Education: Challenges & Perspectives – Workshop 4A School Violence: Extent of the Problem and Solutions

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Welcome everybody; this is obviously a very important topic. I’m glad to see all of you here. My name is Doris Ling-Cohan. I’m a judge of the Supreme Court. As someone who has a child in public school, obviously this issue affects me. But beyond that this is an issue that affects our community and I would say it is probably the most important issues that affect our community today because it affects the future generations of our community.

This whole discussion got generated because of a numbers of reports in the Asian American press as to various incidents that have happened in various schools. I’m going to just name a few of them. I’ll probably not cover all of the ones that we had heard about—Lafayette High School, Bayard Russian High School, Junior High School 189 in Flushing, FDR High School, New Utrecht, Ford Hamilton High School, P.S 205, Seward Park, John Bound H.S. also in flushing. That’s just a few of the ones we heard about.

Obviously you’re here today on a very warm day because you are interested in these issues. We have some fine panelists who will be talking about various aspects of school violence and looking for solutions and also providing solutions to children, to families and to community.

Our first panelist is Vanessa Leung, who is with the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families. She is a project specialist currently working on a report on the status of Asian American students in the public schools. Her bio is very distinguished; everybody’s bio here is very distinguished. I’m just going to touch on the highlight of everybody’s bio. I invite you to look into the booklet, which has more detailed information and her topic will be “Impacts of Asian American stereotypes on inter group relations in school violence.” Vanessa….

Vanessa Leung:

Thank you, Judge Doris. The Coalition for Asian American Children and Family is really dedicated to improving the health and well-being of all Asian American children in New York City. What we do is we work to challenge them, talking to policymakers, educating the public about the many stereotypes that can affect services to our family. We help to build a bridge between government and our community, as well as we hope to build an understanding between community-based organization, our community and the government.

We started this education project with the knowledge that there is a growing number of students who are of Asian descent in our public schools but who have no unified voice. We hope to become a representative to represent all their perspectives and bring awareness about their unique challenges, their unique struggle. We want to be able to build a pan-Asian advocacy voice and work with community, work with the school, work with the parents and students to develop positive measures that will improve education all around for all our students. Hopefully, through the goals of this talk we can all really understand who are our Asian American students, really paint the general picture of what makes up that population. I’m going cull from a lot of information that we had done—I have done a series of group interviews with students and parents—cull from that as well as with the recommendation of steps to improving the situation at our schools.

The National Center for Educational Statistics actually have shown that all students feel increasingly unsafe during school, as well as traveling to and from school. That is something that is occurring in all our schools. We have some information about Asian American students, though we are uncertain in terms of their validity. But there is a survey, a national survey, Asian American students had a growing sense of feeling unsafe, especially when there was increasing ethnic minority. So there was a correlation in that respect.

Most of our Asian American students are immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. Actually in New York State, about 96% of our households are children living in households with foreign-born parents, and almost half of New York City Asian household are deemed linguistically isolated. That means no one over 14 speaks English very well. So most of our Asian American students are immigrants or are children of immigrants.

In New York City public school, about one in ten students are Asian American. Out of these, one in four are English language learners. So almost one in five of all English language learners are Asian Americans. Taking that into consideration, when you see about almost 2% of all principals and assistant principles are Asian Americans, and only about 3% of our teachers are Asian Americans. Something that we have learned through the work done by [Amy Allen-Schwartz] at NYU is that in elementary and middle school, Asian Americans students are attending, proportionally, school with Asians and Whites.

On average, let say if you take regular population, an American child classmate should comprised about 32% Asians, 14% blacks, 30% Hispanic, and 23% white. However, on average of our child classmates, Asian American classmates are about 11% Asian, 35% black, 38% Hispanic, and about 16% white. So the idea is that most of our Asian American students are in schools with other Asian American students as well as white students, and are not reprehensive of what would be a regular average if you take the whole student population.

So what does this all say? A lot of these are going to be speculation, founded in no means of any scientific proof. But these are the information that we have learned from interviews. We have found that how our children interact in school is going to play a key role in their development. Race dynamic can often go unaddressed; stereotype can really have an impact on how our children react with other students and how teachers react to students. And what is the overall sense of community in the school.

What I’m saying is that there are Asian American kids’ perception of other races as well as other kids’ perception of Asian American kids. Post-9/11 we had seen an increasing amount of school violence, specifically against South Asian American students. With the increase of patriotism there is also this sense of who really is an American. We have talked to youths from South Asian Youths in Action, and found that there has been increasing harassment, an increasing number of assaults that occurred. Even when we talk to elementary school guidance counselors, they found a young South Asian boy in a predominantly Chinese American student population, that he didn’t even want to identify himself as being South Asian. He would rather identify himself as Latino instead of placing him into a certain group.

We also talked to Filipino youths. With the understanding that there is terrorism in the Philippines, young Filipino youths are being harassed, with people saying things like, “oh, are you also one of those terrorists?” or “are you related to those people in the Philippines?” It’s the idea that Asian American students as obedient, quiet students and that they aren’t going to rock the boat. We found that even with teacher’s expectations, that people are going to say, “Our Asian American students are quiet, they study hard, they don’t want to disrupt the class.” This could lead to implications that will have an effect on interaction between teacher and student as well as the student peers to peers.

The fact that they have limited interaction with groups across racial barriers limits their ability to be able to talk to… They are not given the environment where they can really interact comfortably with a lot of different people. There is a lot of ELL kids who are separated and trapped into English Language learners. I’ve talk to youth who said that the school is divided, the school is divided between the mainstream kids and the ELL kids and the ELL kids never have the opportunity to interact. They are not afforded those opportunities and there is a sense and feeling of division in that school.

