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At P.S. 157 in the Bronx, staff called 911 multiple times to respond to a
7-year-old in emotional distress.
Education
NYC SCHOOLS HANDCUFF AND HAUL AWAY KIDS IN EMOTIONAL CRISIS
by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica May 4,
5 a.m. EDT
DESPITE A PLEDGE TO STOP RELYING ON POLICE TO DEAL WITH STUDENTS WHO HAVE MENTAL
HEALTH EPISODES, NEW YORK CITY SCHOOLS HAVE CONTINUED TO CALL 911 ON KIDS IN
DISTRESS THOUSANDS OF TIMES A YEAR, AN INVESTIGATION BY THE CITY AND PROPUBLICA
FOUND.
by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica May 4,
5 a.m. EDT
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Co-published with THE CITY
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as soon as they are published.
It was almost time for school pickup when Paul’s mom saw the text on the
classroom messaging app: Paul — her 7-year-old — “ended up running out of class
today and it escalated rather quickly.” Someone at the school had called 911.
Paul’s parents could contact the main office for more information, the message
read.
Paul’s mom remembers the physical feeling of dread, like ice under her skin.
Paul — that’s his middle name — has a neurological disorder. He loves to cuddle
with his mom and help take care of his baby sister, and he’s wild about Greek
mythology. Like a lot of kids with developmental disabilities, he also has very
big tantrums, hitting, spitting and throwing things when he gets upset. Since
the end of first grade, he’s been in a special public school classroom in
Brooklyn that integrates disabled and nondisabled kids.
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The day of the message, in early December, Paul’s mom was so panicked that she
couldn’t fully make sense of what it said. Why had the school called 911 instead
of calling her? Was her child hurt? Had something gone terribly wrong? She
wanted to run the last few blocks to the school, but her legs felt frozen. It
was hard just to walk.
When she made it into the school building, she found Paul lying facedown on the
floor of a computer room, his whole body heaving with sobs. She touched his
back, and he screamed and tried to scramble away. Then he recognized his
mother’s voice and jumped into her arms. “Mommy, don’t let them handcuff me,” he
begged.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about? No one is going to handcuff you.’”
But that’s when she found out: Someone already had.
That afternoon, Paul had had a meltdown that started in his classroom and
spilled into a hallway. When he didn’t calm down, someone called a school safety
agent — an officer of the New York Police Department who is stationed full-time
in the building. Paul knocked off the agent’s face mask and glasses, and that’s
when it happened. The agent pulled out a pair of Velcro restraints and forced
them over Paul’s hands.
Looking now, Paul’s mom could see red marks where the handcuffs had rubbed
Paul’s wrists raw. But she felt more bewildered than ever. She must be
misunderstanding, she thought. Who would handcuff a 7-year-old?
New York City officials have promised for years to stop relying on police to
respond to students in emotional crisis. Under the terms of a 2014 legal
settlement, schools are only supposed to call 911 in the most extreme
situations, when kids pose an “imminent and substantial risk of serious injury”
to themselves or others.
And yet an investigation by THE CITY and ProPublica found that city schools
continue to call on safety agents and other police officers to manage students
in distress thousands of times each year — incidents the NYPD calls “child in
crisis” interventions. Unless a parent arrives in time to intercede, cops hand
kids off to EMTs, who take students to hospital emergency rooms for psychiatric
evaluations. In close to 1,370 incidents since 2017, students ended up in
handcuffs while they waited for an ambulance to arrive, according to NYPD data.
In several incidents, those kids were 5 or 6 years old.
Schools Called the Police on Students in Emotional Distress Thousands of Times
Note: 2017 is the first year that the New York Police Department released data
on all incidents where a school employee called 911 over a student in emotional
distress, known as child-in-crisis incidents. Data Source: NYPD quarterly School
Safety Act report. Credit: Lucas Waldron, ProPublica
Ten years ago, in the runup to the 2014 settlement, a group of parents sued the
city’s Department of Education, claiming that schools violated their children’s
constitutional rights and broke federal law by sending them to hospitals when
they weren’t experiencing medical emergencies — in many cases in response to
behavior that resulted directly from a student’s disability.
The experience was traumatic and humiliating for the kids, the plaintiffs
claimed. Students were terrified to return to school; 6- and 7-year-olds thought
they were being arrested. Two schools filed child welfare reports on parents who
didn’t allow EMTs to put their children in ambulances.
Meanwhile, the hospital visits served no useful purpose, plaintiffs claimed.
Students missed crucial class time only to wait for hours in emergency rooms —
sometimes with seriously mentally ill adults — and then be sent home. At least
one parent lost her job because she was repeatedly forced to leave work to rush
to the hospital, and then she was stuck with bills for ambulance trips and ER
services her child didn’t need.
