NYCDOE Schools Data Breakdown and Rocco Laurie Safety Committee explanation and reflection:
Throughout my internship and graduate courses, I had the opportunity to be involved with many social and political aspects of the school system. While interning, I was exposed to numerous disciplinary issues and also asked to be on the safety committee where I was privy to confidential school and city-wide data that we analyzed and used in order to create a safe and positive learning environment for students and staff. Knowing that the ISLLC Standard 6.0 involves the influence of the larger political, social, economic and cultural context, I felt that all of my work with the safety committee and data exposure should fall within this ISLLC standard.
Not only did I create a breakdown of our school data from Intermediate School 72, but I compared past years of data as well. This helped to see the larger picture as to where our school falls and what SWOT analysis we should be doing. Not only was this breakdown helpful, but we were able to then tie cultural changes within our own school, to disciplinary issues that were occurring as well. We then compared our schools cultural data with that of an intermediate school in the city that closely shares our numbers and cultural data to see if there were consistencies in culture and school discipline data. Therefore, along with my mentor and an NYPD school safety level I officer, I was able to take our schools discipline data break it down into hourly occurrences and also levels of infractions and co-lead a safety meeting with my mentor. This meeting involved the NYPD school safety district representative, our administrative team, as well as stakeholders such as parents, community members, and school safety staff.
During this meeting that I co-lead and created, we reviewed OORS data and talked about next steps in order to break down our larger scale safety issues at certain times and types of infractions and work on a plan in order to create a safe and positive learning environment for all in the school community. We did review other important aspects of up and coming events, but the focus was on safety and data.
Being involved so closely with safety and confidential data such as OORS reports gave me a greater understanding of why disciplinary issues on a large scale need to be analyzed and processed in order to find better ways of managing school systems and students. Teachers write discipline reports daily, however, it is on the large scale that data analyzation can show how and why certain times and incidences are occurring and then finding ways to manage these are of the utmost importance. Comparing our data to that of the city is also a key factor in working with school and city-wide safety agents in order to make our city schools effective and thrive within a positive environment.
Being directly involved in student infractions, school safety, and other measures throughout my internship truly exposed me to a deeper side of education. Discipline and data analyzation is such an important part in making a school run effectively and safely. I feel that my exposure with not only my school safety team, but numerous meetings with NYPD district officers and citywide stakeholders make me realize that this is not a one man operation. The social, communal, and economic exposure of a school is so important if you want things in one building to run smoothly. That is why I feel all of my experience with safety and school data falls into Standard 6.0 due to the amount of time spent not only on inhouse meetings, but with involving our community stakeholders as well.