Harassments can lead to escalating tensions. In no means am I saying that if there is harassment there is going to be an assault. But there are certain things that school as well as administrator, as well as teachers and parents can do. Public schools really need to prepare to serve the really diverse student populations and the different kinds of family there are in their community. They have to be able to understand the different unique traditions, the different unique cultures, as well as know that every child has the right to learn in an emotionally and physically safe place. The only environment that can afford that is one that is built upon respect and hostility-free, where both teachers and parents feel respected and secure.

It is important that we realize that a lot of times many incidents go unreported. A lot of times this is due to fear, fear of reporting something that is not supposed to be put out to the public or fear of parents or family being undocumented, fear of what would happen afterwards. They might also not know what to do, what are the next step should something happen. It is important for the school to really know and understand the experiences of the students, the parents and the teachers in order to address the reality that occurs in our schools and prepare to address the situation. Because once we know, we can be better prepared to educate our students, our parents, our faculty to know their rights, to know what to do and to empower them to do something.

Stereotypes need to be challenged. Oftentimes the adults in school are the role models for the kids. They can play an amazing role in helping children shape their understanding of different races, as silence or perpetuation of these stereotypes can promote a misunderstanding among students as well. I think what is most key is that, there’s that old adage that “Sticks or stones can break their bones, but names can never hurt.” It is really important to stay away from that and move to believe that language hurts, and language is threatening.

If a student feels harassed at school and they are not feeling safe, they are not able to learn in an environment where they are respected and feel secure. If they are verbally harassed, there is a limitation in terms of they want to go to school, they feel that the school is a place where they can grow and learn. So we as the community need to support the school and their efforts to support the students and to support the family, try to develop a mutual understanding between groups as well as foster greater substance among different groups. Thank you.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Thank you. Our next speaker is a recently transplant to New York and we welcome her. She is staff attorney in Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, also known as AALDEF. Khin Mai Aung leads the newly formed Youth Law Project. This project focuses on educational equity, hate violence and racial targeting, police misconduct and juvenile justice as well as language access for non-English proficient youths and parents.

Most recently Miss Aung was the Director of Policy and Civid Engagement for the Youth Leadership Institute on the West coast, a non-profit agency dedicating to promoting youth voice in the formulation of public policies and community-base initiatives affecting youth. We are happy to welcome her to the East Coast because we can certainly use her energy on this issue. Miss Aung….

Khin Mai Aung:

Thank you. I’m really happy to be here. My presentation today is going to talk about the legal protections that students enjoy in school, particularly related to school violence and harassment. Also we are going to look at some particular issues that my organization AALDEF has found regarding school violence in some cases in NY, in particular some cases that have already come before me in my brief time here at AALDEF. In framing the discussion I want to focus not only on actual school violence, but as Vanessa said, verbal harassments and the like.

AALDEF’s approach to this issue is not to focus so much on punishing perpetuator, though certainly it is appropriate to discipline, or have police prosecution of injury assaults and more serious incident. But our approach generally is to focus on the duty of the school to protect students, and also to build community within the school that are more integrated and understanding, and where different groups can mix and understand each other and intermingle, and won’t have inter-group tensions. We also focus on the more preventative thing that could happen for the future, as opposed to just looking at particular incidents and punishment and involved in particular incidents.

First I want to go through some basic data about school violence nationally for API. This is from a report by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, which has done a lot of school violence work. They found that nationally, not just in New York, that consistently APIs (Asian Pacific Islanders) were the group that felt most at risk and also were most subjected to actual incident of violence. 35.6% of Asians felt unsafe because of their racial ethnicity. The next percentages are African Americans at 20.8%. So there is quite a big gap, almost twice the next group. Only 1.1% of Whites felt unsafe because of their race and ethnicity at school. 17.4% of APIs (Asian Pacific Islanders) reported being subjected to verbal harassment and 6.5% reported actually being the victim of physical assaults. That is the highest in all the categories.

So obviously there is something going on. Particularly in communities like New York where there’s a high Asian population, it is an issue that we need to look at more closely. What we found, briefly before we go to more specific incidents, is that there are some particular problems overall. One was that we found a lot of schools don’t fulfill their duty to notify parents right away when incidents happened.

Schools are supposed to tell the parents obviously right away if their children are hurt in a fight at school. But because parents are difficult to get in touch with, with Asian parents sometimes there is a language barrier, schools are very inconsistent with actually following up to reach the parents, especially if they are unable to reach them right away. So right away that is one problem that needs to be addressed because sometimes the students won’t tell their parents.

The next thing which I alluded to earlier is that school often stop at disciplining the perpetrator and not looking at what could be done in the future. Whether it is by increasing security, which we don’t always support but sometimes can be helpful, also workshops on community building efforts and investigation protocol for the future to make sure this things wouldn’t happen and that they can be dealt with more smoothly. There are also problems with school failing to provide victim with services for incidents that happen in school, like medical services or, in more extreme cases, counseling, or follow-up medical care.

Finally immigrant parents—especially undocumented parents—but more across the board immigrant parents, sometimes are hesitant to report the even more serious incidents to the police for fear that they going to be hooked up to some police database that might lead to immigration problems. Sometimes the reasons are not that well based in fact or law, but sometimes immigrant parents are afraid to report these incidents due to embarrassment or fear. Our goals are also to correct that by making sure they know what the actual laws are.

What we found is that there are particularly types of schools where these incidents seem to be the worst. Often they are in areas that experienced fairly recent democratic change. Often Asian are pushed out from some neighborhoods like Chinatown to other boroughs, and neighborhoods like Bensonhurst, which was mentioned by the Chancellor over lunch, that was predominantly white about ten years ago, but has become heavily Asian. There is often racial tension in such neighborhoods that manifest themselves within the schools.