As part of the 2014 settlement, the department issued a regulation that requires
schools to make every effort to safely manage students in distress without
involving police — including by deploying trained crisis response teams and
allowing parents to speak to their children by phone if possible. Schools are
never allowed to use 911 calls as a punishment for misbehavior. When cops do get
involved, they must use the “minimum level of restraint necessary.”
Despite the promises and regulations, New York City public schools call 911 on
students in emotional distress as often as ever, an analysis by THE CITY and
ProPublica of NYPD data shows. Prior to the lawsuit, city-run and charter
schools saw an average of 3,000 child-in-crisis incidents per year from 2005 to
2010 and an average of 3,300 incidents in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years,
according to court documents. Since 2017 — the first post-lawsuit year for which
the NYPD reported complete data — schools have seen an average of 3,200
incidents per year. (The analysis excludes 911 calls made in 2020 and 2021, when
schools operated on a remote or hybrid schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Schools are far more likely to call 911 on Black students, who make up less than
a quarter of the student body but account for nearly half of child-in-crisis
incidents and 59% of instances in which students were handcuffed since 2017, the
analysis shows. And schools continue to call police to respond to young
children: Last year, more than 560 child-in-crisis incidents involved students
aged 10 or younger. In five cases, the kids were 4 years old.
Black Students Are Disproportionately Handcuffed During Child-in-Crisis
Incidents
Black children, who make up a quarter of students in New York City schools,
accounted for 59% of handcuffed students.
Hispanic
Black
White
Asian/Pacific Isl.
Other
All Handcuffed Students
59% of all handcuffed
students were Black.
All Child-in-Crisis Incidents
As were 46% of kids in
child-in-crisis incidents.
Student Population
But only 25% of all
students are Black.
Black
Hispanic
White
Other
Asian/Pacific Isl.
All Handcuffed Students
59% of all handcuffed
students were Black.
All Child-in-Crisis Incidents
As were 46% of kids in
child-in-crisis incidents.
Student Population
But only 25% of all
students are Black.
Note: Data for all New York City child-in-crisis and handcuffing incidents
covers 2017 to 2022. Data for student population demographics includes school
years 2017-18 to 2021-22. Data Sources: New York City annual student enrollment
snapshot and New York Police Department quarterly School Safety Act report.
Credit: Lucas Waldron, ProPublica
“The things that needed to change did not change,” said Nelson Mar, an education
attorney at Legal Services NYC who represented the plaintiffs in the 2013
lawsuit.
That’s partly because the Department of Education fails to hold schools
accountable for not following its own regulations, Mar and other advocates said.
Schools are required to file occurrence reports after calling 911 on students,
but they don’t have to show that they took the mandatory steps to manage a
crisis first. Unless parents have a lawyer or a paid advocate, they rarely know
the reports exist, much less get the opportunity to contest a school’s account
of an incident or to object if they believe school staff called 911 to punish a
student they were fed up with.
In an emailed statement, Department of Education spokesperson Nathaniel Styer
wrote that, if parents believe a school called 911 in violation of city rules,
they should contact their school district’s superintendent, who oversees school
leaders and can provide additional training. “Situations where young children
are in crisis and/or are at risk of harming themselves or others are among the
most difficult for our educators and school staff,” Styer wrote.
“Nevertheless,” Styer continued, “whenever there is evidence the policy hasn’t
been followed, it will be reported and investigated, and we review every case
where 911 is called to ensure that it was necessary and complied with our
policy.”
But thousands of children are still being forcibly removed from schools each
year, which means the oversight clearly isn’t working, said Amber Decker, a
public school parent who was a plaintiff in the 2013 lawsuit and now works as an
advocate for parents of kids with disabilities.
If schools were being held accountable for unnecessary 911 calls, “the numbers
would have gone down,” Decker said. As it is, “there’s no consequences other
than the ones you push for until you’re blue in the face or banging your head
against the wall.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To understand why police are so involved in New York City schools, you have to
look back to the late 1990s. Rudy Giuliani was mayor, and schools were at the
junction of two of his biggest campaign promises: to slash crime and to fix the
education system. For students, that meant a “zero tolerance” approach to school
misconduct.
In 1998, the city created a new division of the NYPD, transferring school safety
operations — which had previously been managed by the Board of Education — to
the police department. Agents were allowed to arrest students for all kinds of
misbehavior, including spitting, talking back to teachers and cutting class.
Eighteen years and two administrations later, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio presided
over a city that approached young people and police very differently. According
to a 2016 mayoral task force that included the commanding officer of the NYPD’s
School Safety Division, overly punitive practices weren’t making students safer;
they were pushing vulnerable kids out of schools and into the juvenile justice
system.
