

Paul, I know the department has spent a lot of time talking to states
about data that\'s collected. Are there two or three indicators that
hold some promise in terms of being somewhat consistent across states
that would be a starting point?

MR. KESNER: That\'s a good point, Mike, and you know because you\'re in
the seat what\'s going on.

A couple of points that we have, and I mentioned two from the UMIRS
collection, the uniform management collection. One of those particularly
would be the suspensions/expulsions for physical fighting. Truancy data
is also collected at a school basis and reported on a school basis, but
the problem with truancy are definitions of truancy vary even within
states, and so that\'s a challenge, but that\'s one there.

I\'d also offer the information that states currently gather for the Gun
Free Schools Act: number of firearms brought to campus or brought to
school, number of suspensions or expulsions based on that. Those are
data that are already being collected and could be incorporated, I think
within the infrastructure of what they\'re doing.

MR. HERRMANN: What about the victims of violent crime?

MR. KESNER: The victims of violent crime, what we\'ve been working with
in states and as we\'ve audited our monitored states \-- they audit; we
just monitor \-- is that we ask how states are carrying it out, and one
of the common features is that \-- and I thought this was a very unique
thing \-- the LEA has a form that they actually document on when a
student reports to them that they\'ve been a victim, and then they
document that that student has been informed of their opportunity to
transfer and asked, and the parents, have actually documents that the
parents are informed of that opportunity to transfer.

So I think tracking that, that information that\'s already being
collected, is something that\'s easy to do. It\'s already being there,
and it\'s already being collected.

MR. HERRMANN: Very good. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Dennis.

MR. ROMERO: Thank you.

First of all, I failed to thank the previous panel and this panel as
well. The information that you\'re providing us is just extremely
helpful, and it\'s a wonderful learning curve for me. I will say that,
and I appreciate the information.

A couple of thoughts and then a question as well. I hope that as we\'re
hearing all of this information that we really as a committee, we keep
in mind the importance of looking at this issue from a developmental
standpoint, and I think it was Shep who put it really well. We need to
look at the impact of children.

A famous abolitionist once said it\'s easier to work with children than
it is to fix adults, and I think that holds so true to this effort.

So needing to focus on prevention has to be at the forefront of this.

The second thing is looking at the role of parents. I mean, we\'re
hearing that parents seem to be out of the loop. So what are ways that
we can better engage the parents and get parents more involve more in
the loop of things?

I said in the prior panel that I\'m concerned about the issue of trauma.
We are not focusing on trauma enough and the impact of trauma, the
victimization of trauma and the stigma that\'s associated when a child
is identified as either being bullied or being singled out, segregated.

The trauma of that child and the lifelong scars really need to be given
a real look.

Having said that, my question is for Paul. Paul, in your third slide,
you mentioned the Department of Education\'s efforts. You mentioned the
non-regulatory guidance, the workshops and meetings.

Then you went into the data grants, and you mentioned something about
you would not \-- and maybe I\'m wrong, and I wanted you to sort of
speak to this \-- you mentioned that the data grants were not focusing
on substance abuse, were not focusing on drugs. Was that how I
understood it?

MR. KESNER: No. The data grants actually are grants to offer support to
states for all the areas within safe and drug free schools. So enhancing
data collection not only with victimization, but also with drugs,
substance abuse, how states monitor and collect that data and enhancing
the infrastructure, if you will.

I almost refer to them as infrastructure grants. Beefing up how states
can collect data on all of the issues across safe and drug free schools,
and actually they\'re called \-- I\'m trying to find my sheet here with
the name of it \-- but they\'re called data grants for the collection of
substance abuse and violence prevention program grants.

So those grants, while they were only offered for two years, funds were
only available for two years, and I believe there may have been 17 or 18
states who took advantage of that; they were there to help states
increase their infrastructure an their capacity for data collection.

MR. ROMERO: Have those grants ended already?

MR. KESNER: No. They\'re in process.

MR. ROMERO: Okay.

MR. KESNER: Yes.

MR. ROMERO: Thank you.

MR. KESNER: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Kim.

MS. DUDE: Speaking of data, have surveys been done in not only the
schools that are PDS schools, but non-PDS schools, surveys of students
to find out their perception of the safety of those schools?

And then also, coincidentally, to know what their alcohol and drug use
may happen to be, to see if there\'s any correlation. Do the students at
the PDS schools actually feel less safe than the students at other
schools, or is their alcohol and drug use higher than the non-PDS
schools?

Because if what we\'re really going after is, as somebody said earlier,
their perception of safety as well as whether or not they are safe,
perception of safety has a whole lot to do with your ability to feel
like you can learn and feel comfortable and welcomed in that school.

So I\'m very curious about if those kinds of surveys have been done as
well or are we strictly looking at incident data?

MR. KESNER: I don\'t know that any have been done. They don\'t report
that to us. What we have found in some instances is that that does
happen, and one state hasn\'t had any definitions of persistently
dangerous, and I believe it is Florida. Part of their process is if a
school on paper is persistently dangerous, then there is a survey of the
community of the students to see what are the community\'s feelings
about or thoughts or perception of the school and of the safeness of
that school.

But, no, there are none that I know of that have occurred formally.

MS. DUDE: Because it seems to me in a survey like that you could also
have questions like have you ever brought a gun to school or have you
ever bought or sold drugs or used drugs in schools; that it would be
interesting to look at the schools that really do \-- the PDS schools
that really are doing something about it. At least that\'s my
perception, that they\'re doing something about it, to see if that use
changes because they are actually enforcing those rules.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Seth.

MR. NORMAN: I\'ve been hearing inconsistencies from different states, is
what I\'ve heard you all say in these reports. Under the reporting
section of the act, is there a list or are there definitions?

For instance, you said that truancy varies from state to state. Now,
would it be beneficial if this act said under the reporting section
truancy means, and it\'s defined, or crime means or serious violence
means, and you had a definition, and the state had to follow those
specific definitions in their reports? Would it be helpful?

MR. KESNER: It certainly would be helpful in collecting and analyzing
the data and aggregating the data. Part of the flexibility has to lean
upon what the state determines, but certainly in our guidance we offer
things that states could look at in making determinations. While it\'s
not regulatory or it\'s not mandated, we do offer some guidelines that
states can use in making determinations.

But you\'re right. It certainly does help when you have common
definitions.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay.

PARTICIPANT: I believe I heard in an interagency meeting a month or two
ago that education across the department is developing new core
measures; is that correct? Measures across the agency, not only in the
area of safe and drug free schools, but in academic achievement.

MS. PRICE: We have what you might be referring to. It\'s not core
measures, but the Secretary has priorities, and her priorities are of
academic achievement. So as we develop our grants, even those grants
that are from safe and drug free schools, that academic achievement is
an element and outcome of those grants.

And so that might \--

MS. SOLBERG: Those are measures, six or seven measures related to that;
is that correct? Or at least that\'s what we were told. My question was
going to be is there a measure in the core measures that education uses
that measures school violence so that we have some kind of a consistent
set of numbers to compare across all school districts.

MR. KESNER: One of the things that\'s happening is the EDEN System, and
I can\'t remember what the acronym means, but it\'s educational data,
and it\'s a consolidation of how the department receives data. And
around that there has to be \-- for instance, I mentioned our
consolidated state performance report. What will soon happen over the
next couple of years is that we will receive \-- right now we receive
the consolidated state reports as Word documents or PDF documents and we
have to go down through, and we have common questions like how many
persistently dangerous schools did you identify this past year, and they
plug that number in.

What will happen as a result of EDEN is that there will be a collection,
and there will be core elements described more in the academic areas,
reading comprehension, mathematical abilities or whatever.

But there is a movement to consolidate the data in the way we see the
data. For instance, I understand, although I haven\'t seen it, that in
the future not only will we get the number of persistently dangerous
school in the state, but they will also be identified by the LEAs that
were persistently dangerous because of the data collection mechanisms
rolling together.

But as far as common core definitions, there are some, but it\'s not all
the way across yet.

MR. TADLEY: I think one other thing I\'d like to add to that is through
our audit work we could see where there were issues in a school district
where it wasn\'t even consistent from school to school within a school
district on how they reported upon things, and you know, that was
difficult for us at times to see how they couldn\'t have the same
incident happen at two different places, but it was determined to be
something different at one school as opposed to another.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Susan.

MS. KEYS: Thank you.

I wanted to sort of build on the point that Kim was making and also from
our earlier panel where we had input about the value and importance of
school climate and the perceptions of people that live and work in those
environments about that, and you also mentioned in one of your slides
that student curves about fights on school grounds could be another type
of data that could be used.

And it seems to me that if we really want to have a program where
there\'s the integrity of data, we need to be thinking about how we
build sort of a network of data sources, that we don\'t put all of our
tricks in one tool kit, which is incidents, but that we look at how we
really define a school environment and we do that in a number of ways.

And my question to you is really the feasibility of developing those
multiple sources and the feasibility of asking states to develop a
report that moves beyond just looking at incidents, but to some of the
other factors that we\'ve talked about is important.

MR. KESNER: The first thing I think of is what our current legislation
asks is for two things, for states to develop a policy and identify
persistently dangerous schools and then offer transfer to those students
in those schools and to those students who are victims.

Ideally it would be and I think a challenge to states, should be how do
you want your schools to be perceived both internally, externally; how
do we move toward a more supportive learning environment.

As we heard from the earlier presentation, there are several surveys.
There are ways to connect to that information and to get that
information. So in an omnibus sort of way, it certainly would be
legislatable, I would think, that states report how that is going on and
what is happening within that state.

MR. JONES: Just a comment and then a quick question, but a couple of
things, two things that I just hear that I think we really need to
consider is Seth talking about the glossary. Once terms are actually
defined, and then the need for a consistent data core that Mary Ann is
making reference to, because without either of those, boy, we\'re going
to miss the boat again. I mean it just ain\'t going to get it done.
Those are just basic, basic steps.

But I\'m just wondering. In terms of the children that are victimized
and then those children that are actually committing the offense, I\'m
wondering to what extent data are being collected on those children and
then possible interventions.

I\'m kind of putting on my clinical hat, and then the interventions that
are being engaged and what those data are looking like.

MR. KESNER: In our monitoring we haven\'t found a lot of information
about those sorts of things. Actually we were pretty tickled when we
found out the number of students who had transferred and that they had
transferred and offered the transfer to these students, but we have not
tracked that number, Russell, to this point. It would be good to know
though.

MR. JONES: Yes, indeed, it would be.

MR. RASA: Maybe if I could get in, actually I\'m still thinking about
what everybody has been saying, and this idea of a school climate survey
and multiple data sources and how are we going to know if a school is
having a problem; what data is easily gotten for folks either at the
school level, the district level, the state level, and how does it come
up to us?

I mean that\'s a big issue, and there\'s a lot of work involved there.
Here\'s the thing. In our reauthorization ideas that we have in our
paper that we submitted to you all, the first one talks about the idea
of having all violent incident data being reported that goes to the
state code.

Now, it would seem to me that each state code would have that all laid
out, and we know that they do. Different states have longer lists than
others, but if a parent were to know that any violent incident at that
school was going to be listed, categorized, and they would be informed
about it so that they can make some decisions, I think there\'s the body
of data that we need to get at.

You know, after doing five states and doing the work that we\'ve done,
we put that as one of our number one issues that we\'re putting in front
of the department.

School climate survey is another group of data, and we do like this idea
of multiple data sources. All right? It would seem that the listing of
the indicators of school violence, these incidents, is a red flag, and
hopefully the principal, the CEO at the school level, is also doing some
information to find out what really is going on, which ties you into
that school climate survey.

But you almost need \-- I don\'t know which comes first, to tell you the
truth, and that\'s why you all are here. All right? We\'re just the
auditors on this, but this idea of having multiple sources of data and
sort of confirming each other is a good idea.

MR. LEDBETTER: Just a statement. I promised David I would keep this very
short. It\'s not a question so much as it is a statement.

I\'m in agreement that we need some workable definitions of these terms,
but realistically, when we use a term like violent incidents, what
constitutes a violent incident, I can only speak from one school\'s
perspective. I won\'t try to speak nationally.

But if we have, with 1,100 students, if we have ten fights during the
year, nine of those ten fights are between girls. Every one of them are
a result of one of them flirting with the other one\'s boyfriend
somewhere at the mall or someplace on the weekend or one of them calling
somebody\'s girlfriend or boyfriend, and it all starts someplace else,
happens someplace else, but it comes to school.

Now, does that make a school a dangerous environment? Now, those are the
kinds of things that factor into a lot of this, I believe. We\'ve got to
be very careful that whatever definitions that we look at, that there
needs to be some leeway in it because it may have nothing to do with
what happened at the school. That\'s just the only place where the two
of them came into contact.

And all of a sudden, if we\'re not very careful, we have branded a
school with this terminology in the newspaper that kills the school, and
I know that probably one out of ten incidents at my school where there
is a fight is something that happened at school. The other nine were
things that happened somewhere else and they come to school. But nine
out of ten of ours are between the girls. They\'re not between boys. The
boys, I don\'t know if they just don\'t want to fight over the girls or
what \--

(Laughter.)

MR. LEDBETTER: \-- but the girls, they\'re the ones that we have to deal
with when it comes to fighting.

Now, I know that our situation is probably not typical of some schools,
but would that make us become a school with a violent climate? You know,
I don\'t think so, but whatever the definitions are that we look at, I
think that there\'s a lot more to consider than just whether or not
there was X number of fights at a school and so forth.

So that\'s all.

CHAIRMAN LONG: I would like to, now that he\'s back, Bill, this is for
you because when it has been repeated two or three times, it becomes a
Bondism. So I\'d like to repeat that Bondism and then tie it back to
something that was mentioned here by Rich, and that is \-- and I\'ve
heard it mentioned a few times \-- that we change behavior by the
certainty of the consequences.

And then this is just a question for you, Rich, because I heard earlier
that you said there were some superintendents that would not sign the
reports, and that there were some notices that were not sent out.

So I was curious as I put those two together in my mind. What were the
consequences associated with no doing that? What were the consequences
for those superintendents that didn\'t sign those? What were the
consequences for those schools that didn\'t send those out?

MR. RASA: Okay. The example that I was using actually came out of the
New York report that Jerry was going over this morning, and I\'m as
interested in what the consequences were on that case as you are because
there\'s a good reason that when folks submit data reports that we like
this idea of certifying it, certify it that it is accurate, reliable,
and complete, and we can use it.

In cases where \-- and I\'ll just give you my opinion from what I read
\-- if a superintendent did not sign a certification, there\'s probably
a good reason for that, and somebody at the district level should really
be looking into that to find out what the barrier was there.

If there was a weakness in the data system and that was preventing that
superintendent from saying, \"You can rely on my data. It\'s accurate,
reliable and complete,\" folks need to know what that weakness is and do
something about it.