Lafayette is the school that the judge has also mentioned, where there have been a lot of incidents which I’m sure you hear being reported in the papers. Particularly a couple of years ago when a South Asian student was beaten up right outside the school. The school first of all denied that it happened anywhere near the school. As it turned out it did happen very close to the school, right outside the school gate. The principal refused to see the parents of the victim. Basically there was of lack of follow-up on this incident. Then there was this other similar incident a week later at the same school. And of course there was another incident that happened fairly recently, in December I believe, when this type of thing happened.

Another school where we have heard some incidents, even in the time that I have been at AALDEF, was the Francis Lewis High School in Flushing, where there has been harassment issues with South Asian and Muslim communities there. They have been allegations of some profiling by teachers and the administration of South Asian students there. Going specifically on some of the particular issues that I touched open, the issue of the unwillingness of immigrant parents, especially undocumented parents, to report these incidents. In one case we talked to community members about the case of an undocumented student be beaten up and actually fairly badly, where the student’s guardian (because there parents were not in this country) were loathe to report this either to the school authority or to the police.

We pointed out that neither the school nor the police were supposed to investigate the immigration status of the victim. Their role is to investigate the crime and figure out who did this, but the victim’s immigration status should not come into effect. Particularly the chancellor’s regulation say that even if the school happens to know that the student is an undocumented immigrant, they are not supposed to give out any information about the student to other parties. So that should be protected.

We pointed all this stuff out. We did also point out the Police Department does have a database of people who overstayed visas. They are supposed to follow up if they come in contact with perpetrators whose visas are overstayed, but it’s not supposed to happen to the victims. In that case the student did eventually report to school and they followed up. But I think there are a lot of cases where the victims are undocumented, they are afraid that school or the police will do some kind of investigation on their immigrant status.

We have also heard incidents of harassment by teachers and staff. This of course goes to the environments we creating for school for example teachers are heading. One example was a disciplinary example where a South Asian student commented to a teacher that she was worried that there would be a terrorist attack. The student got suspended for five days because the teacher took that fear as a threat. I’m sure you would appreciate that it was not the case, or even just based the basic facts.

There was also a report of a high school in Queens which refused to enroll a Middle Eastern student. His parents were getting him registration and they were sitting in the vice principal’s office. When the Pledge of Allegiance went on and they refused; they just didn’t stand to do the pledge, which was entirely within their rights under the First Amendment. But the school refused to enroll him because of that. Again as Vanessa mentioned, pos- 9/11 there are a lot of discrepancies and concerns. I think schools are understandably concerned about maintaining security, but we found that it has gone too far in terms of how it impacted immigrants, particularly South Asians.

Going briefly into the school’s duty to protect students. Schools are required of course to protect students from harm and harassment while they are actually physically on the campus of school, but also in incidents on school property with connection to the school, some kind of connection to the school. The limits on this are not clear, but essentially if a student is walking home a block from school, that should be covered, if a student is outside across the street that should be covered.

Specifically, the legal requirements under the chancellor’s regulations in terms of what school should do in regards to not just hate incidents, but any kind of violence or incidents between students, the specifics vary according to the seriousness of the incident, but the principal is always supposed to be notified. If there is an actual crime that was committed, like an assault, and is dangerous to students, school security and community police are also supposed to be notified. If medical attention…

Doris Ling-Cohan:
When you say community police, are we talking about…

Khin Mai Aung:
Just the police

Doris Ling-Cohan:

The police, the local police department.

Khin Mai Aung:

If the medical attention is required, the school is supposed to call 911 right away, and also bring someone from the school with medical training to take care of the needs. If it is serious enough the school is supposed to tend the student in an ambulance to a medical facility. As I mentioned earlier they are supposed to call the parents; and if the parents haven’t arrived at the time the ambulance come, someone from the school is supposed to accompany the student to the hospital in the ambulance or with the ambulance somehow, and wait until the parents come. What I have mentioned are requirements, but that is one particular provision that we think may not be enforced as well as it should be.

The principal is supposed to file an accident report within 24 hours and also get statements from witnesses and parties just to document what happened. For the more serious incidents, as I mention earlier, they do have to also tell the police. If the student is arrested, they are supposed to notify that student’s parents. If the student is the victim and is going to be interviewed by the police, ideally that student’s parents are supposed to be there as well. The Board of Education is supposed to make an annual report of violence in school with detailed information. So that’s where this type of reporting is supposed to go into.

Briefly, as you may know, each school supposed to have a school safe committee, which puts together a yearly comprehensive school safety plan. At present this school safe plans seem more focused on major emergencies. The first thing come to my mind was earthquake, because I’m from California but I’m sure that this has happened here, maybe hurricanes, fires, large scale terrorist attacks. I think those appear to be the things that school safety plans address. But there’s no reason why they shouldn’t also address this type of inter-student incidents.

If you have a son or daughter and you are active on his or her school, that’s the kind of thing that you can propose to integrate in your school safety plan. The members of the school safety committee include, among others, the principal, a member of the schools security, I think they are called “school safety agent”, a P&A representative, a student body representative. It’s open actually to any other person demmed necessary. So community members with an interest could also start attending those meetings.

When perpetrators of harassment incidents are staff members there is also procedures for how to follow up with that. For verbal abuse, reports should be made to the Office of Special Investigations, and a report by that office is supposed to be made within five working days. For cases with school alleged discrimination or harassment on a higher level of threshold for that kind of incident, the student should file a complaint with the Officer of Equal Opportunity. Their procedures are also specified…. I’m not going to go deeply into this. That’s just to let you know that there are also specialized procedures for harassments that are going on by staff or faculty.

There are also protective measures under the Safe Schools against Violence Education Act which was passed three years ago, there s also requirement that K-12 curriculum has to include some degree of tolerance education. This might have been the case before, but the acronym for that act is HAZE Act. There is also teacher training requirements, there is annual school violence prevention training and new applicants for teaching licenses have to get specialize two hours of course work in this kind of training.