The task force pointed to child-in-crisis incidents as part of the problem.
“With little mental health experience or training, and scant access to mental
health professionals, ER overuse is the norm,” the task force wrote.
De Blasio promised to transform the city’s approach to school discipline by
reducing the role of police and dramatically increasing the mental health
resources available to students and teachers. “We’re revolutionizing our school
system,” he said in 2019.
ProPublica
Read More
Public Schools Are NYC’s Main Youth Mental Health System. Where Kids Land Often
Depends on What Their Parents Can Pay.
The revolution never materialized. In 2021, after New York City students
experienced some of the longest school shutdowns in the country, the city hired
500 new school-based social workers to help respond to trauma connected to the
COVID-19 pandemic. De Blasio’s was “one of the first administrations to
recognize that schools are where kids with mental health problems land,” said
Peter Ragone, a longtime de Blasio adviser.
But while the hiring push put the city ahead of many other jurisdictions, New
York City schools still have just one social worker for every 475 students —
close to double the National Association of Social Workers’ recommended ratio of
250 students per social worker.
The city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, announced a sweeping mental health plan in
March that includes a “Mental Health Continuum,” a project that was conceived
under de Blasio and rolled out last year to connect schools directly to mental
health clinics and mobile crisis teams. But Adams’s proposed city budget,
released a month later, included no funding for the project.
“It’s mind-boggling,” said Dawn Yuster, who directs the School Justice Project
at the group Advocates for Children. “This would expedite care for young people
with the most significant needs. If you’re going to say it, fund it.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about the Mental Health
Continuum, but Patrick Gallahue, press secretary for the city’s Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene, wrote in an emailed statement that a new teletherapy
program for high schoolers will “connect even more young people with services by
reaching them where they are.”
Meanwhile, in 2022, City Council members acknowledged the need for more
oversight of child-in-crisis incidents, introducing a bill that would have
required school safety agents to document that school staff tried to de-escalate
a crisis before involving police. But the bill never made it out of committee.
(Neither Councilmember Diana Ayala nor Councilmember Rita Joseph, both of whom
sponsored the bill, responded to requests for comment.)
When school staff don’t get the support they need from mental health experts,
they often resort to punishing kids for behaviors they can’t control, Yuster
said. It might start with “calling parents every day about a student’s behavior.
Then they up the ante, calling to say, ‘We’re suspending for five days, and next
time we’re going to call EMS if this behavior continues.’”
Not only do the escalating punishments violate city rules but they also destroy
trust between students and schools, said Crystal Baker-Burr, an attorney who
directs the Education Project at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit public defense
agency.
“Even if a school is at their wit’s end,” Baker-Burr said, “sending a student to
the ER is not going to help the situation. Getting police involved, handcuffing
them, it doesn’t make anything better at school the next day.”
Three years ago, Baker-Burr saw the impact of 911 calls up close — on her
7-year-old nephew, Ethan. (Ethan’s family asked us to identify him by just his
first name.)
In 2019, Ethan was a second grader at P.S. 157 in the Bronx. He was a gentle and
sweet kid at home, but he got overwhelmed and acted out at school, said his mom,
Jacqueline De Jesus. He’d hit other kids or run out of the classroom. Sometimes
he’d bite himself. This was before he was diagnosed with autism, and his parents
were still trying to figure out what to do. De Jesus asked the school for help,
she said, but teachers told her that Ethan didn’t need to be evaluated for
educational services because his schoolwork was at grade level.
Instead, De Jesus said, Ethan, who’s Black and Latino, got punished. Teachers
yelled at him and sent him out of the classroom. He wasn’t allowed to join music
or sports clubs or sign up for the after-school program. The school constantly
called his parents to pick him up early.
De Jesus felt like the message was clear. “They didn’t want to deal with him,”
she said. It seemed like the school was making it as difficult as possible for
Ethan to stay.
When Jacqueline De Jesus’ second grader, Ethan, threw tantrums at school,
staffers repeatedly called 911.
Ethan loves stuffed animals, reading, playing with clay and building paper
boxes.
P.S. 157’s principal did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of
Education declined to comment on Ethan’s experience, even though De Jesus signed
a release allowing it to share information with THE CITY and ProPublica.
In April 2019, De Jesus got a phone call that shocked her. It was the school
secretary, saying that an ambulance was on its way to take Ethan to the
hospital. De Jesus was at work in Manhattan — a 40-minute cab ride away — so she
called Baker-Burr, who went straight to the school. When she got there, Ethan
was curled up in a ball underneath a desk, rocking back and forth and sobbing.