The superintendent should be able to sign a certification and put some
caveats into that certification that other than these things or taking
into account these weaknesses, I am signing this certification, the idea
of not signing \-- well, let\'s put it this way. That\'s a red flag.
Somebody should be looking into it.

Certainly the state should be aware of how many times certifications
come up to them where data is rolled up from districts and then sent on
to us at the federal government because there\'s this idea of a
certification in the information that we get as well, and it\'s real
important that if we start seeing states not signing certifications that
I know Deborah would be asking questions and Bill Monduleski and Paul.

But from an auditor point of view, that\'s a real red flag.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And I appreciate that because we can talk all we want,
but then if we do not follow the process, and we\'re here to talk about
changes, but if we don\'t follow that process, there is no reliability
and we can\'t make those changes.

MR. RASA: That\'s right.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And I\'ve always wondered this, and you\'ve clarified
this for me. I always wondered what auditors did and now you told me you
read audits from other states.

MR. RASA: We absolutely do, and I\'ve got to tell you in New York, the
Comptroller\'s Office puts out some very good audits. Anybody who read
the Rosalyn School District audit on how a superintendent, assistant
superintendent stole a lot of money, we sent that out to all our
auditors for them to read that audit report.

And like I said, I read their most recent one on this subject, and it\'s
an affirmation of what we\'ve found in the five states that we\'ve
looked at. So we\'re glad they did the work.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you.

Shep.

MR. KELLAM: I\'m worried about this conversation. I don\'t think we can
get there from here. I think that the problem is not so much to improve
the reliability of the data by itself. I think there\'s some inherent
problems as you all have been suggesting with the basic idea of finding
out which schools are unsafe.

And the problem, I think, is that, as I said several times now and
before that, we\'re not thinking developmentally about the kids who are
coming into a high school, where they come from and where does the
problem start, which is the basic public health notion. We\'re acting as
if the problem is where the kids are, and that somehow the reporting
about the high school is going to allow us to judge the high school in
terms of its environment for my kid.

Number one, it\'s extremely important that we understand that our real
purpose is to somehow turn this data into fixing issues and not just, in
fact, being pejorative. We\'ve all agreed today. The problem is how to
do that, and we can\'t do it with an isolated system. It has to be
somehow tied into monitoring kids\' progress in general in the school
around the central mission of the school

And just as no kid gets left behind has a big emphasis on assessment,
this is another parameter, and we\'re getting closer when we say, okay,
multiple sources of data. The next step is integrating these multiple
sources of data into a single system which allows strategies to be
developed which, in fact, move the school building, and not just the
school building.

I went to a wonderful city high school in Baltimore as a kid, and I knew
damned well that the kids who came there were attracted to 14 tracks
literally. I was in A1 or whatever in the hell it was D1 or something,
and there were kids in D14. They didn\'t go to college.

If you ask where is the distribution of anguish and fighting, it was
across those tracks and involved kids who, in fact, felt like they were
failing and they were moving out elsewhere than into college and the
mainstream.

Now, why am I saying that? Because this process begins early on in first
grade. The socialization within a few weeks of first grade will allow
you to track kids, and we\'ve shown this and many studies, including our
own work in both Chicago and in Baltimore, you could start with fall of
first grade teacher ratings as to who\'s aggressive/disruptive and have
a hell of a good fix on (a) the reading achievement over first grade,
but the age 40 to 50 drug abuse problems and criminality and antisocial
personality disorder.

In other words, there\'s a development trajectory you have to pay
attention to, and I think that it\'s very important for us (a) not to
create information systems in isolation because they end up being
pejorative, but rather, they need to be integrated into formative
processes of fixing the issue, and unless we develop that kind of
information system, it\'s not going to happen, and the punishments are
far worse than the positive consequences, and so you get unreliability.

Worse, you don\'t fix the problem. So this process, this legislation has
to be integrated with the whole mission of the school system, and when
we talk about a school, we\'re talking about in high school the
consequences of preschool and elementary school where these trajectories
really begin to drive kids into different tracks and different modes of
behavior, if you will.

And it\'s fixable. The fact is that these early predictors are really
much more malleable, as some guys were saying earlier, the last panel,
and you guys are nodding yes. I mean, it\'s fixable early on. It\'s very
unfixable later on. It\'s a difficult, and in fact, it keeps a lot of us
employed and doing prevention research and police work and all kinds of
things.

I mean, increasingly we\'re in the business of, in fact, studying and
making our livings out of, you know, problem behavior. Well, I think
that we ought to recommend that, in fact, we start by training teachers
and Schools of Education. I think we ought to start by indicating that
the criteria that are important in first grade, kids are not going to be
carrying guns to school in first grade. They might by middle school, but
the criteria early on are predictive of later.

I mean, the same kids are, in fact, pushing and shoving and inattentive
early on or are not being socialized properly, are the kids who have the
big problems later on. That group, that population of kids that are
consistently antisocial, age appropriately antisocial are the population
we\'re talking about.

So I just think we need to be integrative of information systems. We
need to think formatively and not summatively, and so on.

Anyway, that\'s my hear aid going on.

CHAIRMAN LONG: We have time for one very quick wrap-up question, and
then, Catherine, I think you have something. Do you have something to
hand out? Okay. Distribute and then the lunch will be held in the
training room.

Is there one final question? You\'re on the clock, Russell.

MR. JONES: I\'m on the clock.

You know, I think the bottom line, and I think we\'re back to where we
ended up at the last meeting. You know, to get the job done, you know,
the Department of Education by itself can\'t do it, you know. I mean,
schools can\'t do it. States can\'t do it. It\'s all about partnering.
You know, it\'s what we said before. It\'s partnering, you know,
bringing in the fourth multipliers such as psychologists, social
workers, et cetera, those organizations to assist in the contextualizing
of information and the contextualizing of projects, and then in terms of
the data collection.

I mean, we do that well. You know, we\'re trained in that, you know,
collecting the data, interpreting the data, making sense of it. You
know, again, just back to the role of partnering, and I think the extent
to which we do that, I think we\'re going to move this train much
further along the track than where it is now.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you.

And with that, a very special thank you to Paul and Bernie and Rich.
Thank you again so much for coming and sharing your expertise with us.

Let\'s give them a thank you.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: It is now 1:05. We will break for lunch. Catherine will
distribute that information to you.

MS. DAVIS: This is the Department of Education\'s non-regulatory
guidance that Paul referred to for your reference. So you all can go to
lunch, and I\'ll just \-- they\'ll be waiting for you when you get back.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And we will start at 1:55.

(Whereupon, at 1:08 p.m., the meeting was recessed for lunch, to
reconvene at 1:55 p.m., the same day.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

(2:02 p.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: If we could have our next panel please come up. We\'ll
start with Susan and then we\'ll go \-- the order is important so that
the folks who are flipping things on the screen, so that they\'ll know.

So if I may, let me introduce our third panel for the day. First of all,
on my left, Susan Martz, currently the Director of the Office of Program
Support Service at the New Jersey Department of Education. Since joining
the department in 1988, Susan has served in a variety of roles in the
areas of grants management, development and special education. Susan
holds a Master of Arts in educational psychology from Rutgers Graduate
School of Education, and B.S. in psychology from Rutgers University, and
holds the following state issued certifications: school administrator,
principal supervisor, elementary school teacher, teacher of the
handicapped and nursery school teacher, quite a broad range of
experience here.

Welcome, Susan.

And on Susan\'s left, Mr. Cory Green is the Senior Director for the
Division of NCLB Program Coordination at the Texas Education Agency. Mr.
Green has been with the Texas Education Agency since 1995. Prior to TEA,
his teaching experience includes nine years in high school agriculture
science and technology.

Mr. Green is a graduate of Tarleton State University where he received
his Bachelor of Science degree and Master of Science teaching degrees in
agriculture education.

Welcome, Cory.

And on Cory\'s left is Meredith. Meredith Rolfe is the Administrator of
the Safe and Healthy Kids Program office of the California Department of
Education. Prior experience includes SDSFC Coordinator in a large
California school district; also Safe and Drug Free Schools Coordinator
for the SAC Meadow County Office of Education, and she has written
several state sponsored drug and tobacco use prevention curricula.

Welcome, Meredith.

Janelle Krueger has been a consultant with Prevention Initiatives,
initiatives at the Colorado Department of Education for 16 years. She
has served as a program director for the Safe and Drug Free Schools and
Communities Program since 1998.

She also specializes in police-school partnerships, having been a
certified peace office for 15 years. In addition to these duties,
Janelle is also the Homeland Security Coordinator for her department
which lends an additional perspective to her focus on school safety.

And welcome to all four of you. We look forward to hearing from you and
all of the things that you can lend to us, for us with your years of
experience.

And with that we\'ll start with Susan.

MS. MARTZ: Good afternoon, everyone.

You probably have copies of the PowerPoint presentation. As you can see,
I have a lot to say, but I\'ll try to make it briefer than what it
appears.

I do sit before you, and I think this morning was very informative for
me, as the representative of the state department that has really, we
believe, tried to follow both the statute and the non-regulatory
guidance.

We\'re using existing data, which is something that everyone has been
discussing this morning. It is reported. It\'s statewide reported data.
We use it for reporting on the UMIRS as well as Gun Free Schools Act, as
well as to our state legislature on a yearly basis.

We\'re also a state that has identified persistently dangerous schools.
We\'ve been audited by the Office of the Inspector General, and we are a
recipient of the Title IV data grant that you\'ve talked about. So
hopefully I won\'t be saying too much in addition to what I had prepared
because of all of the things I heard this morning.

Basically I just wanted to give you a brief overview of what we tried to
do in our state in the development of our policy. We developed it in
cooperation with a representative sampling of our LEAs. That in and of
itself was a challenge, and it took us quite a long time to do that.

Once we developed the policy, we shared it with our Attorney General\'s
Education and Law Enforcement Working Group, which is active in our
state, as well as our NCLB Advisory Council and our Leaders for
Educational Excellence, which represents all of our state education
organizations, including the state PTA.

We had it approved by our state Board of Education. We also believe that
our school districts are all compliant with this regulation, and we
require our two school administrators to certify their compliance when
they comply with their No Child Left Behind funding on a yearly basis.

I wanted to begin with the Victims of Violent Criminal Offenses
provision. I know we spent a lot of time this morning listening about
persistently dangerous schools and the victims piece came in a little
bit, but for us it was really important to carefully describe this
provision of the statute.

We worked with our Attorney General\'s Office, the Division of Criminal
Justice to come up with the definitions of the criminal offenses, and we
tried to make them clear for all of our school administrators so that
they would be better able to identify if a student was a victim of a
violent criminal offense.

I believe all of you have a copy of our policy in your packets. I think
you do. And, again, I just gave that to you so that you would have a
sense of what we were trying to work on.

On page 8 it starts with all of our definitions. We go through homicide,
assault, sexual assault, and we try to really help our districts
understand what they were supposed to do.

Additionally, this section applies to completed offenses as well as
threats and attempts, and we made that determination, again, based upon
the discussion with our Criminal Justice Division.

Other than that, you can see our definition of the criteria for victims
on pages 6 and 7. A referral had to be made to law enforcement and also
there are several other criteria there that you can see were carefully
defined.

Districts that are receiving NCLB funds have to provide these victims,
if they are victims while on school grounds, they have to provide them
with the option to transfer within ten days and complete the transfer
within 30 days.

And the one thing that I just wanted to also let you know is I think you
have in your packet some forms that we use for our electronic violence
and vandalism data collection system. There are four forms there.

As part of our implementation of unsafe school choice, we\'ve included
on our victims page an area where we collect whether or not a student
was a victim of a violent criminal offense.

I know I\'m talking quickly, but our districts have to report all
incidents, and then there\'s an offender page. They have to describe the
offender. There is a victims page where they have to describe the
victim, and on that page they have to indicate whether or not the
student was a victim of a violent criminal offense. If so, if the
transfer option was given because there is a transfer option, and if so,
whether or not the parent accepted the option.

Our persistently dangerous schools provision is on pages 2 through 5 of
our policy, and our staff in our school districts in New Jersey by
regulation are required to report offenses, and the districts are
required to report incidents.

Our chief school administrators are required on an annual basis to
verify the data that they report in the system, and it is a signed
verification form that they have to send back to us.

Additionally, we provide them with guidance on a yearly basis and
training, and I also, I think, included in your packets \-- there\'s
information that you\'ll see. There are definitions of different
offenses, as well as \-- and I\'m looking at Catherine because I assume
they\'re in the packets \-- and there\'s also scenarios that we
developed, and they\'re kind of descriptions of things that they might
see, and there are considerations for them to make a decision as to
whether it might be a fight or a simple assault.

These are all things that we developed to try to help with consistency
across our districts and across the schools within our districts because
we recognize that the whole data collection system is a very difficult
one.

As I said before, we\'re getting one of the Title IV data grants, and
we\'re using money that we\'re getting through that data grant to help
improve the system, both the reporting component of it so that people
can more easily access their information, but also we\'re developing a
video tape that will be given out to all of the schools to help them so
that they can use it for training within their schools so that people
know how to appropriately categorize or classify the incidents.

Our criteria is a little complex. I\'m not going to go into it in
detail, but with our schools, if they have seven or more Category A
offenses, and there\'s a list of those offenses on the next slide, or a
score of one or greater on an index of Category B offenses, they are
considered dangerous. The persistent definition comes in if they meet
that criteria for three years in a row.

And if you look at the Category A offenses, we have statute in our state
as well as regulation that requires that kids be removed if they commit
one of these offenses. So it was determined by our group of local folks
that helped us to develop the criteria that those should absolutely be
ones that we count.

And we did a statistical analysis to come up with which \-- how to set
the numbers, and I\'m not going to go into a lot of detail on that, but
you can see that a lot of consideration was given as to how we were
going to define these.

And then our Category B offenses, again through a statistical analysis,
we determined that these really were affected by school size more, and
so we applied a formula to these in order to control for school size to
make it a more normative curve as we define the index.

But as you can see, the offenses that we\'re talking about, there are
quite a number of them here. We\'re talking about firearms offenses,
aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, gang fights, robbery. I know
harassment and bullying was an issue that everyone talked about this
morning, and that is included in one of the offenses that we count when
we determine whether or not a school is persistently dangerous.

The parental notification, again, is one where the schools must offer
within 15 calendar days of the notice and they also have to be compliant
by submitting documentation to our regional offices for them to check
that the schools have offered the transfers and completed the transfer
options. And we have folks that are looking at that again on a yearly
basis.

And as is required by the statute, the transfers have to occur before
the beginning of the school year.

The other thing that we\'re requiring are corrective action plans from
all of our schools. So if they are determined to be persistently
dangerous, they have to submit a corrective action plan to us.