That’s the kind of stuff that should be happening right now to prepare our schools, our teachers and our students to deal with it. How well it is being enforced on whether there is finding for it, I don’t know. But that’s something you should know that should be happening to reinforce what’s happening in our schools.

In terms of what is your recourse if you know of an incidence of violence, or if your child is a victim of violence, especially if there’s an injury or if there’s repeated harassment, you should definitely tell the school, because the school does have the duty to protect. But unless they are aware of it we can’t hold them to it. In the more serious incidents you should tell the police so they can follow up as well.

Audience Member:

You have repeatedly mentioned that students need to report the incident to the school. I attended one of the presentations given by John Liu. One of the topics was school safety. From there I collected that when incidence was reported to the principal they do not report to authority because they didn’t want a bad report card. If the nature of the incidence is serious it was supposed to be reported to the school review board. When they review the incidence they will kick it back to the principal’s court, he or she will sit on it. Since the annual review will show that you have so many violence incidents, the principal will sit on it and how that it will go away. That would only promote violence.

Khin Mai Aung:

Right, that’s one of the things we should get into in the question and answer period, but that’s why I am going over the requirements. I mention earlier sometimes schools don’t fulfill their duty for a variety of different reasons. The next thing that I was going to mention is that if this type of things happen, you should definitely report it to the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, to my organization, because this is part of the type of work that we do in this project.

Our goal through this work, and I think there are also other agencies that do this work, but in our project our goal is to hold the schools responsible to the kind of stuff you talking about. And we can have this discussion later on in the time of question and answer because I don’t want to take away from the other panelists with our exchange.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

This is an important issue. Do you recommend in terms of a parents who has a child who has been a victim that that parent not only go to the principal but also go to the police. What do you recommend exactly?

Khin Mai Aung:

I think that if it is a serious incident then they should also go to the police. I think if it is a minor incidence, if they were called a name by another student, obviously they should not go to the police. They should always report incidents to the principal because our position is that even if principals don’t always fulfill their duties or they may not do anything about it, we are going to hold the principal responsible and follow up and bring it to the Board of Education’s attention that the principal is not following up. We need to first inform them and give them a change to fulfill their duty; if not then we can use that as evidence.

We also recommend that you document the fact that you bring it up to school, not just call them, maybe do a short letter if possible, so that you have that on record that you did notify the school and the school did not follow up as required. As I mentioned earlier you should also get our office involved. This is the kind of things that we are tracking. We can also, if for instance, your child gets hurt in school, report to the principal, also let us know so we can follow up with a letter or whatever to make sure that they are both investigating and doing all those things that I read out, also reporting it to the Board of Education so it is in fact included in that report at the end. Schools really are very bad at reporting incidents because they don’t want to reflect that in their report card. It is understandable that they are concerned about school funding, but at the same time they are responsible for keeping students safe. It is also exacerbated by some immigrants’ fears about reporting these things and getting other people involved in these incidents.

Couple of other groups that can help or places to make report: the department in charge of overseeing this is the Security in Schools Division of Student Safety and Prevention Services. I have their phone number here if anyone wants. But they also, I don’t know how good their follow-up is either. But they are the department that is supposed to, at least under law, to be following up. They are a good party to appeal to. Again AALDEF can also help you follow up to make sure that each of these different departments within the Board of Education is following up and fulfilling their duty.

Finally in extreme cases in schools where there is a pattern of this type of stuff happening, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights can look into to see if there is a hostile racial environment. They define it as a situation where a student’s needs are systematically, repeatedly, in case after case, aren’t being enforced. They can also do an investigation on that. If you contact our office first we can, if appropriate, work with you to contact them as well. I also have some information about potential reforms, but I don’t think we have enough time.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

We probably at this point should let our next speaker speak and perhaps cover it within the timeframe of the questions. Our next speaker is Robert De Sena. His claim to fame is that he was my high school English teacher, but that is not why his here. He looks exactly the same as when he was my H.S teacher; I don’t understand why but he still looks exactly the same. In any event he has alot of expertise on this issue. First apparently he was a member of a number of street gangs when he was a kid; but he reformed himself and became an English teacher.

He formed an organization called Council for Unity in 1975 and this organization has a national reputation for its success in promoting unity, safety and achievement in schools and communities. Currently they are in how many schools in New York City? About 56 schools and eight states. It comes with a distinguish record, one of the statistics this organization has is that 96% of their kids graduate high school, which is an incredible, incredible statistic. Not only do they teach unity, safety, but they also promote kids in a way they achieve educational excellence. So it’s my pleasure to introduce Robery De Sena.

Robert De Sena:

Thank you, you still own me two home works.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

But you passed me any way.

Robert De Sena:

The unfortunate thing for all of us is that racism and stereotyping and violence is the cornerstone of American history. It is the central issues that affects every group that comes here and the tragedy of our experience. America on paper is perfect; in reality it could be frightening. In 1975 all of the causes of violence and racism and stereotyping came in to play in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Bensonhurst was a community at that time was primarily Italian.

In and around school where Doris attended and where I taught there was a housing project called the Marlboro Projects, which is mostly Latino and Africans Americans. A long-standing history of conflict between the Italians and that group. Well it got so bad that it began to affect the Asians, Latinos, Jews, and every ethnic group that went to that school. It got to the point that the school was literally considering going from an immigrant model to a very traditional model just to guarantee the safety of the kids, because it was not an adequately secure. The intent, or I guess the design, didn’t anticipate this problem.

So it came to end and I was there to intervene. I brought six gang leaders together from different ethnic groups, racial groups, who were the cause of all this problems. A lot of people were very uncomfortable about bringing these kids together because the fear was that if you take gangsters and bring them to the table you legitimize the work they do. And the other kids in the school would see that and then feel even more intimidated or more compelled to be part if it. That was the thinking of one side. On my side if you have enemies and you don’t bring them to the table, and you don’t create a place for them and include them, they will always sabotage everything you do.

