Stabbing sparks inquiry into possible gang ties at Rustin HS

Volume 2, Number 13 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | Dec. 28, 2007 - Jan. 3, 2008

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Chelsea Now photo by Jefferson Siegel

Chelsea’s Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, on West 18th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where a rash of recent violent incidents has parents, teachers and local community leaders concerned.

Stabbing sparks inquiry into possible gang ties at Rustin HS

By Chris Lombardi

In the wake of several violent incidents in December involving students at Chelsea’s Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, local legislators and community leaders are demanding that the city be proactive in preventing such problems, and will start 2008 by meeting with police agencies, the Department of Education and local principals.

While the meeting, facilitated by the office of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, will focus on overall “community safety” and not gang violence, BREC’s own students and teachers say that that gangs are an important part of the picture, confirming recent figures from both the DOE and the NYPD. Now, while long-term gang-prevention efforts by multiple city agencies continue, Chelsea teachers and local residents are asking the DOE and BREC to extend their definition of “school safety” beyond school walls.

Better school discipline?
On Dec. 12, three young Rustin students were taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital after a knife fight that left one student with stab wounds. That same week, a father pulled his 16-year-old daughter out of BREC after hearing other girls had warned her: “We don’t like you.... I don’t know where, I don’t know when, but we are going to jump you.” Yet another girl showed up at the 10th Precinct with some of her hair pulled out, allegedly by a group of three other youths on 24th Street.

The combination was enough to get local parents whispering, said Miguel Acevedo, a member of Community Board 4 and a parent of two children at the Museum School, one block away. Acevedo added that for the first time, the buzz started to include the names of some of New York’s more feared street gangs: the Bloods, a branch of the venerable Los Angeles gang, and the up-and-coming Dominicans Don’t Play, which is reportedly well-known at Washington Irving High School on East 16th Street.

Inside the four-story BREC campus, on West 18th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, news of the stabbing made it almost impossible for school to continue, according to Rustin teacher Henry Funes, who spoke to Chelsea Now on Monday. Many students were too busy that week “thinking and talking about what they will do after school,” he said, referring to whether they would fight or run away to protect themselves. Meanwhile, he said, some school officials treated the news as a small victory for school discipline, telling teachers that “we were doing such a ‘good job’ of containing the violence within the building that it is happening out in the community.”

In response to the stabbing, Acevedo, who has recently mediated several local youth-police forums, immediately contacted area principals, including Rustin Principal John Angelet and Security Chief Armando Ortiz, Quinn’s district office, and the 10th Precinct. Acevedo told Chelsea Now that he has long been aware of the violence at Rustin and worried that it would spill into the community, especially if the signs of gang involvement were true.

“Gangs—they’re one thing we haven’t had to worry about at Fulton Houses,” said Acevedo. “The last thing I want, as a parent or community member, is for a problem to develop here, because it was in there and we weren’t dealing with it.”

Teen gangs of New York
Even before the stabbing, gang-related violence in schools had taken the spotlight. In October, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum launched a series of initiatives aimed at creating new responses to gang violence, with a provocative new student survey and planned roundtable discussions with “students, educators, community leaders and elected officials.” Gotbaum acted after police figures showed an increase in gang street crime from 2005 to 2007, with a 62 percent spike in gang-motivated incidents in the first four months of Fiscal Year 2007, as well as an 11 percent rise in violent crimes committed by juveniles from 2005 to 2006.

Gotbaum’s own survey, “Old Problem, New Eyes,” found that among nearly 350 young people across the city, two-thirds reported that “there are more gangs today than there used to be,” and a higher percentage said they noticed gang colors and flags at their schools. The report sparked a wave of press reports in the Daily News, the New York Post and elsewhere; in September those newspapers also dug through the data in the DOE’s newly released “School Environment Reports,” part of the new school report cards, which included its own student surveys showing that nearly one-quarter of students citywide saw gang activity either “most of the time” or “all of the time” at their schools.

“I hear from kids all the time, they’re fearful of bullies,” United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told the Post. “They don’t like when at a school there is a sense of fear and intimidation, and they don’t feel safe.”

Of course, even at these somewhat heightened levels, gang violence is nowhere near the levels of the 1960s or the 1980s crack epidemic. Furthermore, experts (including the NYPD) readily agree that gang identification, such as wearing colors or flags, does not always translate into violent activity. But the students’ concern, paired with incidents like those in December, has raised warning flags for many community members, as well as those inside Rustin.

Ask any kid in the building, and they can tell you.

As a large (nearly 2,000-strong) urban high school, Bayard Rustin Educational Complex may typify both negative and positive trends of recent years. While according to the 10th Precinct, none of the young men involved in the December stabbings is on record as belonging to a gang, according to BREC students and teachers, recent violence has been strongly flavored by ethnic identification and often accompanied by gang affiliation.

“Ask any kid in the building, and they can tell you what is going down,” said BREC teacher Funes, when Chelsea Now wrote to ask about the December incidents.

In the DOE’s Learning Environment Survey, 65 percent of surveyed students at Rustin reported that “I worry about crime and violence in my school,” 86 percent said that “students get into physical fights” in the building, and 79 percent said that “students bully and threaten other students.” And in a significantly higher proportion than reported citywide, 75 percent reported “gang activity” at the school—either some of the time (33 percent), most of the time (16) or all of the time (26). And according to observers, graffiti with gang insignias appears repeatedly on the outside of the building, and reappears each time it is obliterated by custodians.

Funes, who until last year also coordinated a samba/capoeira club for the school, said Monday that longstanding tensions among African-American and Dominican students often explode both inside and outside the school. “Last year, in October, we had a mini-riot in front of the post office on West 18th Street,” Funes wrote, though the only press coverage of the 2006 incident was a mention in the school’s own newspaper. The December attacks, he said, were not unexpected: “The violence at BREC has been brewing for some time.”

Funes, who said that his confrontation of Principal John Angelet has made him an outsider at BREC and admitted that he is now currently challenging his first-ever “unsatisfactory” teacher evaluation in 20 years, said that Angelet was so focused on the school’s massive efforts to reshape itself, aided by the Gates Foundation, that he has at best let the deeper tensions fester, and damaged his own efforts.

“Do you think students care about the subject-verb agreement in Spanish when they saw their school on the news and they are fearful that the ‘peeps’ of the those that got stabbed may be waiting outside the school at 3:00 p.m. for payback?” said Funes.

Starting the dialogue
Questions like Funes’ may be on the mind of those attending next week’s meeting at Quinn’s office. DOE and NYPD representatives may list their extensive history with anti-violence and gang-prevention programs, including the city’s own Department of Youth and Community Development, which was created in the 1960s specifically as an anti-gang measure. Angelet might bring up BREC’s alliance with the nonprofit Council for Unity, which sends in former gang members to teach positive skills. Miguel Acevedo said that he plans to ask all the principals what their plans are for ensuring that the local kids are safe: “We just need to start the dialogue,” he said.

Later in January, a similar dialogue will continue at another of Public Advocate Gotbaum’s Neighborhood Roundtables. The first, in Brooklyn in November, brought youth activists and service agencies together with scholars like John Jay professors Luis Barrios and David Brotherton, the godfathers of the recent wave of studies that describe gang networks as potentially important support systems. The NYPD was not invited: The point, according to Gotbaum, is to find something different.

“What we’re hearing from youth is that gang activity seems to be growing in our schools and communities,” said Gotbaum. “This administration has tried harsher punishments and more police in our schools and neighborhoods. But it’s not working. It’s time we look for alternative ways to deal with gang violence in our schools and communities.”