We also meet with the schools in order to review what the requirements.
We give them what we call a press kit, how to go about notifying the
public as to what has happened, the requirements, the notification to
parents, what should be included in the letter, and we work with them a
lot on preparing them to be able to address their community in regard to
what they\'re seeing and why they were designated as persistently
dangerous and what they are going to do about it.

It has really proved to be very successful in the sense that the schools
or the principals have met with the community and the parents, and in
talking through the actions that they believe they\'re going to take in
the next school year in order to address the incidents, we\'ve had very
few transfers or parents wanting a transfer option.

We are also one of the states that has identified early warning schools,
and for us early warning schools are those schools that meet the
persistently dangerous school criteria, and they meet it for two years.

So they haven\'t met it for three years, yet they\'ve met it for two. We
meet with them. They also have to do corrective action plans in order to
address the issues.

The other thing that we\'ve done is for any of our schools that were
identified as early warning schools or persistently dangerous schools
we\'re trying to provide them with some additional technical assistance.
We created a technical assistance project at one of our institutions of
higher education. It provides technical assistance to all schools in
regard to their Title IV applications and how to go about setting
outcomes and selecting programs, but it also provides specific on-site
technical assistance to any persistently dangerous schools or early
warning schools to help them use their data to assess their problems and
to develop a corrective action plan.

And these are our numbers. As you heard this morning, the numbers have
gone down. You know, there are obviously two things that we\'re looking
at here. One is are the numbers declining because people aren\'t
reporting because they don\'t want to be identified or are the numbers
declining because people are implementing better programs and really
addressing the needs in their district?

Related but not required by the unsafe school choice options, we also do
a report to our legislature on a yearly basis regarding number of
incidents, and we\'ve identified about 19 different schools that we feel
have had dramatic declines in their incidents.

And we have developed a protocol to go on site now to review what
they\'ve done to determine whether these declines are because they\'re
not reporting their data they should be reporting it or whether they\'re
due to best practices.

And we really did take that approach because we just weren\'t going to
assume up front that the declines were because they weren\'t reporting.
So we\'ll be doing that as this year goes on.

As I said before, we also were audited, and I\'ll sort of give you the
other side of the audit. We weren\'t one of those nice states. We
weren\'t very nice to the auditors. We were nice while they were out
there. We gave them everything they asked for.

And as you can see from the dates here, it took about a year. Actually
we were in communication almost every week because there was always
something that they needed or wanted or that they were going to look at.

And I think the one thing for us, they did visit, I think, three or four
schools in our state. We have 650. It was difficult to accept the audit
when it came in because we felt there were a lot of things that we did
right that weren\'t addressed. And it\'s probably not the auditor\'s
job, but we would have felt better if they at least had acknowledged the
fact that we followed the policy and we followed the law. We wrote the
policy the way we were supposed to. We were, you know, being pretty
comprehensive, but they did have some issues, and some of the issues
they had we agreed with. The consistency of the data certainly is one of
the issues that, as you\'ve heard today, everyone is really taking a
look at.

Just to give you an idea of how it worked for us and how there were
positive and negative impacts on that audit, it was very time consuming,
and I\'m sure it was time consuming for them, too, but we were told up
front. We were one of the states that had some schools that had appealed
the persistently dangerous schools designation, and we had awarded
appeals to a number of our schools, and the review that we did was based
upon the incidence that resulted in them being categorized as
persistently dangerous, and the auditors felt that we really needed to
go out to those schools and review all incidents before we could grant
an appeal.

You know, in hindsight, okay, that might have been a good idea, but we
didn\'t do it, but we rectified the situation because that was the only
year we were going to offer the appeal. From that point on, we had
already set in place that schools would have to verify their data before
we would even use the data in order to calculate or determine
persistently dangerous schools.

So that became a moot point because we were not doing it anymore. So our
schools now can appeal the persistently dangerous school designation
because of their data. They submitted it, they verified it; we\'re
considering them to be the accurate numbers.

There were some other issues regarding our definitions, and when the
audit report went to the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, that
office didn\'t uphold some of those. In other words, they supported the
state in that we had to set our own definitions, and as long as we were
being consistent with those, that was appropriate.

We did include in our definitions, especially for things like simple
assault, consideration of a child\'s age or developmental age, the
chronological or developmental, because we did have schools, you know,
with kindergarten children who were reporting assault on staff members
if a child was having a tantrum and then hit the teacher while the child
was having a tantrum.

And according to our definition, that\'s not a simple assault. So we had
to take that into consideration.

But ultimately, we\'re working with the Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools now as a result of the audit to do 90-day updates on how we are
progressing in order to meet the requirement.

And then the other issue that we have, and I\'ll speak more about this a
little later, has to do with special services schools, and in our policy
we don\'t designate them as persistently dangerous schools even if they
have high incidence because they have special education. All special
education students are sent there for a reason, and I\'ll go into that a
little bit more, but that\'s another area that we\'re currently working
with the department on.

So we\'ve done a lot of work in the area. We thought we were doing a
pretty good job and we know that there\'s a lot more to do, but I did
want to start out by saying that we do believe in our state that there
has been some positive impact. You\'ve heard it today. It certainly did
raise the awareness of the importance of school safety and elevated its
status in our state, anyway, by virtue of the fact that we had to write
a policy on it.

It also focused the attention of districts on the need to really analyze
their data. They\'ve been reporting this data to us for a long time.
We\'ve been trying to get them to really pay attention to their data,
and this forced the issue.

It has motivated schools to implement programs to address specific
problems, and it has fostered a communication with the community, both
at the state level, because we convened our advisory panel to help us
develop the policy, but also at the local level, as I told you before,
with parents having to talk more with their principals about what was
going to happen in their schools.

How much of this was an impact of the actual federal law and how much of
it was an impact of what we were doing in our state anyway, it\'s hard
to really tease that out. We do have regulations regarding reporting. We
have a statute and regulation regarding if someone knowingly falsifies
the record. We have a regulation that districts must take action.

We do have also harassment, intimidation bullying policy requirement in
our state. The school districts have to annually report to the public on
their incidents of violence and vandalism once a year in our state, and
we do have a security initiative now in our state where there have been
on-site visits in our schools.

So we have a lot going on. So it\'s really hard to know which had more
impact.

As you can see just from some of my sidebar comments that we have felt
challenged trying to implement this. The database itself, identifying
persistently dangerous schools out of 2,500 schools, providing training
and follow-up on those that are considered to be persistently dangerous
has all put a strain on our department, although we\'re trying to do it
the best that we can.

The districts really have been challenged, especially if they have to
notify parents of the designation and they don\'t have an option for
transfer. That certainly has proved to be a challenge for them.

Also, the requirement to transfer students to schools that are at or
near capacity has just created situations where those classrooms get
larger, and it\'s very difficult for the schools to deal with that, as
well as trailers. Sometimes they\'re the option. So, you know, who\'s to
say that the trailer is more safe than the school that the child was
moved from?

Very short turn-around for us in our state because we\'re trying to use
current year data between the time we identify the schools and the time
the schools have to give notice and the time that they have to transfer.
It\'s like a matter of a month. So it\'s very difficult for us in that
regard.

And also for the LEAs, it\'s really a challenge for them to implement
this without additional resources.

Now, I know I\'m like really short on time, although my friend on my
left told me I could take a little bit of his if I had to. I do have in
the packet also, you can see some of our concerns regarding transfers,
regarding the relationship \-- and I want to emphasize this \-- between
the SEA and the LEAs that we\'ve identified.

Rather than us now providing them with technical assistance and
training, there is a bit of an animosity there and a lack of trust
because we now have identified them as persistently dangerous schools,
and it\'s in the press, and it doesn\'t make for the best situation.

Also, there\'s a tension between the parents and the schools, as I said
before. If they don\'t have a transfer option, that is very difficult.

There is a lack of correlation in our state between the schools that
we\'re identifying and how the communities view those schools. We have
to work on that. We may have to change our criteria because we\'re not
sure that we\'re really identifying the right schools at this point.

High incidence occurring in a school based upon the behavior of one or
two students is also an issue that we\'re trying to deal with. Sometimes
you have repeat offenders, and so the numbers go up in that school and
it\'s one child, and that really is not a very good way to be
identifying schools.

Also, the lack of credibility in our state about the law itself because
there are so few states identifying persistently dangerous schools. So
there really is a question about the law itself.

Now, to just quickly go over some of the recommendations, of course the
first, and I think you probably would have expected this, is to repeal
it. Just repeal it the way it\'s written. It\'s not working for us.

But really, we understand that or we feel that the labeling without
support is a true problem for us, and I know that there are other states
besides New Jersey that are doing a lot of things in this area, and they
don\'t really need a federal regulation to tell them to do it.

The inconsistencies and variability across the states, of course, also
doesn\'t allow for a meaningful analysis at the federal level as to
whether or not it\'s working.

And if repealing it is not an option, then recommendations if retained.
Our state is looking for uniform criteria. I know some states are not.

A clear definition of what a persistently dangerous school is, as well
as some dedicated funding. We truly believe, and especially at the LEA
level, if they can get some funding for corrective actions, for
providing transfers, transportation to transferred students, for placing
perpetrators in alternative programs, that would be very helpful

Additionally, we are emphasizing the importance of focusing on the
victims of the violent criminal offenses. We believe that that really
affects far more students and would rather see our time spent there than
spent on running data and identifying schools as persistently dangerous.

Also, we believe that there is a true benefit to intervening with the
victims of violent criminal offense. I mean that they really \--
although they don\'t get the headlines, that is the section of the
provision that really we should be concentrating on.

Okay. Extending the time lines would be helpful. If we are to use
current year data, that we really need to some flexibility there.

The exemption of special education, as I stated before we think is very
important because many of these schools are including very aggressive,
violent kids, and they\'re put there because the LEAs can\'t work with
them, and we either have to figure out a way to come up with different
criteria or not identify them as persistently dangerous.

Plus, if the students are put there based upon their IEP, you can\'t
just transfer them somewhere else. There would have to be an IEP meeting
and another place would have to be selected.

So although we\'re working on that right now with the Office of Safe and
Drug Free Schools, we wanted to just put that out on the table.

The other thing is we\'ve used corrective action plans with our schools.
We believe that that might be a way for us to address some of the
issues, that if there\'s some flexibility instead of a transfer, we can
require corrective action plans that are approved by the state. That
could help to address some of the issues regarding either that there is
no option or that the only option would affect desegregation order or
might affect health, fire, and safety codes. So we think that that might
be a way to go.

Okay. So in conclusion, we do believe that, as everyone said, that the
law was admirable in what it was trying to do, but we don\'t really feel
that it\'s reaching it, and we believe that promoting transfers rather
than concentrating on making the school safer is really not a way to go.

We also don\'t believe that it\'s necessary to have that negative label
on a school in order to get them to change, and we believe that the
overall impact has been counterproductive.

So if repeal is not in the plans, then we\'d like for you to give
serious consideration to some of the things that I suggested today in
order to make changes to the law.

Thank you for your time.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Susan.

Next we could hear from the State of Texas, Cory.

MR. GREEN: Thank you.

This afternoon you\'re going to hear four different perspectives from
state agencies about how the unsafe school choice law is implemented
within their state, and I would like to put out there that there is no
wrong way it is being implemented necessarily. There are differences in
the implementation due to various factors that go on within those
states.

In the State of Texas, just to give you a little bit of background, we
have over 1,200 independent school districts and charter school
districts. We have almost 8,000 different school campuses, and 4.5
million students.

So our implementation of the law is slightly different than what you
just heard from the State of New Jersey.

Also, let me first tell you in your handouts you have a brief three-page
description of the implementation of our state. I am not accustomed to
speaking from notes, and so I will tell you up front that I will deviate
from what is written, but it will at least provide you a generic guide
to the implementation for later reference.

The issue of labeling in the title of unsafe school choice and
persistently dangerous schools, Texas took that on from the very
beginning. We implement unsafe school choice option as the school safety
choice option simply because of the little bit more positive nature of
the title.

We do, however, still identify persistently dangerous schools as it is
written in statute, but any time we are talking about the implementation
of this statute, we refer to it as school safety choice option within
our state.

We annually provide a notification to school districts in the month of
July to notify them if they have any campuses within their district who
have been identified as persistently dangerous schools and to remind all
districts of the requirement that the victims of violent criminal
offenses must also receive the school choice transfer option.

We post guidance documents on our Web site, along with the letter of
notification, and we provide specific guidance documents and forms for
data collection to any school district and campus who has had a
persistently dangerous identified.

Staff in our division then follow up with those schools who have been
identified as persistently dangerous, reviewing their corrective action
plans and maintaining regular telephone contact with those campuses as
they implement that plan throughout the year.

You can see from the handout the state has also identified what would be
considered a victim of a violent criminal offense, having multiple types
of offenses that qualify. The victim of a violent criminal offense
actually is, as New Jersey said, a piece of the legislation that we
strive to focus on, a little bit more than the persistently dangerous
school termination. And as we\'ve started collecting data over the last
school year and validating that data to see how many students are
actually being offered the chance to transfer, those numbers are
reporting that we have had in preliminary data more numbers of students
transferring because of the victims of violent criminal offenses than
for the persistently dangerous school option.

Now, granted we have very small numbers of persistently dangerous
schools.

Our definition of a persistently dangerous school is based on three
years of data, and it\'s basically set up that the campus has to have
three or more mandatory explusions per 1,000 students.

Now, in Texas we have a statute that requires mandatory expulsions for a
list of different types of incidents. So we have 13 types of incidents
that require mandatory expulsion in three incidents per 1,000 students
in three consecutive years identifies the schools as persistently
dangerous. You\'ll see from the handout that those incidents include
use, exhibition or possession of a firearm, a club, a weapon, incidence
of arson, on down the list, including aggravated assault of a student or
school employee, sexual assault or aggravated sexual assault, and we
also include felony controlled substance and felony alcohol violations.

This is one issue that some of our school districts have concern with in
our definition of persistently dangerous school in that it appears we
are one of the fewer number of states who do actually include alcohol
and drug offenses in the definition.

We at the state level do believe that they are consistent with
indicators of school violence, and so we have chosen to include those
types of offenses in our definition.

Our definitions for victim of violent criminal offense and for
persistently dangerous school are going to be reviewed starting in a
meeting next month where we\'re bringing in our original committee who
met with us to determine the definition, as well as additional people
from schools who have been identified as persistently dangerous and from
schools who were preliminarily identified through the data validation
process, were removed from the list because of data reporting errors.

So as we go into the next identification for the 2007-2008 school year,
we\'re going to be revisiting the definition to see do we need to make
any changes to the persistently dangerous school definition.