So you are on the horns of a dilemma, which means somewhere along the lines somebody is going to take a risk. So we decided to take the risk and bring them together. It was horrible in the beginning because they were enemies. And every group was represented. Two of our founders where Asians, one was Korean and the other was Chinese. They were not stereotypical; they were very, very, very very tough kids. And they had reputation and they were feared and respected. But those are the only kind of kids that you could bring together.

At the end of the year a miracle happened. I’m not a particularly religious person but I’m a very spiritual person. And that was one of the miracles of my life because these enemies with the history of inflicting pain on one another became friends. And these racists who despised each other’s cultures found a common humanity between themselves and they bonded. At the point I thought the problem was solved. But these kids got so close that they didn’t want to end the experiences. They wanted to create a legacy for all kids that would pull them out of violence, pull them out of discrimination and get them into a kind of a new culture that could bring everybody together.

Very idealistic. We decided to call it the Council for Unity; and we based it on four ideas. Our kids are drawn into gangs and negative peer groups because our schools, our communities and even, I hate to say this, our families don’t meet their needs. Peer mediation programs, leadership training programs teach skills; they don’t address the deep-seeded needs of kids. We took four concepts that we knew gangs used, and peer groups used to seduce kids and get them involved.

First was family. Kids are starving for family. It is very difficult sometimes to find that in America. In the broader cultures, there is 50% divorce rates, I don’t know what the devoice rate is in the Asian American community, but I know that in America it is very high, and that divorce rate is extremely damaging. It doesn’t make a difference if demographically you come from a wealthy family. If your family breaks up, you are lost. Most of us forget what that feeling is like. You are torn apart, you are alone, there are very few things that are going to embrace you. The gangs and dark peer groups are waiting for you. You want a family you come and join us. The only problem is when these kids got in this peer group their friendship is based on their willingness to commit criminal acts, which puts them on the path to prison or death.

We had to create a new family and a new kind of group. The pillar in the family council was designed to ensure the growth and the development of every single person who would come in. That first concept alone drew many, many kids from many, many cultures. The second big issue—and again I’m bringing this up only because in order for us to combat these problem we have to know the needs of these children and what these needs are, then we need to create things to bring them from where they are to something else, because if things are going to be the same, we better get use of this pain. Something new has need to occur for changes. Kids want to feel safe. Obviously, that’s the theme of this discussion.

What they’ll do to feel safe is to join a group that would guarantee their safety. The unfortunate thing is that once you do that and you join a gang or another group that’s going to act violently to protect you. You inherit many, many new enemies. So that security that you hope to achieve you have now lost. So how we going to deal with that? The second pillar of Council for Unity is literally unity. If you bring everybody together, there’s no one left to fight. I’m going to say that again: if you can bring everybody together there is not one left to fight.

And another thing happens that’s even more important: there’s nobody left to discriminate against, either. So if you could create in any school environment or any community or an entity, not necessarily ours, that brings everybody together that links them in a permanent, on-going program. What will happen is they’ll make friends, they will because they are in contact everyday, develop relationship and from that comes respect. So the pillar of unity for us became the springboard to all kinds of new possibilities.

The other thing our kids needs is self-esteem. They need to feel good about themselves and it’s not just about getting good grades. They need to feel good about themselves in all sorts of other ways and they need others to see that as values. It’s not enough for you to feel good about yourself. We all need each other in our globe. So the pillar of self-esteem became another cornerstone of Council for Unity.

This would be a program that would be designed for support and also design to showcase what kids could do, even if it was not academic. If the kid was an artist, this program would have to finds outlets for arts. If the kid was a performer or had leadership ability or could do yearbook, whatever that skill was, Council for Unity has to showcase it. Now think for a minute, you’re a kid, you’re in the program that gives you a family, that makes you safe, you are meeting all these new people who’re different than you, they are interested in you, you are interested in them, and then you are going to work together in the things you love to do, the motivation level keeps going up.

The final thing the kids want is responsibility. If we have children and we don’t give them responsibility, they will remain children. Unfortunately, in schools the authority that exists are very stingy when it comes to including students. And the terrible irony in all that, education is supposed to make the child the client. Our educational system doesn’t do that. The children come into the system and they serve the system not the other way around. If a child fails in New York Coty it’s the fault of the child, it’s not the fault of the school. We think that’s crazy. If we were in business, whether it was a restaurant or making shoes and our product stunk, our costumers will go someplace else. The school system has to learn how to make children clients and serve them.

Our fourth pillar is empowerment. We train our kids in organizational development and interpersonal development. These are the skills that they could either use in business world or any place else you go in life. You have to be able to organize to produce change and you have to be able to get along with other people. If you don’t have those two skills you are in trouble. So with these four ideas in place: family, unity, self-esteem and empowerment, we created a new culture. And what happened after that was nothing short of miraculous.

We did have everyone together, and the result was a new community. The kids, through the curriculum that we developed, spent a part of their year learning how to become a family, learning how to become a positive peer group, learning how to functions in a group, learning how to be affective. That was the first step of a community of children from different background becoming focused on a common good. That’s what America is supposed to do. We don’t do it enough.

The other big issue for us was how are we going to affect the school and the community around us? So the second thrust, the second focus was to now network with administrators, teachers, parents, the people who work in the kitchen, the custodian, anybody who’s in the school, anybody was affected by what goes on in the school. If there’s an issue of violence, intimidation, and bigotry, it affects the entire school. The problem is that the entire school is not invited in to change those issues. Only very few people in most of our schools take responsibility for that. So what does everybody else do? If you’re a teacher and you can’t influence your environment, you teach your five classes and you go home. You don’t care about what goes on outside your the classroom because nobody in their minds cares about them.

