A new police campaign aimed at getting truant students off the streets has returned many to class, but some parents have complained that the police have been overeager and are picking up students with legitimate excuses, school officials said yesterday.
About one in 10 of the nearly 4,000 students picked up for truancy had valid reasons for being out of class, according to a report on the six-week-old program, which covers seven specially designated zones in the five boroughs.
In addition, the police in some precincts have been detaining suspected truants in areas outside the zones and dropping them off at the nearest high school, sowing confusion among educators and parents trying to track their whereabouts, the officials said.
"We believe that if this program is to continue, more coordination between the police and the Board of Education is needed," said John Ferrandino, the executive director of the board's high school division.
Mr. Ferrandino and several aides, reporting on the results of the joint anti-truancy effort by New York City police and the Board of Education that began on April 6, portrayed a fledgling effort that has brought some benefits but has been plagued by several embarrassing glitches and some parent mistrust.
Parents Make Complaints
Parents, many angered that their children had been picked up despite having legitimate reasons for being out of class, have lodged criticisms with school officials, board members and the police.
Chief Louis R. Anemone, the Police Department's chief of patrol, heard many of the complaints himself at a meeting with parents at Board of Education headquarters on April 21, Mr. Ferrandino said.
"Chief Anemone came under a great deal of attack from parents," Mr. Ferrandino told board members in a meeting yesterday.
The program was started because the police and school safety officials noticed a correlation between some types of street crime and high truancy areas.
In the program, the police sweep through zones targeted as areas of high truancy -- one in each of the police department's seven patrol bureaus -- taking detained students to high schools designated within the zones, where they are questioned by school attendance officers. Parents are called, and students found to be truant are returned to classes at their own school.
The high schools that serve as processing centers are Louis D. Brandeis and Graphic Communications in Manhattan; DeWitt Clinton in the Bronx; Jamaica in Queens; Eastern District and William E. Grady in Brooklyn, and Ralph McKee on Staten Island.
During the campaign's first six weeks, 3,997 students were detained and processed, according to the board report. Of those detained, about 88 percent were found to be truants. But 11 percent -- 448 students -- were out of school because they were going to work, to outside mentoring or to community service programs, were on half-day schedules or had other valid excuses.
"That's not a tremendous number, but its more than we're happy with," Mr. Ferrandino said.
Of the 3,997 students, 62 percent were males and 38 percent females, the report showed.
When the program started, critics expressed concerns that the police would concentrate on black and Hispanic teen-agers. The report shows that Hispanic and black students have been detained in slightly larger percentages than their proportion of the city's student population, but not by much.
Forty-four percent of those picked up have been Hispanic students and 40 percent have been black, while Hispanic students and black students each make up about 37 percent of the student population.
Concern About Disparities
Nine percent of those picked up have been white and 5.3 percent have been Asian, while whites and Asians make up 17.5 percent and 8.9 percent of the city's student population, the report said.
Dr. Esmeralda Simmons, the Brooklyn representative to the board, urged Mr. Ferrandino to closely monitor the ethnic breakdowns as the program continues.
"I'm concerned about the disparities with the African-Americans and Latinos, and we need to make sure that their civil liberties are not being curtailed," Dr. Simmons said.
A police spokeswoman, Sgt. Tina S. Mohrmann, said of the board's report: "We do not know of any disagreement with the Board of Education about the truancy program. They haven't told us of any problems."
During the campaign's first four weeks, according to the board report, the police arrested 13 students and issued court summons to 83 others. The report did not detail the causes of the arrests. The police confiscated 31 weapons, including one firearm, the report said. Twenty runaways from outside New York City have been picked up in the sweeps, the report said. But if identification of the runaways was an unexpected benefit, initiatives taken by some police officers has caused unexpected confusion.
Andrea Schlesinger, a senior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn who is the board's student representative, said that on Tuesday she had seen "a room filled with kids brought by police" to Murrow High, even though Murrow is not one of the seven high schools designated as processing centers.
Mr. Ferrandino said he believed that local commanders in several precincts appeared to have ordered anti-truancy sweeps through their neighborhoods, independent of the centrally organized effort. "They are carrying out programs we don't know anything about," Mr. Ferrandino said.
He characterized the planning for the program as limited. But with that in mind, he said: "It's worked out a lot better than I thought it would."