Texas did not identify persistently dangerous schools in the first two
years, and in implementation in \'05-\'06, we had two schools
identified, and we currently have four schools identified as
persistently dangerous in the current school year.

All of the campuses are secondary school campuses. We have one ninth
grade center who has been identified for the second consecutive year.

As we look at the number in our case increasing, even though they\'re
still small numbers, we have provided statewide a lot of training to
districts, a lot of training on reporting incidents correctly, a lot of
training on coding those incidents correctly so that they\'re reported
to the state correctly.

As we have increased the training, the numbers of incidences has also
increased, and we feel like districts are actually making a very valid,
strong attempt to correctly report and code all incidents that are
reported to the state.

We also have additional efforts going on within our state for school
safety, and I\'ve highlighted a couple of items in the handout for you,
but in the state we also have a statute that requires the district to
provide a school transfer option to any victim of a sexual assault or
aggravated sexual assault if the perpetrator also attends that campus.

If they cannot provide a transfer within the district, the state statute
on this issue requires the transfer outside the district. If the victim
does not wish to transfer from the school, the district is then required
to transfer the perpetrator.

Within the unsafe school choice options, the state also strongly
recommends additional flexibility for students related to the school
choice transfers. Any time the district does not have another grade
appropriate public school campus within the district, the state strongly
encourages districts to work across district lines to find an
appropriate grade level campus within a neighboring school district who
will accept the transfer.

School districts are also advised to explore state and federal funding
resources and encouraged to provide transportation for the transfer, and
any time a victim of a violent criminal offense requests a transfer the
state also encourages the district to have a local policy to allow any
siblings to transfer away from the campus as well if it\'s deemed in the
best interest of the child for a safe school environment for that child.

As we begin data collection over the \'05-\'06 school year, we had in
preliminary data 87 school districts report having students who were
victims of violent criminal acts. Ninety-eight students transferred
because of those violent criminal offenses. Sixty-seven campuses were
transferred to within the school district, and we had three districts
who were able to arrange out of district transfers for those victims of
violent crimes.

As we talked about persistently dangerous schools, I feel I have to talk
about some of the concerns that school districts have with this
legislation and the implementation of this legislation. Because of
several programs and policies that are already in the state for school
safety.

Many districts feel that if they are really active in preventing school
safety incidents that they\'re more likely to be identified as
persistently dangerous schools. Because of our mandatory placement
program and disciplinary alternative education programs to remove the
students from the school campus, many schools feel like they\'re
basically being hit twice for having an offense. They\'re already
following state law to remove that student from the campus with the
mandatory placement, but then by doing that, having that offense,
they\'re also likely to come up on a persistently dangerous school list.

Implementation of zero tolerance programs are often considered to be
more likely to identify the student or to identify a campus as being
persistently dangerous, and then there\'s other community programs, such
as one example where the community law enforcement upgrades non-felony
offenses on school groups to felonies, and in that instance, that campus
in that district or in that community is more likely to be identified as
a persistently dangerous school.

Many of our districts have very strong prevention programs in place for
both drug prevention and for school violence, and while no one will
argue with the intent of the unsafe school choice option, the
implementation of it is an issue.

Being an unfunded mandate, schools that are identified as persistently
dangerous and required by the state to have the corrective action plan
in place and to implement that corrective action plan, many of these
schools spend thousands of dollars, 40 and \$50,000, to implement plans
and to make changes.

Now, they don\'t argue that the changes are not good, but to be required
to do something with no funding to do it, it puts a burden on the
district, and at some point you have to start looking at where the
resources are coming from.

I\'m keeping my remarks very brief today because my panelists have
additional slides and information that I think is very important for you
as a committee to see, but I want to close with telling you that when a
school is identified as persistently dangerous, it\'s not just school
personnel who will argue that there\'s not a danger problem on that
campus. My office this year received phone calls, E-mails, and letters
from teachers, staff, community members, and parents arguing with us
very strongly that their schools are not persistently dangerous
environments.

The one thing that we feel might help, we need state level flexibility
because we are a local control state. We need the flexibility within the
implementation of the statute, but we need stronger guidance from the
department to outline what type of definition is preferred, if there is
any mandatory requirements to be added to a definition. I would
encourage you to look at ways that you can still allow states to be
flexible in using existing data systems. Allow states to have the
flexibility to implement statute that will work within their states for
their districts.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Cory.

And now, Meredith, if we could hear from the State of California.

MS. ROLFE: I\'m Meredith Rolfe with the California Department of
Education, Safe and Healthy Kids Program Office.

The content area, to give you an overview, the content area in my office
is the umbrella, the strand that runs through everything; the content
area is youth development, positive youth development. But I have mental
health services. So everybody in my office is mentally healthy. We have
tobacco use prevention education, one drug that we get a pot of money
for because of an initiative that came through in California.

We have drug use prevention content, drug use intervention, and in fact,
the intervention of all behaviors of concern in my content area.
Violence prevention, and safety schools, and I\'m giving you that
picture so that you can get a feel for what the other people in the
other states in my position have, in general, I think.

I do have a large staff. I have 25 people on my staff. We\'re lucky. I
use multiple funding sources, put them together, and you\'ll see a
little bit more about how we do some of the things in our state.

But so that you can get a feel for the education world structure in
California, we have 11 superintendents\' regions. Each of those regions
has several counties within.

We have 58 counties in California, and each of those counties has a
County Office of Education. I use my multiple funding strands to fund at
least \-- you know, the funding that goes to the county office is based
on ADA so that it depends on the size of the county, but I have at least
one person in each county funded really to coordinate the whole process
for all of their LEAs.

We have 6.3 million kids in California. We have over 9,000 schools, and
at this moment, it\'s somewhere between 1,300 and 1,400 LEAs, and that
includes the charter schools. So you can imagine. Twenty-five sounds
like a good size staff if you\'re Janelle probably, but you know, 25
people, and nine of those people are consultants. That\'s an internal
job title for state workers, but those are the people that deal with the
content areas. So there\'s a lot to cover.

I\'m going to focus on persistently dangerous schools. My office
assembled a group of people, our persistently dangerous schools advisory
committee in March of \'02, shortly after the No Child Left Behind bill
passed. The people on that panel, committee represent 20 randomly chosen
school districts. We have very large, very small, and right in the
middle size school districts represented. We have urban, rural, and
suburban represented on that.

Over half of the people on the panel were parents of kids in public
schools, and it was a very ethnically diverse panel.

It also included legislative staff, the governor\'s staff, people from
the Office of the Attorney General, and from several of CDEs\' state
offices.

The process was very open. We did a lot of brainstorming. We took a lot
of far and out-of-the-box ideas. Everything was considered.

The goal of the group was to develop policy to define persistently
dangerous and to identify implementation issues.

Over the first time, the first three days that the panel met back in
March of \'02, March and April, we spent a total of 24 hours together
hashing over definitions, philosophy, everything that you can imagine
that pertained to persistently dangerous schools, and the option, but we
came up as a group with some, we think, good ideas.

The committee believed that the process must improve safety at the
highest risk school sites, not simply identify schools and give a list
of names of schools or even a number of schools. The whole point of this
has to be to make the schools safer.

We decided we had to use objective data, and that we had to use existing
data because data collection is very expensive.

The committee also decided that persistent meant over a period of time
had to be more than one year.

The implementation issues were basically the data collection process,
and we came up with the UMIRS data collection, and it was going to be
reported back to the state on our statewide consolidated application.

The advisory committee came up with a definition, recommended it to our
state school board, and the state school board adopted that. It uses
existing expulsion data for the most serious offenses. We the \-- I
believe it\'s from the FBI list as the most serious offenses, and then
two years later, we reconvened and added non-student gun violations. So
that meant somebody coming on campus who was not a student of that
school and who couldn\'t get expelled if they were caught, hopefully,
that would count with the same balance of the same value as an
expulsion. So we had ten items.

To be considered persistently dangerous, a school must have high rates
for three consecutive years, and we thought that was very important.
With our process, the first year schools are called at risk, and then
they have a three-year period to pull it all together, to solve the
problems. We give them a \-- originally we developed this what we
thought was really dynamite packet that would go out to the persistently
dangerous schools, and then after a while we figured out, you know,
let\'s just give that out to everybody.

So we put it on line, and it\'s very \-- I think it\'s very helpful. We
have documents, booklets that have been developed by CDE and by some of
our other state agency partners on things like hate crime, classroom
management, truancy, all kinds of topics.

As I said, we reconvened in \'04, and we\'ve had three years of data
now, the \'03-04, \'04-\'05, and \'05-\'06 years. Twenty-four sites have
been on an at risk list now, and almost all of those cleaned up their
act after one year. So we still think that we\'re doing the right thing.

The offenses are causing serious injury, robbery and extortion, assault
and battery against a district employee, sexual assault or battery,
firearm violation, selling a controlled substance, possession of an
explosive, brandishing a knife, and hate violence. All of those are
expulsion concepts or triggers.

And then, again, in \'04 we added non-student firearm violation.

The \'05-\'06 year was the first year we collected the data on
non-student firearm violation, you know, bringing a gun, non-student
firearm violation, and that year we only had 19 that were reported, and
we believe that\'s way under reporting, and we think it\'s because it
was the first year. We\'re hoping that it was because it was the first
year of collecting that data, and they weren\'t ready, prepared to
report it.

No school so far has been considered persistently dangerous, and we
believe that\'s because we give them \-- our idea is to make the schools
safe, not to catch them. And so we give them the three years. That\'s
why we think \-- and we think we have really good advice or packet for
them.

Lessons learned. Hard data isn\'t hard. Schools with high rates can be
safe, and that can be because the principle really clamped down, you
know, in a year, and there were a lot of expulsions.

It might be a new principal comes on board or it might be that they were
at risk the year before or they were getting pretty close to that, that
risk trigger, and so there were a lot of expulsions. That doesn\'t
necessarily mean that it\'s an unsafe school.

Schools with low rates can be dangerous, and that might be because the
administrator is ignoring the problem or because there\'s under
reporting. Under reporting can be because it\'s on purpose or it cam be
because it\'s not on purpose, because there were mistakes made.

Schools with low rates may be fear. There may be a perception of being
unsafe. If a school has lock-down a lot, if they have a police presence
on campus all the time, people can feel unsafe.

And identifying sites based on incident data lone, in other words, hard
data alone, is unfair. You won\'t come up with a true unsafeness.

Okay. Lessons learned. Some people feel that it\'s not statistics, but
the absence of a good safe school plan or program that indicates high
risk. A good site safety program includes hard data and a site safety
program would include data collection and analysis, science based
prevention, and that\'s based on the analysis of your data collection,
NIMS compliant crisis response programs. NIMS is National Incident
Management System. Ongoing training, and planning to keep the plan
alive.

In California, we have a safe school plan that\'s mandatory of all
school sites. The safe school plan has to be renewed every year. It has
to be redone every single year.

We feel that it\'s very important for a student assistance program to be
at every single site. It\'s an SAP. That way you\'re giving help to the
kids who are causing the problems, who are making the school unsafe.
You\'re not just saying they\'re a problem. You\'re saying, \"Let me
help you with that behavior of concern.\"

We believe that these kids need intervention and they are students with
behaviors of concern, that we need to be concerned about them.

Labeling persistently dangerous is so emotionally loaded that it defeats
the program\'s purpose. You\'ve heard enough about that. I won\'t say
anything more.

And administrators must also focus on having a positive school climate
and having positive youth development activities ongoing. The school
climate is ultimately responsible for whether it\'s a safe school or
not.

I ran across something a couple of days ago that I just wanted \--
talking about the title \"persistently dangerous\" \-- it\'s the social
cognition theory of behavior change, and the bottom line is that the
benefits must outweigh the barriers. I think that\'s a very important
thing to remember.

Some behavior of concern might be bullying, might be alcohol and drug
use. We definitely believe that there\'s a connection between alcohol
and drug use and school safety. It might be the student who\'s at risk
of committing suicide.

How do you improve the highest risk school sites? They need resources
for improvement. That\'s a must, or schools will avoid the label rather
than dealing with the problem.

A high priority site would need intervention and prevention, both. We
played around with some numbers to see what that would cost, and in
California full-time law enforcement officer is about \$120,000 a year.
A half time prevention-intervention coordinator for a high risk site
itself would be may be another \$60,000. That\'s a lot of money.

Alternatives for identifying school sites. There are many possible ways
to identify the sites, but no process will result in a positive outcome
unless LEAs are convinced that the process will benefit them and their
students. Any process must be initiated with a campaign to assure the
support of the LEA administrator.

So we thought about, okay, how can you get the top-down buy-in that you
need, and so we came up with this campaign. The state superintendent, my
boss or their bosses, should emphasize the importance in a public
campaign. oftentimes we don\'t have access to those people, but they
need to be involved in influencing the top people in the schools.

Each LEA administrator should be able to know their students\'
perception in that LEA, the perception of safety. In California we have
the California Healthy Kids Survey, which is a student survey. It asks
questions on all kinds of health behaviors. There are 25 questions on
student safety, and we also have a staff survey. When you look at those
two pieces together, you get a really good feel. A superintendent or
principal can get a really good feel for their site or their
district\'s, students\' and teacher\'s perception of the safety of the
school. I think that\'s very important.

You could have workshops on the connection between perceptions of safety
and academic achievement. You all must know that there\'s a lot of
research out there showing that connection now.

Once you have the top-down buy-in, there\'s a number of alternatives for
implementing the program, and here are some possibilities. We cam up
with three.

Number one, require each LEA to nominate one site or two percent of
their sites, whichever number was higher, and these would not be called
persistently dangerous. They\'d be called highest priority school safety
sites.

The nominated sites with the lowest student perception of safety at
school would receive a grant to improve the school safety.

Let\'s take a look at what this concept would look like in California,
for example. We have over 9,000 schools. Two percent of that would be
180 sites in California. If we only funded 15 percent of those sites,
that would be 27 high priority schools. You know, that could be funded.

Nomination could be based on hard data plus local knowledge. So some of
the hard data things that could be considered would be
suspension/expulsion, anonymous survey data, absence of a good safety
plan, local crime data, other local knowledge, such as an
administrator\'s knowledge of the school site conditions and of the
school principal\'s expulsion philosophy, so to speak.

Some of the California questions asked how safe do you feel when you\'re
at school. In the past 12 months, how many times have you been afraid of
being beaten up? In the past 12 months, how many times have you been
threatened or injured with a weapon?

And, by the way, only ten percent of California\'s students felt unsafe
or very unsafe, a combination of those two things.

Alternative 2, use local hard data plus local knowledge of the schools
to interpret the data. In California, that would be \-- oops, identify
one percent of the sites using that data. In California, that would be
90 schools.

Have a grant application, and that 90 sites or that one percent would be
qualified. It would be the only ones qualified for the grant. We could
call them highly qualified schools.