And the kids who don’t benefit from that do several things: one, they get violent. You don’t want to listen to me, you don’t care what’s happening in my life, well then I’m going to make you suffer. And if I don’t make you suffer I’m going to damage my self, I’ll cut, I’ll get involved in drugs, I’ll get involved in promiscuity, I’ll drop out, but I’m going to show you that your system doesn’t work for me. I’ll either do it by getting you and hurting you or I’ll do it by hurting myself, so I can prove to you how ineffective you are.

So our plan was to interact with and invite into the Council for Unity, the broader school community. We did that and do that by creating surveys and going to all of these different constituents, and inviting them and their ideas to create a plan that they feel will make the school safe and unified so that children can achieve. So all that information gets crunched into an annual plan. Then everybody who has contributed becomes part of a new network where each person takes a responsibility to this change. When that happens, you take the school where before very little communication between administrators, teachers, kids, newly arrived immigrants, people who work in the kitchen, the custodian, very little communication, now you see this. Because everybody is interacting.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Bob, can you give a concrete example of how that model has worked besides John Dewey, a school in the Bronx perhaps.

Robert De Sena:

I’m going to use this theme about Asian American. I want to use an example for that too. We were called into Columbus High School in the Bronx, three years ago. Let me tell you the problems that you have are similar to all the immigrants group. My parents came here, my grandparents didn’t speak English and they weren’t interested in meeting Americans. They wanted to stay with their own because they were safe. And nobody here can condemn people for doing that. That’s what everybody has done. It’s a slow process to pull us out.

In Columbus High School, with newly arrives Dominicans, Albanians, people from all over the Caribbean, people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, very few Chinese Americans but other Asians involved. There was a big war between the Latin Kings, which is a very dangerous street gang, and the Albanian community. What the Latin Kings didn’t count on is that the Albanian, who had been occupied for a thousand years and were involved in a war of genocide against themselves, are extremely violent when it comes to people attacking them. So normally where you would expect the newly arrived immigrants would take it, the Albanians were armed to the teeth. There was a huge battle that put 11 kids in the hospital, there was a kidnapping, and it got so bad that they called Council for Unity.

We came into the schools, we mediated the peace between the Albanians and the Latin Kings and we brought all the other gangs in the school together. Three months later, we had all those groups in Council for Unity, and the principal wrote a letter to the district leader that Doris… Doris actually gets the credit believe it or not for saving Columbus High School because Doris dragged this guy John Prada, who is [Sherly Silver’s] district leader to me, and said “You got to talk to this guy” and we came to Columbus because of Doris’ initiative.

The principal wrote a letter to me saying that since Council for Unity has been in that school, he hasn’t had one gang related incident. All these kid declared neutrality and bought into our culture. Three years later they are all over the school and all over the community. It is one of the most inspirational things that you have ever seen. They had become a family. All these gang members are now going to college, the leader of the Bloods in that school and the leader of the Crips. The leader of the Bloods is finishing her first year of college in [Captain State] and is still in Council for Unity; and the leader of the Crips is finishing his second year in College of New Rochelle. The head of the Latin Kings in three states is now a friend of Doris because he dropped his way, as they say, and is now working with us in a volunteer basis everyday. So this model is successful in bringing people together.

Seward Park High School is a big concern for us, and we are in a committee right now to address that problem and other problems. I went to visit the Council for Unity there and I’m extremely upset because I have high expectation about what I wanted them to do. There were a lot of assaults on Asian kids. I met with our group, which was nicely integrated. And this is what I found out. There are two groups of Asian kids, Chinese kids in school, the American born Chinese, and the Chinese who are in this English language learning centers. The American born Chinese—yes, the ABCs, the first time I heard that I was like, “What the hell are they talking about?”, now I know—don’t have that much difficulty. They also said as a class, a mixed class that they didn’t think that the motivation was racial.

The Asian born students don’t speak English that well. If you’re going to victimize them and rob them they are less likely to report it. So that’s where they go. We even learned the techniques that they use. They catch them in the bathroom and pull their shirt over their heads and they victimize them, and beat them up. This is what this class is doing there. There was a Chinese American student, I think his name is Mr. Chen and our Latino kids are going to this teacher to have him bring a group of ELL kids to the Council class and make them feel comfortable because the Council for Unity wants to support these children.

We found out that the only way to do it is through this teacher. The reason is this: sometimes without the teacher those kids will never on their own come and join you because they are afraid. They also have stereotypical images of the group. I mean some of them are pretty funny. Some of our Latino kids and some of our African American kids decided on their own to go and approach these ELL students. They were walking over…you know, they got these really hoody looking clothes. And they were walking like, “What up, what up?” And the Asian kids were running out the door. You know, they see all this rap stuff and they think these guys were going to kill them.

So our kids are coming back saying, “What’s wrong with them…you know we try to make friends with them, they all ran.” Our other Asian kid said, “That’s because you look scary.” So we realized, out of sensitivity, that we have to use a teacher to bring these groups together. I guess I don’t want to run over with too much in terms of time, except to say we are extremely concerned about this problem and we are going to be extremely active doing it.

In regards to Bensonhurst, I will just close with this, and I hope maybe this is something that can raise our aspiration that we can solve this problem. In the 80’s as Asians were moving to Bensonhurst, a very shadowy organization called the Gravesend Neighborhood Association wrote a letter and sent it to about a 100,000 residents, asking them to boycott and not to sell homes to Asians. They said that the money that these Asians were bringing to the community was from drugs, and they should also boycott any realtors who sold homes to Asians.

But we have got a hold of that letter. I met [Mini Liu] and [Katie Kwan], they were outraged and they called Mayor Koch in. They called in the priest from Saint [inaudible] Parish. And they called us. We created a new community, went public, went into the papers and had a major press conference. And that whole malicious attempt to exclude a group from the community ended. But, why did it end?

