October 12, 2005
Brooklyn High School Is Accused Anew of Forcing Students Out
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, NY Times

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The nonprofit group that forced New York City to promise to stop pushing failing students out of the public schools filed suit yesterday charging that Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn has continued to force students out, in violation of the law and the city's pledge.

Moreover, the suit charges, many struggling students at Boys and Girls High are essentially warehoused in the school auditorium, where they fill out worksheets for three hours a day and attend no classes. As a result, they fail to earn course credits needed for promotion, and then are told they can no longer attend the school, the suit contends.

By pushing out students who are failing and unlikely to graduate, as well as truants and students with behavior problems, schools can raise their test-score averages and graduation rates while reducing suspensions and dropout rates.

In response to earlier cases, the city adopted new discharge codes intended to improve tracking of the reasons students leave high school, and it settled two federal lawsuits by promising to readmit students who were forced out without diplomas.

But yesterday, Elisa Hyman, a lawyer for the nonprofit group that filed the suit, Advocates for Children, said the city's new policies did not appear to be working or were not being enforced.

She said statistics on discharged students provided by the city over the summer were incomplete, raising the possibility that many students were still being pushed out. Under rules imposed by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein in late 2003, students are to be extensively interviewed and counseled before they are discharged from a city high school. Students and parents must be provided with written information about alternative programs, and they must be advised of the student's right to remain in school until age 21.

Ms. Hyman said her group had repeatedly advised the City Education Department about complaints at Boys and Girls.

The school, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, has more than 4,000 students and is one of the few remaining high schools in the city that draws its students from its own neighborhood.

"We had no choice but to assist students and parents who have been subject to these illegal practices," Ms. Hyman said.

Michael Best, the Education Department's top lawyer, issued a statement that did not address the allegations in the suit but said the parents should have asked school officials for help.

"The chancellor has made clear that we will not tolerate pushing out our students," Mr. Best said. "If the plaintiffs wanted to help our children, they would have come to us, but they obviously prefer a lawsuit, which will needlessly waste time and resources."

One mother, who asked not to be identified because she still has a son at Boys and Girls, said her older son was placed on a shortened schedule when he arrived at Boys and Girls in September 2003 as a 16-year-old freshman, two years older than most ninth graders.

"You sit in the auditorium and you are handed papers that you fill out while you sit there," she said. In the lawsuit, where she is identified only by the initials N.W., she charged that a counselor at the school had asked her to sign papers transferring her son to a program to earn a high school equivalency degree without explaining that her son would be sent to a different school. She said she was never advised of his right to stay at Boys and Girls.

"That was not in the conversation, period," she said in a telephone interview yesterday. "It was like he had to go, it was no options, it was no choices."

She has a younger son who she said was also assigned to three periods a day in the Boys and Girls auditorium last spring and then pushed out of the school last month by the same counselor, who said that because he was 17 and had earned no course credits, he would have to seek a high school equivalency degree.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was filed yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, include two other parents and their children, also identified by initials. A 15-year-old student at Boys and Girls, whose mother is considering joining the suit, said in an interview that he was assigned to the school auditorium after being suspended for 15 days last January for fighting in school.

At first, he said, he had seven classes a day, including math, environmental science, history, English and business. But after the fight, he was required to sit in the auditorium for three hours each morning. When he returned to school in September, he was given the same schedule.

This student, who asked not to be identified out of fear that he would never be returned to regular classes, said: "We just sit in the auditorium, and the teacher he gives us a packet and we have to write down the answers. It's just a little story." He said the same worksheets were assigned as homework.

In an interview yesterday before the lawsuit was filed, the school's principal, Spencer Holder, called the auditorium program a disciplinary measure. "We have a small program in the auditorium that deals with youngsters who had a history of truancy," he said. "And we provide them an opportunity to adjust, but they are in that program for a short period."

Mr. Holder said Boys and Girls served its students well. "It's an extremely popular school among the communities in Brooklyn," he said. "People want their kids in Boys and Girls High School."

The lawsuit charges that "Boys and Girls has a long history of illegally excluding students" that includes the tenure of its previous principal, Frank Mickens, who retired last year after two decades in the job. Mr. Mickens was known as a tough-talking enforcer who ran a tight ship according to his own rules.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Mickens complained that large schools were being forced to take all of the city's special education students and students with behavior problems while the small schools being created by the mayor were not admitting these children.

"I am not going to sit there as principal and welcome a student who threatens me or my staff," he said. "I stand by my record."

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