Again, LEAs will only cooperative if there are incentives. So funds are
crucial. You\'ve got to make the places safer, not just identify them.

The grant process would ask for local interpretation of state and local
data. For example, is the data just a symptom of a crack-down? Is it
reflective of the real problem? Maybe there\'s another site at the
district, within the district that\'s really more dangerous than the one
that has the high numbers. You know, local people know the answer to
those questions. Use that local knowledge.

Alternative 3, simply use an anonymous survey seeking student perception
of safety. It\'s not subject to as much reporting bias as incident data
is, but then perceptions don\'t already reflect reality. So use a
combination with other information.

There should be a standard survey, and Janelle and I don\'t agree on
this one, but there should be a standard survey nationwide. So even if
it\'s just a few questions that are asked, if you had this, you could
use the data at the statewide level to identify one or two percent of
the school sites, and then that could be followed by a grant application
or the state could just pick a number and say, \"We\'re going to fund
the 30 in California.\" We\'d probably pick something like 30, 20 to 30,
worst scores or lowest score, and require them to take the money and
require them to fix their problems.

Okay. Recommendations. Number one, reauthorization should mandate
identification of high priority schools, not persistently dangerous
schools, and should provide funds.

Number two, there should be no identification of school sites unless
they\'re given funds or some other positive incentive, and I\'m not sure
what that would be.

Title IV funding must be retained or there\'s no point in talking about
improving school safety.

Title IV funds all schools, all LEAs. All LEAs need funding for having
their schools be safe and for being drug free. But we also need
targeted, high priority funding. We need funding focused on school
safety, but we also need enough funds for drug prevention. It\'s very
important. Often students\' use of drugs and alcohol makes the school
less safe.

And finally, if the United States loses safe and drug free schools\'
funding, you\'ll really see some persistently dangerous schools.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you, Meredith.

And now if we could hear from the State of Colorado, Janelle.

MS. KRUEGER: Hi. Thank you for welcoming the state agency
representatives to the panel presentation today.

I really want to comment the U.S. Department of Ed. for turning a lot of
attention to the people in the states that have a lot to do with
implementing the law because I think that is just a really critical
perspective to have, and so I\'m just so delighted that there\'s a lot
of attention being paid to that in your work.

And we\'re delighted to be here to try to give you a lot of information
so that you can make some informed decisions. And what I\'m going to do
in my presentation is I\'ve broken it into three different area. The
first one is going to be reviewing some of the reasons for the
resistance that we were meeting at the time that we were trying to set
out to implement this, and then we will go into how Colorado approached
the work.

Part of the approach had to do with trying to overcome some of that
resistance, and then I\'ll also conclude with some of the
recommendations that I have thought of.

To begin with, it must first be stated that when you talk about the
resistance to this law, I think we\'ve already had a pretty honest
dialogue about that, but I think some people have been afraid to be
honest about criticizing this law, whether it be good policy or not,
because they\'re afraid of being perceived that they don\'t care about
school safety.

I can tell you we have school educators who are bending over backwards
in the name of school safety, protecting their children, sending them
back home to their parents every night having had a good school day.

And so I wanted to just state that in writing and have that on the
record, that people should be free to express opinions about it, and I
think if you\'re deprived of any of that kind of honesty, then you\'re
not going to make as good of a decision as what you otherwise might not
have been able to make. So that\'s on the record.

The thing in Colorado is that we have not really had a need for this law
because we are one of the public choice states. Sometimes people refer
to that as open enrollment.

And so we already met the intent of this law in that our state statutes
provide for parents being able to enroll their children in districts
other than where they reside. They can also have their children transfer
between schools within the district, and they can enroll them in a
school other than the attendance area of a school where they reside.

And so we\'ve been promoting choice for quite some time. We are also a
strong advocate for things like home school, charter school, online or
virtual schools, and so parental choice has kind of been our middle
name.

So when this law came along, we knew that we were going to have to work
with it, but we also knew that it probably wasn\'t going to do anything
different for us because it was about really helping parents make the
best education choices for their child, and we were already permitting
that.

We also share with parents a lot of school safety data. The Safe School
Act was a result of the Columbine High School tragedy in the April of
\'99. Our session in 2000 was the first legislative session, and when it
enacted the Safe School Act, it mandated school by school safe data
reporting, and so we have elements that we have been collecting since
that time.

The companion piece to that is the school accountability report where we
\-- you see a panel of it there \-- where there is safety information
included on a school unique to that school report card, and a lot of
this information is very public. The incidence there that you see are
drugs, alcohol, tobacco, assault, fights, dangerous weapons, other
felonies, all code of conduct violations.

And so you can find this information in other areas, such as the Web
sites. There are many communities that publish their entire school
accountability report in their weekly newspaper. They will include it in
their annual reports to the school board.

There\'s been a lot of attention given to that information, and so
school safety data is pretty high profile, and I think a lot of that
does date back to the history with Columbine because there was just a
spotlight focused on what was going on within individual building level
settings.

Regarding the victims of crimes, we also have \-- you know, the victims
would also be able to take advantage of that school choice option in
that they could transfer within the school year. They don\'t need to
wait until the end of the school year to reenroll somewhere else. They
wouldn\'t have to wait for the state to determine it and then notify the
school and then have the school notify them.

And so that option always has been available, but we also advocate for
the victim, that if a victim didn\'t want to leave their school
environment, we put the responsibility on the perpetrator to be held
accountable for committing the offense in the first place. We think
they\'re the ones who should be inconvenienced, and they have lost the
right to attend that school because they behaved badly. It\'s a behavior
choice, and so we put the perpetration into the responsibility of
re-enrolling somewhere else.

And if there\'s not an available school for that, then the school has to
adjust the perpetrator\'s schedule in order to avoid contact with the
victim. That is provided that they are expelled for the behavior, and
that there has been some criminal adjudication, either pronounced guilty
or gone through juvenile diversion or something like that, but they do
have to be processed through the criminal courts in some way.

Because Colorado already met the provision when this was first passed, a
lot of people term this a solution looking for a problem, and I had
never heard that expression before, but that was one thing that came up
over and over, was that this is a solution looking for a problem.

Secondly, all new requirements in Title IV with the passage of NCLB are
unfunded mandates, and the reason we say that is because the formula
changed with the onset of No Child Left Behind. The state was able at
one time to retain nine percent of its allocation, and No Child Left
Behind now has it retaining only 93 percent.

And so with that loss, some of the states lost a significant amount in
the very same year that No Child Left Behind was enacted.

This is our funding history for the administration and technical
assistance dollars that we get in Colorado. Our highest level of funding
was prior to Columbine. We had a dramatic decrease after that year. It
has steadily gone down, and you see I\'ve noted where USCO, or the
unsafe school choice option, was enacted. They call it the No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001. It was signed by the President in January of 2002.

That means that in the 2002-03 school year would be the first year that
the provisions of No Child Left Behind would be implemented locally, and
that year was the first year then that the allocations followed
according to the new formula.

And so you can understand the environment we were in where we were all
feeling a little defeated and demoralized, given more work and
requirements, having sufferance one of the largest cuts in our history.

The motive of the law has always been somewhat questionable because even
though the surface looks like it is about school safety, there was no
support written into the law to accompany then addressing safety, and
the same way with transportation. There was no assistance given to
parents who might want to transfer to a different school if that meant
having to find a school out of the district.

There were some other title programs within No Child Left Behind that
did provide some transportation support for parents on some other
issues, and it requires them setting money aside in order to aid those
families. But that wasn\'t given the same attention in this particular
provision, and so people kind of wondered is this really about
supporting the parental choice to choose another school, and where would
they find aid in order to do that if they didn\'t have it within their
own means?

And then although the intent of the law, like you\'ve heard, has never
been questioned, I think the framers of this really were intending to
aid those districts and those schools that maybe didn\'t have any other
choice than to have to go this route.

But, for example, if there was no other school available, then what you
put the parents in the position of doing is intentionally sending their
child to a school that has bene labeled persistently dangerous. You\'re
also asking teachers to go teach in a school that has been labeled
persistently dangerous, and people were questioning if there\'s any
liabilities that would accompany that.

And it is quite awkward, and for me it has always raised a moral issue
that if a school is truly persistently dangerous, why shouldn\'t a state
shut them down. I can\'t believe that we would still allow them to
remain open if they truly are persistently dangerous, and so it has
always been kind of counterintuitive in that way.

Also, we were given a pretty hard and fast deadline to get this
implement. There was a lot of attention. The media was given it a lot of
attention. USA Today reporters were calling around all of the states
wanting to know what\'s your criteria. Do you have schools identified
yet?

The U.S. Department of Ed. had given us a deadline, and because there
was kind of a rush to hurry up and get it done, have the schools
notified by the beginning of the \'03-\'04 school year, et cetera, there
was no time for many states to look at their data on a school-by-school
level because some states didn\'t even have it.

This may be one of the reasons why there have not been more schools
identified as persistently dangerous, because there wasn\'t enough
school-by-school data available to begin with in order to make that kind
of assessment.

There has also been speculation lingering about whether or not the
judgment of persistently dangerous would be believed, and I think
you\'ve heard at least some of the other panelists that for the schools
that have been identified, some of the faculty and the parents and
community members themselves would not accept that finding.

And so I think another question is: so what\'s the disconnect? And is it
really only about what the data says compared to what their personal
experience is?

We believe that parents have the ability to judge the safety of their
school based on their own child\'s individual experience and the
child\'s word of mouth for how they describe what\'s going on in their
school.

We also believe they hear a lot of it by word of mouth through other
parents, and then they have their own individual experience any time
they visit the school campus. And so there\'s a lot of other data that
goes along with this other than what a state would say because of doing
some kind of statistical analysis.

Laws that require reactionary measures run counter to the preventionist
belief system. I heard somebody say earlier that this is filled with
irony, and it is. The very people who are charged with implementing it
are probably the very people who would never choose to be in
relationship with educational professionals, you know, for this purpose.

And, again, they\'re all dedicated to school safety, but over and over
and over at our national meetings when the counterparts get together and
talking about where are you at with implementing this, you could just
see that it was a violation of a lot of people\'s belief systems because
we would rather empower people. We want to prevent things from
happening, and we don\'t want to spend a lot of energy reacting after
children have behaved badly. We would rather teach them the skills in
order to reduce the propensity for them to behave badly in the first
place.

And number seven, people couldn\'t seen to get past the actual words,
and I don\'t know if there could be something different. I like
Meredith\'s description about seeing if we can\'t get people over that
hurdle, but this came up over and over.

When we were looking at persistence and dangerous, we kept thinking you
know what that implies, is that the situation is so bad that if you
choose to continue attending the school, you are accepting a high risk,
and it means that your child could very well become injured or something
like that.

It seems like it was done as more of a predictor and to put people on
notice saying beware because the school has demonstrated historically
that there\'s something wrong in their school climate.

And so we were running into just a big hang-up with those words in
particular.

One of the colleagues at one of our national meetings said, \"We don\'t
have persistently dangerous schools. What we have are safe schools with
a few students who occasionally pose a danger to a few other students.\"

I\'m going to go ahead. I\'ll skip because of the time, but you have the
comments in the power point. If you want to read those later, you\'re
welcome to do that.

Our approach to implementing this first was we didn\'t let the
detractors distract us too much. We wanted to seize the opportunity to
have conversations about school safety. So what we did was pay attention
to the process, and we did a highly inclusive process where we invited a
lot of the other education state agencies, as well as locals to come
together in order to help us develop the policy.

One of the ways we did that was we had a safe school committee that had
been impaneled by a broader committee that was working on all NCLB
implementation related issues. So we were a subset of a working group.

And then in order to supplement that with local representatives, we had
a safe school forum where we brought almost 50 people together
representing various aspects, school board members, school research
officers, safe and drug free school coordinators, parents, students, and
we had small group-facilitated discussions in order to talk about what
kinds of things provide a safe climate, what kinds of things jeopardize
that safety, what would their recommendations be that we would look at.

I\'ll skip over Colorado demographics just other than to say in every
state that has a diverse population we are still a frontier state. We
have over half of the state classified as small rural, but our
population center is the Denver metro I-25 corridor down the middle of
the state, and so whenever we\'re trying to implement a policy and it\'s
a one size fits all, we have a lot of diversity in order for that to
pertain to.

One of the times, since I am almost out of time, is I\'ll talk a little
bit about what we were considering as we approached this work because
this is what dawned on the committee, and this became our guiding
philosophy.

the first one was for a value of trying to identify schools that are
truly and persistently dangerous as opposed to schools where some unsafe
behaviors occur, but overall they are basically safe.

And then we knew that we had a need for the data to be objective.
You\'ve already hear that sometimes there\'s problems with suspensions
or expulsions. If you start a new school resource officer program, you
can bet that your data is probably going to go up because they\'re going
to be more likely to report everything to the school resource officer
because they\'re so much more accessible.

So you do have to be really cautious about how do you place judgment on
that behavior given different contexts like that.

We had to have the indicator data that was already collected by CDE.
That\'s Colorado Department of Ed. We had no time to invent new data
sets by which to start collecting, and we wouldn\'t have wanted to
anyway because the schools are under such a data burden, and we already
felt like we had enough safety data collected. So we went with that.

We did want to create a system that encourages more accurate reporting
rather than dwelling with disciplinary problems that don\'t rise to the
level of dangerousness.

And we wanted to see if we couldn\'t use this to direct more assistance
to those schools that would rise to the top as having the most serious
problems, and so it could help target that.

The criteria that we used include the alcohol, drug, assault, fight,
robbery, other felonies, firearm, expulsions, and then we also added the
number of school employees engaging in unlawful behavior. That\'s
because we believe that they\'re role models. The adults have a lot to
do with helping maintain that safe civil climate. If there would be a
pedophile, for example, on staff, and you know, they can leave a trail
of numerous victims in their wake, and so we just felt like this is a
way of saying don\'t overlook the data that you might have regarding
what the adults are doing on campus as well.

And I\'m sorry I\'m just about out of time, but I want to respect your
time for questions. You can see our criteria is set relatively high. One
of the reasons for that was because we have discovered a major glitch in
our state statutes that had to do with the assault/fight category, and
too many people were over reporting assaults. They were including all
fights in that when, because of the way the statutes have us collect
data, we don\'t actually collect fights, and we don\'t define fights.

But the districts were trying to be really honest with it, and so there
were a lot of schools that reported them anyway, but they had their own
definition. Some schools included them; some did not, and we felt like
that data was so faulty that the first year of collection, actually
until it has been fixed through an amendment this past legislative
session, we really couldn\'t use that very well.

We were worried about if we identified too many persistently dangerous
schools it would reinforce everybody\'s belief that this isn\'t a valid
law to begin with. We have to have quality data. If the data is shaky,
they\'re not going to believe that this law is serving a good purpose.