This is the last thing I am going to say: Diversity without unity does not create community. None of us alone is even going to solve all. I don’t care how active you get, by yourselves, I’m telling you, you will not solve this problem. It’s through unity, it is the only thing that works in this country. When you are unified, everything is possible. When you are not, very little is. We have witnessed, and I hope this is the thing we are all going to focus on. How can we collectively deal with this situation? Thank you very much.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Thank you. I started this workshop by saying that I believe that this is the most important issue affecting our community because it affects the future of our community. We have gotten a lot of information, a lot of wonderful suggestions. I like to open up… I have some questions, but forget about my questions… I like to open up to everybody. Go ahead.

Audience Member:

Doris, I think there is a very subtle discrimination going on against Asian American kids. Like Lafayette High School, I think that top kids… they don’t want them to take any additional A.P. course, advanced courses, and they want them out of their school. They don’t want them to continue staying in their school because they said that all the Asian American kids are becoming valedictorians, and they don’t give a chance for other ethnic kid to become valedictorians. So they want to kick out as many high-achieving Asian, Chinese kids from that school. And I think it has been reported even the teachers themselves want to kick out the kids. They don’t want their valedictorians only Chinese. The principal were also sided with the teachers. I don’t know if anybody had heard about that case.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Any other comments?

Audience Member:

I have a question for Mr. De Sena. The National Council for Unity, do you get involved only when someone reaches out to you, or you voluntarily go there, how does it work?

Robert De Sena:

It usually happens in both ways. Generally speaking, a school in crisis, or a school that has a big diversity in its population and is not in crisis, will call us and ask us to come. Generally, in the past, the old Board of Education funded the entire operation. We were in elementary schools, junior high schools and high schools. So they request it. They would call us and say, “Look, can you come in and help us?” And of course we will go.

Audience Member:

You talked a lot about the reactive stance to bring [course] to the community [inaudible] and some of those symptoms. What would you bring back in the late 80’s and early 90’s that where [inaudible] we took that information and we took that conflict, and what would be kind of a community organization, would u tell me about [inaudible]. We were able to work with the community in different levels, which I’d like you to add. We changed the [inaudible] rate, in the 90s, which would be the subject of my talk in the next section. Maybe we can take a collective stand…

Robert De Sena:

With out a doubt. In 1989 when Yusuf Hawkins was killed by a group of Italian kids, our culture was obviously extremely pained because we were being stereotyped in the papers as gangsters and racists, which was not an accurate portrait of our community. So the Coalition of [Italian] American Associations and the Italian American Federation in Bensonhurst to fight [inaudible]. The Council for Unity and other groups became very, very active to try to re-educate the community and we had tremendous results. At that time, Italians had the third highest dropout rate, which is the result of Dr. Scelsa’s research. Since then we have been able to reverse that.

Audience Member (Josephine Chung):

The Brooklyn Lafayette High School has, as you know, violence against Asian kids, even three years ago Superintend Ron Woo was appointed by then chancellor to launch an investigation. A few months ago when [Chiu Ko Chang] was attacked, he did go to the school acting principal, who brushed off the situation. Then subsequently Assemblymen [Bill Carlton] and also some community leaders and student parents came and brought up this issue and it became more high profile. Ironically the acting principal is still trying to cover up this matter, a very important matter; and he got promoted during this incidence to principal.

Then when we have other incidents in Seward Park and also high schools in Queens, a student got attacked and reported to the security and they did not pay any attention. Until they went to John Liu, a Councilman, who met with the principal who happened to be Chinese American, and then this issue got addressed. I would like to ask AALDEF, what kind of cases are you involved in, in terms of school violence and what are the groups in the community that are addressing the violent incidents?

Khin Mai Aung:

If we’re dealing with it, right. I just joined, as I mentioned, a couple months ago. So a lot of these incidences that happened in Lafayette happened before I was here. But we were involved in the two incidences a couple years ago at Lafayette, doing that kind of community role where we get the incident reported to the school and followed up to make sure that something is done. We also talked to [Siu Kou Chen]. I think we were less involved because we didn’t have a youth attorney at that time.

I think that you raised a really good point because often it takes some kind of larger authority to address these issues, whether it is Assemblymen [Carlton] or John Liu, or even someone at the Board of Ed. like Ron Woo, somebody who might be willing to follow up. I think that’s a valuable role that groups like AALDEF or CAACF or other community groups can do in mediating that and bringing that to authority’s attention. I think the two key things are, again, going ahead and reporting it to the school. Even if we know that they not very good with following up, if you don’t report to them, but then you report it to other authority and it comes to their attention, “oh we didn’t know” which…

Doris Ling-Cohan:

And reporting means what you said before, not just telling but writing a letter. And AALDEF can assist with drafting a letter as well.

Khin Mai Aung:

And what we would recommend is that you tell them right away verbally and then contact. And then we can follow up as well. I think that as more attention is brought to this issues… I would hope that we get to the point where there is follow up without having to get a politician involved but at this point it does appear that you have to follow up.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Sometimes that’s what it takes.

Khin Mai Aung:

Exactly.

Audience Member:

I’m June Orchanian, the principal of John Bowne High School, a few things I would like to say. I do have a Council for Unity at John Bowne High School, because for a number of years I paid for it, the classes [inaudible] and it comes from a very diverse school, over 70 different countries, over 50 different languages. As for the reason… we don’t have a pattern of any kind of violence against any particular group. With the most recent Chinese student, his concern is not about the school, it’s about how staff treat students. My school staff is very diverse, over 15% of my staff is Asians, from principal, guidance counselors, [paraprofessionals], librarians, mostly primarily Chinese but I also have Indian, I have Pakistani, I have Bangladesh staff members.

His concern is about the school safety and [the dean type]. And when he spoke to them his English was limited and they didn’t quite understand him, so he immediately went to the newspapers. The following day I got a call from John Liu’s office about it. I called my dean to find out what had happened; and they were in the process of investigating.

