For parents concerned about school safety, federal law provides what is supposed to be a critical safeguard: if a school becomes persistently dangerous, families have the right to transfer their children elsewhere. But in New York, a quiet policy shift may have effectively erased that escape hatch without actually making schools any safer.
Under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, states must allow students attending “persistently dangerous” schools to transfer to another public school within the same district. In New York, a school receives that designation if it records a threshold level of serious violent incidents—such as homicide, assault, sexual offenses, or weapons possession—for two consecutive years.
However, beginning in the 2021–2022 school year, New York’s State Education Department significantly tightened the rules that determine which incidents must be reported to the state.
Under the revised policy, incidents involving assault, sexual offenses, or weapons possession are only counted if three specific conditions are met: the act must be committed by a student older than ten, it must rise to the level of a felony, and it must be reported to law enforcement. If any one of those criteria is missing, the incident is excluded from the official tally.
The effect has been dramatic. According to state data, serious violent incidents appear to have dropped sharply. Assaults, for example, declined from 4.9 incidents per 1,000 students during the 2017–2018 school year to just 0.5 incidents per 1,000 students in 2023–2024.
But State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli warns that the apparent improvement may not reflect reality. A report released by his office earlier this year concluded that the new reporting rules create a significant risk that “violent and disruptive” incidents are being underreported.
Other safety indicators tell a different story. Reports of bullying and drug use have increased in recent years—issues that do not factor into the state’s calculation of whether a school is considered persistently dangerous.
The narrowing of what counts as a severe incident has also drastically reduced the number of schools that meet the federal designation threshold. Data shows that in the 2018–2019 school year, 50 schools reached the threshold for a single year and 11 met the two-year requirement needed for the official label. By 2023–2024, only seven schools met the single-year threshold and none met the two-year benchmark.
In fact, DiNapoli reported that no schools in New York were classified as “persistently dangerous” during the 2024–2025 or 2025–2026 school years.
That matters because the designation triggers concrete protections for families. When Jamaica High School in Queens was labeled persistently dangerous in 2007, the city was required to notify parents of their right to transfer their children. Many families took advantage of the opportunity to move their students to safer environments.
Without schools receiving the designation, however, that federal right becomes effectively meaningless.
State education officials argue the rule changes were intended to better reflect student development and avoid overreporting minor incidents. They point to examples such as young children involved in playground altercations that previously may have been recorded as assaults.
Critics counter that serious incidents can still occur among younger students and that requiring police involvement as part of the reporting threshold creates incentives for schools to handle situations internally rather than formally documenting them.
Cases like a reported sexual assault incident in Rochester in 2023—where staff allegedly failed to contact law enforcement—illustrate how such policies could leave dangerous events out of official statistics entirely.
DiNapoli’s office has suggested supplementing incident reports with tools such as school climate surveys to better understand safety conditions. Yet many experts argue that perceptions alone cannot replace accurate reporting of actual violent events.