And so we were trying to pay attention to those issue as well.

This kind of reinforces what you\'ve heard before also, is that if you
really are working with some kind of credible data, you\'ve got what I
call the three Rs. You have to have them.

Every school needs to consistently working off their code of conduct
policies to where they\'re referring the students for disciplinary
action, and you might find inconsistencies in that across the board.
They have to report those referrals to the districts, and then those
districts report it to us.

In order to report it, you have to record it, and then you also have to
have standard definitions by which all of that happens.

So if there is a weakness in any one of those four things, it weakens
the integrity of what your school safety reporting system is.

Mr. Chairman, are you going to give me like just a couple more minutes
to get to the recommendations?

CHAIRMAN LONG: Yes.

MS. KRUEGER: Okay. Thank you.

(Laughter.)

MS. KRUEGER: Obviously, one of the options is always going to be that
you could eliminate the provision.

The second one is if you wanted to just leave it as is with no changes,
I think a lot of states actually could live with that. I think they\'ve
done enough work around more school-by-school data. The uniform
management information reporting system has had more time now and so the
assumption would be that more states would have the ability to continue
analyzing more school-by-school level data.

If that system has some time to stabilize, then they learn about where
are their problems. Can we give more guidance to the schools? If that
has been provided, then the schools that have already done the work to
develop the policy would still have flexibility to modify their policy
if they saw fit. And that would all be state-by-state determined.

The third option would be to retain the USCO provision with some
revisions. One of them could be to allow states to opt out if they can
clearly demonstrate that they already do meet the intent, and that would
have to really be actually that they do something like open enrollment.
They\'d have to show you copies of the laws that permit that. They
can\'t just check off on a list that they assure that they are doing it.

But if they are providing a lot of school-by-school safety data publicly
for parents, then I think, you know, certainly that could be
entertained.

By letting the state opt out, that also allows the states for which this
provision is working well. It doesn\'t interfere with that. And so if
the only thing that they can do is use a law like this to gain that kind
of leverage, to work with the school more closely, if they\'ve got
resources to provide technical assistance, then they would still be able
to make the law work for them if that\'s what they are finding success
with.

I do have a point on here about \-- if I can find my place \-- about
changing the name of safe school choice option. You heard Cory talk
about that.

I actually have a miswording in this one statement. You might want to
correct it. It should read, \"If most states use at least two years of
data, then you can consider having that added to the law.\"

I know the Congress is the one who actually makes the law, but I think
sometimes if you have current practice and you know that nobody is going
to have heartburn about that, then go ahead and codify it, if that\'s
going to be such a regular thing that people have already thought was a
good thing to do.

I believe that resistance has waned, but not everybody still would
believe that this is good policy. I think it\'s still riddled with a lot
of problems, and I\'m not sure that we have the answers to overcome it.

As you can see, what we did was really pay attention to the process. I
think by including a lot of credible representatives in it, I always
knew that nobody is going to be happy with the outcome. It\'s just such
a controversial law that they\'re going to criticize what you choose to
do. Somebody will find fault with it.

But I didn\'t want them to fault the process. I think they knew we gave
it our best shot. We did spend about \$7,000 in order to make this thing
happen because we were paying the fill sill tillers (phonetic) at the
Safe School Forum. We were reimbursing mileage. We had school board
members driving in as far as like the Nebraska state line. We had the
Rocky Mountains, and we feel like if people have to come in and lodge
the night before in order for us to include them in the process, then
somebody owes them compensation for that.

And so we did track our costs because it was an unfunded mandate.

I do want to back up on this point, and this is where we maybe
contradict some of the other states, but I still respect their
recommendation for more nationalization or standardization or more
federal guidance. If that is the way they are used to operating, then
that is what works for them, and even though we differ, I think we have
a lot of respect for recommendations coming forward because it fits the
state context.

Colorado is a very strong local control state. I\'ve always heard that
there\'s only actually about six truly local control states left in the
country, and I know Colorado is one of them.

We believe in a lot \-- I\'m a state sovereignty rights person, and I
don\'t know if that\'s because I was a criminal justice major and I
studied a lot of constitutional law or what, but I really am concerned
about one of the quotes on here. I think I skipped over it, but somebody
said no child left behind is basically the federalization of the
American public school system, and it basically is.

And so when you are not used to treating local schools from a top-down
manner, but you are kind of stuck mediating between the federal level
getting very prescriptive at the building level, and the state has to
have a role in mediating between the locals and the feds., there\'s a
lot of tension around that.

One of the reasons I believe in a lot of state sovereignty is because we
have unique histories. We\'ve got unique circumstances. A lot of the
school safety data is tied to criminal statutes. Some of the definitions
are aligned to criminal statutes. Those are all unique to the state.

Some of the education related titles are unique to the state. The state
legislature and the education community is who has ownership over what
it is that they\'re choosing for themselves.

If you have mandatory reporting items, those are going to be unique to
the state. Your level of resources are unique to the state, time, staff,
et cetera. We really believe people have to own it, and local
demographics are very unique to the state as well.

I wish I had 25 staff members that Meredith has because I know you\'d
probably see a whole lot of different work being done in Colorado, but
we don\'t. So I\'ll leave it with that and turn it back over to the
chair.

And thank you very much for your patience on listening to us.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Janelle. Thanks to the rest of the
panel.

We will now turn to the committee and questions, our question and answer
session so that we can learn more.

So we\'ll entertain questions from the committee, and we\'ll start first
with Deb.

MS. PRICE: Well, I have a question that, as my mother would say, sort of
stirs the pot, but I think it\'s just a question to throw out there, and
I think it would be helpful to hear your response to it, especially
because you are in there working from the state level doing this.

And my question is, you know, we\'ve had some discussions about the
intent of the law and the desire of what Congress was trying to do when
they implemented the law, but my question, to put it bluntly, is if it
weren\'t there, would you be better off? I mean, are you better off
because the law is there?

You know, has it had a positive impact on your state, indifferent, just
in general to kind of get down to the bottom line?

MS. MARTZ: I\'d just like to say that I don\'t think we\'re necessarily
better off because I think that we have a lot of initiatives going on in
our state that still would be holding districts accountable to have
their school safe. So it just adds one more thing for us to do.

I would rather spend the time and energy instead of identifying schools
in this way, responding, writing reports, doing whatever we have to do
on spending the time to look at our data, work with our schools, and
improve the safety and security of the schools.

And I don\'t think we\'re unique in New Jersey, but in New Jersey we do
have a lot of things already that are going to guide us in that
direction, that we don\'t need the federal law to do that.

MS. PRICE: So is it duplicative of what you already have?

MS. MARTZ: Well, we don\'t identify any schools as persistently
dangerous.

MS. PRICE: Right.

MS. MARTZ: But, yes, I think it is just \--

MS. PRICE: The intent.

MS. MARTZ: Yeah.

MR. GREEN: I\'d have to agree that I don\'t know we\'re better off with
the law. We also have so many other programs and state initiatives for
safe and drug free schools, safe schools issues available to districts
that it\'s actually \-- it\'s one more theme that we have to deal with
and for every new school that becomes identified, it starts the negative
impact of the determination all over again. So it\'s a yearly thing that
someone is going to be identified, and we\'re going to have to work
through the entire process with that group of schools to try to show
them that there can be a positive outcome from it.

And while some of our schools seem to go through the corrective action
process simply because they have to, some of the schools also do really
embrace the issue we\'ve got it identified. We have to do this. Let\'s
do it right, and let\'s really make a difference with the students.

MS. ROLFE: I wouldn\'t say we\'re better off with it in California. We
have a lot of initiatives. We have partnerships with other state
agencies. We have trainings going on throughout the state on safety,
three different training models. No, we didn\'t need this.

MS. KRUEGER: And I think I would ditto that as well. A lot of it, as I
said, because we already met the intent, I don\'t think it has changed
local practice in any way, shape or form.

I do think it has caused more anxiety about the reporting of data, and
if people are so afraid of being labeled in this way that they may start
declassifying certain behaviors or changing what they call them for the
purpose of not having to report.

MS. PRICE: And to just follow up, I mean, certainly, I mean, you are for
states that are more visible than some states. Some of the more western
states or smaller states may not have the \-- I don\'t know \-- the
visual. I mean, Texas, you\'re the biggest thing in the world, but just
as you work with other people who have similar positions that you do in
other states, do you think that that\'s a general perspective or unique
to your view?

MS. MARTZ: I mean, I think that\'s kind of hard to address, but I know
where you\'re going with this, that there could be other states out
there that maybe need this in order to give them the impetus to move in
the direction that we\'re moving in.

And you know, perhaps a consideration is rewriting it so that if states
can demonstrate that they already have state law and state initiatives
that are accomplishing the same thing, almost kind of a waiver
provision, then they wouldn\'t have to comply with the federal versus
those states that don\'t have anything in place.

MS. ROLFE: You\'ve got two very large districts and a medium size
district. I think we\'re pretty representative.

MS. KRUEGER: But, you know, I would have to say something about the
demographics being so different. I am a little bit familiar with what
Florida is doing. They\'ve got 64 counties, and their school district is
aligned to their county boundaries, and that lets them be pretty asset
rich as far as data analysis because any time like their county social
services or county public safety and all of that, when they\'re
assessing data, they\'re assessing their school age population.

And in many other states they don\'t have a luxury because they\'re not
structured that way.

Florida also has 2.3 million children, and I don\'t know what their safe
and drug free school allocation is, but we don\'t even have a million.
We\'ve got like a little over 700,000, and so the resources that we get
on student population is very different than what a Florida would get
even though they have half the districts and they probably get ten times
the amount of money.

You know, it\'s a real apples and orange comparison. And so I would ask
that there\'s some kind of sensitivity given to not creating more work
for the states because, one, it\'s going to remain an unfunded mandate.
That\'s probably a given unless somebody decides that money does need to
be put in to build this program back up.

But in the context of shrinking budgets, what the federal dollars are
also up against is there are many states that have done tax revenue and
spend limitation bills. In Colorado it is called the Tabor amendment. So
it\'s really hard for us to even get state dollars that would increase
FTEs within our department to keep doing the work that is primarily
driven at the federal level. That\'s very difficult.

And then we also have a lot of real districts that are losing students,
and so their per pupil operating revenue is going down. There are some
states that don\'t have very many rural districts. There are some states
that have a tremendous amount, hundreds of tiny rural districts.

And so it is very difficult. I am sensitive to how complex it is in
order to \-- you know, I don\'t think one size fits all, but I feel like
a lot of times the Congress is trying to figure out how to make one size
fit all. So if you can build some flexibility into the law, that sort of
helps alleviate the stress that that causes.

MS. PRICE: Just one other thought. You know, the Sheriff of Bailey,
Colorado wa at the White House conference, gosh, it seems to be a month
ago, but it was just last week, and it was interesting because when he
was on the panel that was moderated by the Attorney General, it was
mostly law enforcement, and you know, he was asked some questions. This
issue came up, and he said, you know, he still considers his school a
very safe school in spite of what happened, that that one incident is
not the defining determination. You know, it does not define the school.
It was a \-- I can\'t think of the right word, but you know, it was
something that was \--

CHAIRMAN LONG: Anomaly.

MS. PRICE: Anomaly. Exactly it. It was bizarre that it occurred.

But I thought listening to him talk about it from that perspective, he
thought his school was a very safe school. It\'s just different.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Russell and then Howell.

MR. JONES: Yes. You guys are doing some fascinating work. I mean, it
sounds like it\'s working to the extent that it can, given the context
and some of the thinking behind its inception.

But I\'m wondering to what extent are you guys sharing the good things
that you\'re doing with other states, and then the extent to which there
were existing infrastructure, existing partnerships that have enabled
you to move forward at the pace that you seem to be moving.

MS. ROLFE: In California, we have an infrastructure that is funded
through my office with all of my funding sources. Actually based on the
principles of effectiveness, which I don\'t know if you\'ve all been
brought on board with that, which we live by, we have all of our
funding.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Meredith, excuse me. Could you pull that mic over there
also?

MS. ROLFE: Okay. All funding that comes through my office is pretty much
run on the principles of effectiveness. So we have the data collection
system that is at the site level. We have, you know, processes to do all
of that, and we have lots of partnerships, too.

I forgot what your question was.

MR. JONES: Yeah, I was wondering what those partnerships were. Are you
working like with Marlene Wong with National Child Traumatic Stress
Network or any of those?

MS. ROLFE: No. Mostly state things. We have a school law enforcement
partnership with the Attorney General\'s Office that we meet with them
every week. We have another partnership with alcohol and drug programs
and the Attorney General\'s Office to do a separate data collection
process.

We have a Governor\'s Prevention Advisory Council where I meet with
higher ed, all state agencies looking at prevention with them. You know,
we\'re real partner oriented.

MR. GREEN: We have basically the same type of thing. We have various
committees that work on statewide level bringing all of the different
state agencies together. We have a Texas School Safety Center that
provides services to the entire state. We have a statewide safe and drug
free schools initiative. We have various types of partnerships with law
enforcement as well so that you bring all of the partners together to
the table.

And some very simple things is that I send my staff members to law
enforcement conferences to do presentations in the network and to bring
the education side to law enforcement as well, and that helps build the
relationship.

So it\'s done on a statewide level, but it\'s also very, very small
things that are done as well.

MS. MARTZ: Well, first of all, in the office that I work in, we\'re
responsible for health services. We\'re responsible for character
education, safe and drug free schools, after school programs, non-public
schools, home instruction, a number of things.

So what ends up happening is that all of the advisory groups to all of
those different aspects of non-in school educational programs also have
some input.

I have to say luckily for us, we also have a state legislature that\'s
very concerned about school safety. So there have been a number of laws
instituted as I mentioned before right down to school policies on
harassment, intimidation, and bullying, and each school is required to
have such a policy.

So the legislature has been very supportive. The organizations that
we\'ve worked with over the years, law enforcement organization, and the
fact that within our state we have governor level and attorney general
level groups that meet frequently, have all supported some of the things
that we\'re talking about here today.

So I think that in some states, as Deborah pointed out before, they\'re
further along than others because of the kinds of things that they\'ve
been working on, and certainly all of those groups make a huge
difference if you have that kind of support, although they all draw on
you, too, because everybody wants to do something a little bit
differently. So the challenge is bringing it all together to make it
focus on the same intent or goal.

MS. KRUEGER: In our efforts, our infrastructure also includes a lot of
interagency-state partnerships, such as with the Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Division and our Division of Prevention within our Department of Health
and Public Environment, Department of Public Health and Environment.

We have in our department an initiative for positive behavior supports,
which is a whole school climate change regarding letting the kids decide
what their standard of behaviors are desired to be and offering
incentives and rewards for the kids who demonstrate those desired
behaviors. That\'s a really growing initiative within our state, and so
far the results have been very positive where they\'ve seen dramatic
decreases in disciplinary problems within those school settings.