I think what Chinese parents and students need to understand, too, is that the alleged perpetrators have due process. I explained that to John Liu that just because this person said “that kid, right. I saw the kid with him” doesn’t mean that the system will remove him from school. Those students have, as a result of investigation, been superintendent-suspended and most of them have capitulated, which means they admitted that they were involved and they have voluntarily transferred to different schools. And one boy actually ran away from home and went to South America somewhere.

What I have done for staff members is to meet with the staff members to address their concerns after school and also to give them a challenge. The challenge is for all staff and for all students, all over the public school system… We don’t have enough school safety to be in every corner. We can’t; I would love it, and I’m in a huge school of 3,500 students plus staff members. We all need to be on a look out because we want to have a good reputation, we want to maintain being a good school. If you see something… you don’t have to follow that person… just remember what they were wearing and let us know.

My challenge to staff members who were concerned about the Dean’s Office and for safety wise… Well there’s a certain type sometimes going in to the Deans Office. Maybe it’s a little rough. Maybe we need some ESL teachers to now apply to those positions. I have three positions coming up… you know, the time for rotations. Considered applying, we need more diversity in those offices. Those principal positions, people apply to them, and I could select within the UFT contract. The other area is the school safety agents are primarily of a different minority group…

Doris Ling-Cohan:

What were those positions earlier you were saying that they need to apply for?

Audience Member [June Orchanian]:

Deans.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Deans. Okay.

Audience Member [June Orchanian]:

The dean’s part, the disciplining part. The students… I spoke to all students to try to ID them… basically we were able to identify them, not only by the Asian students but the other students identified them, non-Asians students. Students need to understand that bullying is not always a matter of one group because they are racially difference. High School kid, if you’re different, you’re fat or ugly, you don’t wear the right clothes, you can be teased very easily. And bullying is always a matter of power—it could be a parent against a child, a man against a woman, a date situation, an older child to a younger child.

My husband is in LaGuardia High School. They have instance that he reported, where it is a Korean girl and a Korean girl because in the Korean culture the younger students have to pay reverence to the older students. You can either get beaten up or they will ask for extortion. We are not talking about different group. It’s the same group. So I told students that bullying is always about power.

And I talk about personal safety: You have to be wise. When I go to the subway, I put my rings around and put my chain inside because you need to be safe. Stay awake, kids. A lot of Chinese people have cell phones, cell phones are for “American people”. Don’t take it out, don’t show the latest little gadget you have, put them away. First of all, safety. As you would when you walked on the streets to school or in the city. You need to do that.

I also talk to them about what it is to feel safe. Okay, you are not very strong, get a safety number. If you remind yourself about people who has power. Who has power in school? The adults. In my school I have so many Asian adult members, staff members. If you find that you are not being heard, talk to someone who’s like you. Some adult, or some teacher that have your official language, your math teacher, a group of students. Let them speak to you, because they will fight for you. My staff are very dedicated they will fight for you if they know you have a problem.

The other thing is to begin to develop your own voice. Sometimes it may not happen within your own generation, but begin to have your own voice. You know who’s going to be the student president next year? I know who is; it is Christina Chan. You know how I know? The reason I know is that she is running unopposed. Everyone thinks she is the best candidate. And why is that is? It’s not because we have so many Chinese students that she is going to win. Our Asian population is only 27% of the school, but people recognize her as the best. You be the best. Either now you can develop a voice, and participate in government… She doesn’t have that kind of problem, she speaks English. And begin to learn more language. If it is not going to happen for you, then maybe in your children’s generation.

I need the kids to understand that it is not because that you are Chinese and [other are not Chinese], or you are Indian [and others are not Indian]. It happens within their own groups and they must report. They must report. If they have difficulty in reporting due to language, go to an adult who can report for them. I think, basically, if you talk to the parents, they are very satisfied with the outcomes. I am waiting to see staff members apply for the deans. I think I will have to use ESL teachers. They won’t be Chinese, but there will be teachers who have sensitivity to work with students from a different language group.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Okay, any other questions?

Vanessa Leung:

What Mrs. Orchanian is saying is that it is very important that the follow-up is not just what happened to the assaulter, but really the whole environment of the school, and really changing that environment. What Mrs. Orchanian has done is really try to nurture that understanding. How the principal is held accountable for is nurturing an environment, not necessary “oh, that kid who was the assaulter gets suspended or expelled or something happens to him,” but really to makes that into a higher level of accountability.

Robert De Sena:

Those kids that are the perpetrators, I want them, because my experience has been that you don’t change anything through punishment. So our thing is, if you are committing this, we want you. I will give you a quick example. Pakistanis were victimizing Bangladeshi kids in Council for Unity in Columbus. We went and meet with the Pakistani kids and made it very really clear that Bangladesh kids were involved in and connected to all these ethnic groups. Instead of threatening them, which we could have very easily done, we invited them in. And what happens is once they in with the diverse group that is more powerful, guess what they are going to do? They are going to be part of it, or they are going to be the victims.

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Alright, in terms of these discussions, obviously we are out of time today. But this is a community discussion, a community dialogue, we need to focus on this problem as a community, obviously. I just have one announcement on Monday, May 5, there actually is a meeting in Chinatown at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolence Association about Seward Park. It’s not only on school violence issues but on many, many issues regarding Seward Park. I invite the community to come and to participate and be part of that.

Robert De Sena:

Can you say the time and place again?

Doris Ling-Cohan:

Chinese Consolidated Benevolence Association, 62 Mott Street at 6:30, and it is in the basement. Monday, May 5.

---

Copyright © Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), 2002.
All rights reserved. No part of this transcript may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without explicit permission of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute.
Recording and transcription services provided by
Transcendent International, LLC.
www.tiTranslation.com