His face was swollen and red from crying for so long.
Two uniformed police officers were “standing over my very small nephew,”
Baker-Burr said. “They were saying things like, ‘Don’t lie to us, Ethan. When
you’re older, we could arrest you for things like this.’”
Baker-Burr asked the officers to leave the room, then got down on the floor and
convinced Ethan to come out from under the desk, promising that she wouldn’t let
anyone hurt him. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was calm, talking to
Baker-Burr about his new Five Nights at Freddy’s backpack. Baker-Burr rode with
him to Lincoln Medical Center, a public hospital in the South Bronx, where a
doctor interviewed him and sent him home with a note saying he was fine to
return to school.
Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx
“They were like, ‘Why is this child even here?’ It was a colossal waste of
time,” Baker-Burr said.
That didn’t stop the school from calling 911 on Ethan two more times in the next
month, De Jesus and Baker-Burr said. Nor did it prevent De Jesus from being
billed hundreds of dollars for ambulance rides and ER visits.
Eventually, De Jesus gave up and petitioned the city to move Ethan to a
different school. “I didn’t want to send him somewhere he wasn’t wanted,” she
said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calling 911 on kids “is the last thing any teacher wants to do,” said Kristen
GoldMansour, a former teacher and coach who works with dozens of New York City
schools to support inclusive programming for students with disabilities.
“The question is, how did we get there?” GoldMansour said. “There’s probably a
thousand million things we could have done to avoid getting to that point.”
In fact, when students’ behavior or mental health needs get in the way of
learning, federal law requires schools to intervene, proactively offering them
evaluations and services like occupational therapy or a functional behavioral
assessment — a detailed analysis of what triggers kids’ behaviors and the best
strategies to prevent an emergency.
But getting the right services can be difficult or impossible — especially for
parents who can’t pay attorneys to help them navigate the city’s convoluted
system for students with disabilities. Instead, as THE CITY and ProPublica
reported last year, kids who are disruptive or aggressive often get pushed out
of mainstream schools and into failing special education schools that are packed
with other students who have behavioral and mental health challenges. Even if
they are capable academically, their chances of graduating with a diploma
plummet.
Meanwhile, their odds of encountering police go way up: Special education
schools, which disproportionately serve low-income and Black students, call 911
on kids in distress at four times the per-student rate of general education
schools, according to a data analysis by Advocates for Children.
In Brooklyn, Paul’s parents are doing everything they can to keep him in a
school with general education students. This is his chance to be integrated into
mainstream life, his mom said.
On the day after Paul’s school called 911, his parents asked for a meeting with
school staff and officials from the Department of Education — something they
only knew to do because they were working with paid education advocates, they
said. Paul’s dad went to the meeting, which was recorded on Zoom, with a list of
questions: What kinds of restraints were used on his son? Could he see a picture
of them? Would the school share its plan for responding to students in crisis or
its policies on handcuffing kids? What if Paul had another incident — would
staff call his parents before calling 911?
School staff said that they had tried to calm Paul down, but no one explained
why the NYPD safety agent had become involved or why the school hadn’t called
Paul’s parents first. The principal would only say that the school had done
nothing wrong. “Protocols were followed,” she said. Everything was “by the
book.” Meanwhile, she repeated a list of Paul’s transgressions: He had
“assaulted” teachers, his behavior was “egregious.” (Paul’s parents asked us not
to use their names or identify his school, in part to protect Paul’s privacy but
also for fear of alienating education officials who hold power over Paul’s
future school placements.)
After an hour, Paul’s dad was reduced to pleading: “Promise me, if this happens
again, you have to call us,” he said. “I'm begging you. This is my son.”
ProPublica
Read More
As Rail Profits Soar, Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get
to School
Two weeks after the meeting, the Department of Education transferred Paul to a
school that has more experience teaching disabled and nondisabled kids together.
It’s a better outcome than many families get, Paul’s mom said. “We’re white, and
we have a lot of resources to put toward our son. I have no idea how you would
manage this situation without the resources to pay for help.”
So far, things at the new school are going well. Paul’s tantrums have not been
quite so explosive, and his teachers seem comfortable managing them, his mom
said. “They don’t shame him or drag him through the mud.”
Still, it’s impossible for her not to worry. If Paul was handcuffed at 7, what
happens as he gets bigger and older?
She finds herself shutting away the memory of what happened in December. “It’s
like this other, alternative reality,” she said. “I’m with my joyful, wonderful
child, and I’m like, ‘How could this happen?’”
Sophie Chou contributed data analysis.
Filed under —
* Education
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Abigail Kramer is a reporter at THE CITY.
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