There\'s just a lot of effort going on continuously, and when you do
have a really lean state government, you broker resources among the
other expertises in the state. Our Safe to Tell initiative is a
collaborative between the Attorney General\'s Office, the Colorado
Trust.

We have a Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at C.E.
Boulder. Dale Elliot was also included as a presenter in the conference
last week.

And so we all work together constantly, and that way we share the work
load across many people and can line up our little resources behind some
of those targeted statewide initiatives.

MR. JONES: Yes, I just think that really underscores the importance of
partnerships and having those things in place early on prior to these
types of initiatives.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Howell.

MR. WECHSLER: I want to thank and congratulate each of the members of
this panel. Each of you came to the table with very concrete, well
thought out ideas for improving USCO, and it\'s tremendously helpful for
the work of this panel.

Perhaps it\'s not surprising that in my opinion, at least, the most
outside-of-the-box ideas came from California, and I\'d be curious. I
would like to hear the other three members of the panel respond to
Meredith\'s ideas for her three different alternatives for identifying
the highest priority school safety sites.

What did you think of that?

MR. GREEN: Well, looking at one or two percent, that would get higher
numbers in Texas. We\'d have numbers similar to what California was
talking about, but I don\'t know that we\'re looking for a national
survey. I think we have to have some flexibility within the state\'s
implementation of implementing the statute, but our definition looks at
what basically comes down to .3 percent compared to California\'s one
percent, and so I\'m wondering a little bit myself just thinking through
the process as to how different the numbers would be if we were to go to
that type of model from what we have now.

MS. MARTZ: Not that I can remember all three of the options, but I have
to say the idea of identifying high priority and providing resources to
address the needs, that\'s a concept that certainly we would support.
Because as we\'ve all said here, I think the issue is if we want to
create safe schools, it\'s not enough just to say you have a problem. We
have to do something about it, and we have to provide them with the
resources to try to do something.

MS. KRUEGER: Regarding the survey, Colorado has finally worked through a
collaboration over the last three or four years to come up with a survey
that was administered by enough districts to give us weighted data for
the first time in ten years. We have always left it up for local choice
to have them pick their own survey instrument.

And because we\'ve made that kind of effort, I don\'t know that we would
be too open to trying to promote yet another survey in addition to that.
It\'s that ownership thing again, to where most districts will only take
time to do one survey at the most per year or every couple of years, and
so I don\'t know that we would be too excited about one of the national
standardized surveys, although we would offer it as a choice because we
feel like if the districts want it and like those better, that\'s their
decision.

And then targeting to the highest need, my question would be more what
would that work look like, who\'s available to do the work, at what
cost. If there\'s money available to help those districts, where would
that money come from?

I\'d have a hard time seeing if it was \-- I think the concept is good,
but again, you\'re looking at implementing it, how to make that happen.

And we have history in safe and drug free already. When the law was
reauthorized in \'94, it created a separate pot of money to devote to
the high need districts, and that also was to look at data in order to
isolate which districts in the state would be considered the highest
need. In Colorado\'s allocation, we had to set \$1 million aside and
make it available only to ten districts, and so it was the same kind of
concept.

What happened was they were able to improve upon those circumstances,
but when the law was reauthorized again, the money went away. It
changed, and so everybody felt penalized because now they were the
highest need. They were doing good work and turning the corner, and then
the rug got pulled out from underneath them.

There was other objections from other districts saying, \"How can they
get rewarded with all of the money for being the highest need? They\'ve
got the worst problems and here we\'re working really hard keeping the
problems down, but we get no reward for it.\"

And so I remember people having a lot of talk about that at our state
advisory council meetings that were made up of local districts. So I
don\'t know if we\'d be facing the same kind of an issue or not.

MS. ROLFE: Just as an aside or as a whatever, but if Deborah\'s office
could pick five questions, they could plug them into yours. I mean, you
could add it onto your survey and your survey, kind of things that you
do. You don\'t have to take the whole thing. It doesn\'t have to be 20
pages. It could be, you know, the highest priority questions that you
want answered across the whole United States.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you.

We\'ll go Hope, Seth, Mike.

MS. TAFT: Thank you all for testifying.

I think you all would agree with this quote. Attempting to describe the
world through the use of frequency counts, percentages and cross
tabulation tables is like describing the ocean floor one sand pebble at
a time.

And so I want to thank you all for bringing a real face to the issue and
would like to ask you to talk a little bit more, particularly Meredith,
about your comment that Title IV, safe and drug free schools money needs
to go to all schools, and that if you didn\'t have that money and if you
didn\'t relate alcohol and drug use to violence, that persistently
dangerous schools would go up.

MS. ROLFE: I didn\'t pay her to say that, but I did hand out \-- I think
Catherine handed out something for me or maybe not yet.

Just before I left, San Diego County Office of Ed. sent me some
overheads that the coordinator there put together, and it showed the
comparison of the funding. You know, I think the funding was in bars,
and then the drug use rate was on lines.

Yes, you ave that, and that I thought was just really excellent because
it shows that the reaction to the funding going down was that the drug
use went up.

Drug use is connected to school safety. I mean, I don\'t think you can
get around that in California. Kids are using drugs on campus. We know
that from our CHKS data. That\'s our data that\'s showing that.

The funding now goes out as an entitlement to every LEA. So once
there\'s no money going to every LEA, the things that we\'re doing will
no longer be there, and you know, you see all of us are doing a lot
already with the small amount of money, relatively small, relative to
the problem.

With the small amount of money that we\'re getting, we\'re doing a lot,
and once you pull that away, you know, who knows what\'s going to
happen.

I mean I think I know what\'s going to happen. I think that you\'re
going to have some very unsafe places.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Seth, Mike, Russell, and a reminder that we have five
minutes.

Was that Seth or Shep? Shep, you wanted to go. I\'m sorry.

MR. NORMAN: No.

CHAIRMAN LONG: I\'m sorry. I just wanted to hear Seth say no.

MR. KELLAM: I guess I was struck. We\'re talking about this program in
terms of does it help, and one of the emphases is on how much this
program really costs nationally, and no doubt it varies from one place
to another. We\'re talking about an enormous amount of staff time, and
we\'re talking about an enormous amount of time that we\'re not funding
by virtue of funding this program.

It\'s not a question of is the program effective or not. That\'s half
the model. The other question is if you didn\'t spend the money on this
program, would you be able to use the money better on another program,
and I haven\'t heard anything that suggests to me that there\'s anything
like effectiveness or at least no data on effectiveness for this
program, but there are a lot of programs out there that there is data on
that warrant effectiveness, you know, as an important criteria for using
them.

And I think we need to keep in mind that it\'s not just a question of is
it helping. The question is: compared to what? Compared to improving
classroom behavior management in elementary schools or compared to a
myriad of other kinds of programs that, in fact, you know, have to do
with conflict resolution or other programs or middle school protection
against peer influence in the wrong direction?

We\'re talking about alternatives and not just is the program a good
thing. And I haven\'t heard any evidence that we have any data on that
and plenty of testimony and some descriptive data suggesting that it\'s
a bad idea.

I think we need to keep in mind that we\'re not just doing X. We\'re
doing X instead of Y.

MR. HERRMANN: First of all, my cudos to all of you. I think you did an
excellent, excellent job laying out the frustrations of the unsafe
school choice option.

My question is kind of related to effectiveness really. Bottom line: I
know every time you hear a rumor, \"did you hear about the shooting at
so-and-so,\" your ears go up and your blood pressure goes up a little
bit, and you wonder is that one of my schools.

I guess my question is after all of the work that you\'ve done, do you
feel that the process that you have in place identifies those schools
that you are most concerned about.

MS. MARTZ: I think I\'ve already said no to that, and I \--

MR. HERRMANN: Just say it again.

MS. MARTZ: I will say it again. I believe that when we look across our
state, we can identify other schools that we think are more dangerous
than the one we\'re identifying. We haven\'t figured out a way to get
the formula to identify the ones that we truly believe are the more
dangerous ones.

And I think also, you know, we\'ve heard here today that the schools
that are reporting are the ones that are getting identified. The ones
that maybe are being very aggressive in taking a look at what\'s going
on in the school and really trying to quantify what\'s happening are the
ones that are being identified.

And I have to say that absolutely \-- and this gets back to one of the
other questions \-- that there are limited resources in every state, and
for every second, minute, hour that we have to spend working on this,
it\'s time that we\'re not spending working on something else, and some
of the most positive work that we\'re doing right now \-- and this gets
back to the infrastructure \-- is because our state agency is also
responsible for the governor\'s portion of safe and drug free schools.

And we have a multitude of programs that we\'re running right now
regarding social and emotional learning, social norms, all kinds of
things that we\'re going to be sharing statewide that are going to be
having a far greater and more positive impact on our schools than will
this particular provision.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And I apologize. The last question, we have about a
minute.

MR. JONES: Yes, this is a quick question. Just in terms of, you know,
when we look at the final outcome, I\'m wondering the extent to which
the quality of life for those that are victimized and those who do the
victimizing, the perpetrator, do we have any data in terms of the
quality of those individuals\' mental health at this point?

MS. ROLFE: Do you mean kids that have bene identified as having has
trauma?

MR. JONES: Yes.

MS. ROLFE: Is that what you mean?

MR. JONES: Right, right. Both those that have had trauma and then those
that have committed the trauma.

MS. ROLFE: Okay.

MR. JONES: So just in terms of outcome, where are we with that?

MS. KRUEGER: Traditionally, the educational system probably wouldn\'t
collect that data, but if you\'ve got an assessment center set up in a
local community and the local school has a component of that, then there
may be some local data, but there\'s no system that I\'m aware of that
would have that trickle up to the state level to where you would ever
trace it back down to the quality of life issue.

MS. MARTZ: Yeah, actually we\'ve just gotten to the point in New Jersey
over the past two, I think, two to three years where we\'re just
collecting information on given an incident if the student has been
determined to be a victim of a violent criminal offense, if so, was the
option given and did they exercise the option. So we\'re just getting to
the point where we\'re collecting that data, let alone the \--

MR. JONES: Yeah. I think that\'s just such a fundamental question, a
fundamental issue. You know, we\'re talking about effectiveness. I mean,
how can we say we\'re effective if those persons that are impacted most
by this entire process, if we don\'t know the outcome and the follow-up,
the longitudinal impact?

It really raises some very serious questions.

MS. ROLFE: Well, one thing is for sure. It has nothing to do with
persistently dangerous schools. You know, those kids are not being
tracked by persistently dangerous schools, and in California we don\'t
have that data. We\'re hoping to have a statewide student assistance
program process, and we will be collecting that kind of data with that,
but that has nothing to do with this.

MR. JONES: Was that part of the legislation, Debbie?

MS. PRICE: I\'m sorry?

MR. JONES: Was that part of the legislation? No?

MS. PRICE: You saw the legislation up there on the screen. It\'s two
little, short paragraphs.

MR. JONES: Yeah.

MS. PRICE: And, again, it\'s a provision, and the only means of \--
unfortunately it is not the right word \-- is non-regulatory guidance,
and you know, we\'ve looked at ways to strengthen, to do this. I mean
all we have the ability to do at this point is non-regulatory guidance.
We cannot dictate down to the states in any framework other than what we
already have.

MR. JONES: Thank you.

MS. PRICE: What we have put in place.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you.

As we close this section panel, all of the information and all the good
discussion, but I was also struck with something that sometimes we just
go past, and that is an obvious for all of us. I can\'t think of a
country in this world where we can come together like this, have very
candid questions asked, have very candid answers given back for those of
you what have run the programs in four of our fine states, representing,
again, a reminder for us. These four people represent over 12 million of
our students.

So thank you for the wonder questions. Thank you for your candor. Let\'s
give a big thank you to this panel.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: It is now just before five of four. We\'ll reconvene at
4:10.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off the record at 3:55 p.m. and
went back on the record at 4:13 p.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: We have come to the time for public comment. If there is
anyone in the audience that wishes to make public comment, would you
please step up, and here we have a microphone, please step up to the
microphone, give your name and where you are from.

MS. MOHAMMED: My energy works better when I stand up.

We made some notes today and we want to thank you all for the
opportunity to engage the committee, and we want to thank Secretary
Spellings for providing the opportunity for us to communicate.

My name is Linda Mohammed. I am a parent leader in Baltimore City,
Maryland, and we are very involved, and we\'re very involved in our
parent community.

We want to first thank all of the panel because I learned a lot today.
Resourcing is something that we find to be very essential, especially in
urban areas. We have a lot of lack of resourcing going on in urban
schools land we have a lot of \-- well, not a lot. We have exact
numbers, 11 persistently schools that are listed in Baltimore, and I
have one in my neighborhood. So we thought it was really essential that
we be here today.

I made notes so I can remember some of the stuff I want to say today. We
have a couple of recommendations, but we wanted to communicate to the
committee that an initiative that the parents and the citizens in
Baltimore, Maryland, we started as a self-help solution to bring
solutions to the community and at large maybe nationally at some point
where the parent citizens are engaging themselves, organizing themselves
because we realize that the parents sometimes, parent citizen, is under
valued.

And when we say that we mean not clearly communicated to. When we have
meeting such as this, we\'re always the last to be heard, which
sometimes can bring difficulty because you may have to get home to your
babies, and you don\'t get the chance to clearly communicate that
because you don\'t have the time constraints that some people do have to
sit in long-term meetings.

But we\'re excited about our initiative and our movement that is
happening in Baltimore, and just to put a plug in, it\'s going to happen
October 20th that Baltimore City parent-citizen, and we\'re going to
hold a press rally through our appointed and elected officials to try
and give a better perspective in turning back the tables so that we can
know that the parent is valued and that our self-esteem is better.

There\'s been a lot of training that came through Title I funding, which
is part of NCLB that cause the parents to have more of a literate
perspective, and it has really helped a lot of the parent leaders. A lot
of the parent leaders already had taught themselves, you know, through
the Internet and all of the other resources that are available.

Our target audience are the parents who do not have a voice, and it\'s
really interesting. When you talk to them, there are some real good
stories, where you have grandmothers who are really helping out, moms
that are really doing their best, and then we have the real tragic
stories.

So we want to help ourselves and bring solutions and to help our
administrations to help us help ourselves.

Through that, we realize that the partnership is lacking. That\'s
something that Mr. Jones so clearly spoke to. We were able to put
together a presentation, and we titled it \"Urban School Violence Is not
Televised,\" not that the balance doesn\'t occur in the urban areas, but
the components which make up the violence is a little different
sometimes because of the social and economic basis that we have. The
parents are not able to be a part, always and consistently be a part of
communicating and being communicated to. So that helps in the under
value part of the parent.

