State Comptroller: DOE Concealing School Crime

In 2012, when a student at I.S. 27 in Staten Island pushed another student over a desk, which fell on him, the incident was severe enough to be reported to the state Education Department. So was a scuffle at Manhattan’s P.S. 83, when a student struck a classmate in the face, then threw him into some desks. Yet neither of them made it into legally-mandated reports to Albany, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said last week.

In fact, those were two of more than 400 violent incidents and unauthorized student departures the Comptroller identified as underreported by the city Department of Education over a two-year period. An audit, released April 29, sampled 10 schools from 2011 to 2013, during a period the DOE reported 989 qualifying incidents. That number should have been 1,417, Mr. DiNapoli’s office said.