But as a majority, we realize that that parent can still get
information, and we can help as other parents. And what really helps us
in our initiative that we\'re doing is that it\'s not an entity that is
supporting us. It\'s the parent citizen that\'s really doing this. It\'s
not we\'re the funding and the parent is not intimidated by that because
we find that the gap of communication has occurred and the language
barrier has caused the parents not to trust the administration because
they don\'t speak the same language.

We have a lot of parents who may not be the so-called literate parent,
but they do understand language, and they do have a language that they
speak, but because they\'re not communicated in that way, it has
presented a major challenge. So they say nothing.

One thing I wanted to commend Dr. Kallem. Help me pronounce your name.
is it Kellam? Okay. Kellam.

Because when he spoke and I heard \"Baltimore,\" I was so happy because
I don\'t get to see Baltimore out and about, you know, like I would like
to see Baltimore because we do have a lot to offer as far as resourcing
because of the challenges that our city has provided us, and a lot of
the good things that have happened in Baltimore through parent
involvement.

But early intervention is something that we put in our proposal, that
targeting that parent, especially we found that parents that are in
pre-K or Head Start, they\'re ready to go, and that audience is not
valued enough because that\'s a perfect opportunity to get the parent.

Well, you have middle schools that have parents that are involved.
However, agreeing with the doctor, it\'s almost too late sometimes for
the teenager. I\'m not going to say we give up because I think there\'s
always opportunities when there\'s life. The challenges are different.

But we have a whole audience that we find in collecting our data that
the parent who has a pre-K or Head Start child is more involved, and to
keep them engaged is what one of our initiatives is to do.

One way that we as parent leaders have identified unsafe schools is low
test scoring or failing test scores. We have the opportunity to be on
the part of our state superintendent\'s family council committee, and
they recently showed us that historically black American children in the
State of Maryland have consistently failed our state assessment.

So I posed the question that night: what is the state doing to help us
and our children in these areas? And I\'m posing this to the local
agency and to ourselves as parents. What are we going to do to help our
children?

So what we recommend is we\'re going to work on our school board and
help our school board help us; engaging the parent from the parent
perspective, and it\'s free and it\'s low budget, and it\'s something
that if the administration chooses to engage the parent properly, we can
really accomplish a lot because it takes a lot of organization skills
really without funding because our initiative is not funded. It\'s just
parents taking the time to do what is necessary to do.

So we recommend even to the council today that we truly feel that, well,
honesty, honesty is a really good policy when it comes to the parent. I
believe it was one of the panel members spoke today, and it really
touched me and encouraged me because when you\'re honest about the
system not working, it makes the parent know that you are able to
communicate honesty.

So then when we see that, we go, \"Oh, I can really talk to you,\" and
then that\'s engagement. That\'s the moment of engagement because the
system is saying, \"Oh, we know we\'re not doing everything that we can.
So help us.\" That\'s what it means to us.

We also recommend from a national level to help bridge the gap
particularly in urban areas, communication. The Department of Education
could help bridge the gap of communication between the parent and the
administration because there\'s big distrust on both ends.

They may see me \-- I\'m not saying they do \-- but they may see me as a
parent who\'s agitating, you know, not really trying to help, but just
saying something where really I\'m really trying to help and to be seen
that way.

The other day I was coming from the market with my two girls and I saw
this handicapped man. He either had MS or some type of degenerative
disease, and he had grocery bags. And I passed him, and I went, \"Oh,
I\'ve got to go help him,\" because that\'s the kind of heart that I
have as a person.

But as I was trying to make a U turn to go and help him, I saw about six
people pass this gentleman in cars and walking, and he could not walk,
but he was trying to carry his groceries.

What I saw in that scenario, I saw the heart of the people. We have to
recognize who our audience is, what kind of help they need, I mean, and
really look at it realistically. This was a handicapped person who was
having difficulty carrying his groceries, but yet no one was able to see
him as that.

Man up, that some jargon that we use in our community. Man up means do
what you have to do to make it. Well, we want the administration
nationally, locally, well statewide and locally, to realize who the
audience is that you\'re representing, who you\'re really working for,
and if that becomes part of the topic, then it\'s better to assess how
to come to the multifaceted solutions because we\'ve got multifaceted
problems. There can\'t be just one solution.

We think that there\'s a lot of information. I\'m really happy about
being here, listening and being able to resource with such high
scholars, but if the audience is not targeted properly, then what we\'re
doing is wasting time basically, and that\'s how we feel as parents. We
feel that the time will be wasted.

So we recommend nationally that we could have some type of conference
like that where the honesty is open, where no one gets in trouble.

As a PTA leader, I represent my school, and it\'s interesting. When the
administration of the school comes to me and says, \"Ms. Mohammed, we
have this issue. Can the PTA get involved?\" I go, \"Yes, we can.\"

\"But we can\'t help you, Ms. Mohammed. We\'re going to have to stay in
the background.\"

To me I appreciate that because they have to keep their jobs. However,
that\'s difficult. It\'s difficult to represent an absent person. They
get consequences, something who they really care about, but they can\'t
represent properly.

So I think we should take a look at that as far as the staff and
administration because we have a lot of teachers who are willing to
help, willing to get in the trenches, but they may have heavy
consequences to pay if they do such a thing.

Well, I remember my teachers, as Dr. Kellam has said she he remembers
his school. I remember my teachers were very involved. They came to my
mom, our home, and talked to her. They were in the trenches, and that\'s
how I believe the trust was given to the school systems of our country,
because the school system at that time exhibited that type of behavior.

Well, no longer is that the case. So with these recommendations, as a
parent advocate, we hope that you all are able to take this seriously
because we are very avid on accountability. We appreciate all of the
efforts that you all do from the state level and local level.

We recognize that, but we also recognize that there are some major
problems in urban areas where the communication is really, really short.
We understand that our children\'s lives are at risk, and that it\'s
important to us.

I\'m sorry. I have like a cold from my baby girl. You know, those germs
are really strong. So forgive me for my voice goes in and out.

But I want to commend you for your efforts. The door is open, and it\'s
really interesting how easy the door opens. And I don\'t know if a lot
of administration know or parents know that it\'s just really just go
call and say, \"Oh, yeah, you can come.\" It\'s just that easy.

But because of the history of the relationships, the trust is not there.
So we\'re going to have to gain that back, and you have parents who want
to be here. So I\'m asking you to embrace that.

Please accept our recommendations as a parent leader, and thank you for
the opportunity.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you, Linda.

Anyone else for public comment?

MS. KRUEGER: I\'m Janelle Krueger again with the Colorado Department of
Education.

And I didn\'t come prepared to make any public comments, but just
hearing some of the other conversation earlier and having some side
conversation during the break made me think of some things. So I\'ll
seize the opportunity to quickly share with you some other concerns, as
well as recommendations since it will be the only opportunity I\'ll
probably ever have to visit with you again.

First of all, I would recommend staying the course with the principles
of effectiveness. A lot of people have put a lot of time and energy into
making those more effective, and I think they\'re serving the field
really well.

In response to whether or not there\'s evaluation results about
effectiveness, I can tell you that the local programs are the ones who
can speak to that effectiveness, but we don\'t always collect all of
that information.

So don\'t confuse absence of data at a state or national level with
absence of data at the local level. I can tell you it exists. We collect
it in our state, and how we measure some of that is not through
scientific evaluation, but we hold districts accountable to achieving
their goals.

So if they assess their data through the principles of effectiveness, if
their goal is to reduce bullying behaviors, they implement a bullying
prevention program. At the end of the year they have bullying prevention
behaviors reduced according to their goals. They will attribute the
results to that prevention program.

School teachers have the eyewitness account that the kids are actually
practicing the skills that have been taught in that curriculum, and
you\'re not going to be able to ever talk a teacher out of what they
know to be an eyewitness account of what they see, and they will tell
you it was safe and drug fee that made that happen because absent the
money, they wouldn\'t have purchased the curriculum. They might not have
planned around the behaviors in order to apply for their grant.

And so, again, they do have a lot of that evidence locally.

There\'s a major concern growing, I think, among people that this
program no longer emphasizes substance abuse prevention in ways that it
has in the past. Part of what attributes to that is that when the
principal\'s effectiveness require data assessment, we saw a shift in
Colorado that a lot of people started assessing discipline problems.

And alcohol and drugs are very outnumbered by all the other type of
discipline problems that have to do with safety, safety related
behaviors.

And so it\'s very easy for a person to apply for the money by speaking
to discipline problems that don\'t always get at the
alcohol-tobacco-drug problems.

Secondly, when the high profile school shootings began in the mid-1990s
and have continued, there was a major shift in emphasis for what schools
needed to do in order to secure campuses and create more safe
environments.

We saw an emphasis on threat assessment, how to intervene with kids if
they\'re making a threat, if you think they\'re going to commit targeted
violence. So we see shifts around those growing needs and emerging
needs, but a lot of that doesn\'t have anything to do with substance
abuse, and so it has weakened that.

One of the other things that has happened is when states consolidate
their application for all of the No Child Left Behind funding, every
title program has to make a sacrifice and cut back on the level of
detail that it includes in the application. So safe and drug free had to
sacrifice some of that specificity, and it weakened the state\'s ability
to hold them accountable for exactly what all was going on and how they
would speak to it.

One of those sacrifices the NCLB has brought about is the weakening of
working with advisory councils in the community. Prior to No Child Left
Behind, they were formalized and they were referred to in the law as a
regional advisory council or subregional. But it meant that they were
formal and they recommended all of the representatives that should be
sitting on those councils, and then it was up to the communities to
staff those councils how they wanted.

That has been taken out, and even though a consultation is still
required, there\'s nothing formal about it. If somebody wanted to call
up somebody on the phone and say, \"We\'re going to do this with our
money this year. What do you think?\" and they go, \"Oh, yeah, that\'s
fine,\" well, is that a consultation?

A lot of people would say, \"Yes, I made the call. We had a
conversation. It was the Chief of Police. It was the parent. It was
the,\" you know, whoever.

But there\'s no way for the state really now. We don\'t have a good leg
to stand on to monitor for it or to ask for a lot of detail about that.

So I think there needs to be some strengthening about getting back to a
systems approach to make sure that there are the right players, helping
the district\'s plan, adding their resources to the table, adding their
data to the table, and being more comprehensive in that.

So anything to strengthen consultation in the community would be
welcome.

One of the other things that has drifted away from substance abuse, not
just with the high profile shootings, but 911 has had a major impact. If
the schools are not resourced in order to respond to those emerging
needs, then they keep looking to safe and drug free as the answer to get
some kind of resources devoted to that.

Katrina was another one, and now this year we\'re all aware of some of
the other school shootings that have started again. That brings up the
issues of crisis management and emergency response. We\'ve seen a lot of
people going in that direction. Things like the campus safety and
security, I think we\'re going to see more requests for video cameras,
ID badges.

I had a district request, \$7,000 for a camera, and they didn\'t tell me
what it was for, and it exceeded the 20 percent cap. And so I had to get
back to them and said it still has to meet the principles of
effectiveness. What\'s your data? What are you trying to do? Why do you
need this camera? And, by the way, you have to limit it to \$6,630.

What the camera was for was ID badges for all faculty and staff, \$6,600
out of the 16,000 allocation. But I couldn\'t say no to that because I
thought, \"You know what? They have me over a barrel. I\'d be a fool to
turn that down. Of course they need to be able to distinguish who is
rightfully walking around on campus from those visitors that are not
IDed.\"

You have to do that, you know, and so I was torn because I kept
thinking, \"I wonder what their substance laws are in that community,\"
because there\' probably a lot of other issues they should be
addressing, but there\'s that pressure. There\'s changing needs.
There\'s emerging needs, and everybody keeps looking to safe and drug
free to meet those needs, and so the money is getting stretched way too
thin.

So if there\'s anything to strengthen a return to some kind of a focus
or looking at substance abuse with equity in addition to the other
safety issues that are confronting us, general fund money is really
tight, and so this is an infrastructure grant. It\'s helping staff
salaried people to be in positions to do nothing but this type of work
in many of the districts.

I am frightened for this country if those positions should fold. They
are the representatives who carry the responsibility. We call them Title
IV Coordinator. Sometimes it\'s a school nurse. Sometimes it\'s a
superintendent. It might be a counselor. It could be a teacher, a
principal, but they are the ones that have the responsibility for
planning, evaluating, choosing where the money goes in consultation with
their community.

And if a state no longer has a Title IV Coordinator out there locally,
then that means I don\'t have an E-mail address book anymore with their
name on it. Our superintendents get a barrage of E-mail from anybody and
everybody who has anything to do with youth, anything to sell. I mean,
you know, it\'s a barrage of information overload.

And so if you think like the national grant, for example, comes along,
you have to advertise that to somebody locally. You cannot continue
sending everything to one superintendent per district thinking that you
have just given fair, equitable opportunity to participate in the
competitive national grant.

But if you have a Title IV Coordinator who has applied for the money,
they\'re on the lookout for those kinds of resources, and they\'ll
broker those resources.

So in addition to having the money fund a lot of prevention activity, as
well as intervention, if you can look at this as what\'s the impact on
the infrastructure out there when the school component needs to fit with
the community component. And if the resources continue to dry up or if
the program is eliminated, where would we all be?

And I truly believe that. It frightens me to think what would happen if
a school infrastructure component should somehow be so weakened that
they\'re sitting out of the picture.

And I think that\'s about all I wanted to just emphasize with a little
history and trends and what we\'re up again.

I commend you all again for your efforts and doing some very difficult
work.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Janelle.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: Anyone else wish to make public comment?

(No response.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: If not, as we close today, a reminder that tomorrow
morning we\'ll start at eight o\'clock, eight to 8:30, and we will
reconvene at 8:30, whereas this morning it was nine o\'clock. So I just
want to point that out.

And as I turn it over to Deb, I just want to thank you for a good day.
It was informative, almost an overwhelming mountain of information.

Tomorrow morning we\'ll have the opportunity to synthesize, put this
together, and get a good night\'s sleep so we can do that in a very
positive plan. With that I\'ll turn it over to Deb.

MS. PRICE: I just want to \-- I know that Catherine sent out an E-mail
telling you all that Secretary Spellings is going to join us tomorrow,
but I just wanted to remind you that she will be coming about 10:15,
stay for about a half hour, have some remarks and some then basically
discussion with you all.

And I know that some of what she\'s going to want to talk about is the
recent White House conference.

But anyway, so I just was reminding you that she is coming tomorrow. Our
boss is coming. But anyway, so she\'ll be here about 10:15.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Everyone have a good evening.

(Whereupon, at 4:38 p.m., the meeting was adjourned, to reconvene at
8:30 a.m., Tuesday, October 24, 2006.)